In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell argues that he was forced by the performative roles of dominator and dominated within the British colonial system to kill the elephant that was formerly mad. He nearly quotes Havel and others with his references to the mask that began fitting his face and the fact that he was really a puppet, not a lead actor, that was being pushed by all of the Burmese’s desires. He even takes this notion far enough to generalize it across all colonialism when he says, “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
I would like to challenge this idea. I do agree with Orwell that some performative, second/third dimension aspects of power were, knowingly or otherwise, being used on him by the Burmese. However, Orwell thoroughly dominates every Burmese person in this crowd with physical, literal power, both individually (white, having a gun) and by being British. But here is the counterfactual – had he demanded that people in the town watch the elephant until the mahout’s return, would they not have done as he said because of colonialism’s power dynamics? Or, slightly differently, I disagree that doing the above would have been some display of weakness. If it were, I believe it would have been so minor as to be corrected with an equally small display of British strength.
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I agree with your remarks. But you do not propose an example of an alternative ‘display of British strength’. Your argument becomes elliptical and self-defeating. Moreover, Orwell wrote about the shooting of the elephant as an example of the absurdity of the British identity in the subcontinent. He could not have made his point, that he was transfixed between two poles of ideology, if he had not murdered the elephant. Anyway, the incident is thought by many to be apocryphal, which brings the entire narrative into symbolic territory.