George Orwell: The elephant in the room



Orwell's Grave (By Brian Robert Marshall)

Sometimes an elephant is just an elephant.  Sometimes, however, an elephant is that which is so overwhelming as to be blatantly ignored.

George Orwell’s elephant was both.  In his famous essay, Shooting an Elephant, Orwell painstakingly describes the agonizing death of an elephant that had grown murderously out of control.  No one wins in situations like that.  The destitute laborer whom the elephant had just killed was lying dead in the street.  The terrified crowd was crying out for blood vengeance.  The officer of the law seemed stripped of all choice.  The elephant was doomed to die by this authoritarian hand.

An excerpt from this chilling tale reads as follows:  When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd.  In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant…

Orwell also explores this “mysterious, terrible change” in his essay, A Hanging.  The crowd-condemned being in this essay was human, and the execution was carried out per rope rather than bullet.  Again there were mixed feelings on the part of the narrator, but again doom marched on unimpeded.  The inexorable “change” is described in this manner:  It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it

means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.  When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide…  He and I were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and

in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

Death, per se, is not the enemy here. 

The true enemy is hubris – and the tragedies that inevitably unfold when mere mortals cloak themselves in godlike powers.

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hanging

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris

Copyright June 25, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved