Shooting an Elephant

In "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell employs a casually assumed first-person point of view; what readers know of the event described in the story, they know primarily from the narrator's direct and apparently candid divulgence. Couching the tale in the first person enables Orwell to engage in the rhythm of meditation and action without it seeming forced; because the narrator is reminiscing about the event, which occurred some time in the past, his interweaving of essayistic reflections with the main action strikes the reader as quite natural. The use of reminiscence has a further consequence, that of the splitting off of the narrator as narrator from the narrator as agent of an action. The narrator not only directly reports the impressions and thoughts that he experienced at the time of the elephant episode; he also imposes his present, removed, retrospective analysis on the impressions and thoughts of that time. (This is one of the ways in which readers know that the narrator is a man of conscience.) Despite the first-person point of view, the perspectives of others— the Burmese— also come through, since the narrators reports them frankly.