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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Hanging, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Cruelty of Colonialism
Mortality and Denial
Bystanders, Guilt, and Avoidance
Summary
Analysis
One rainy morning, Orwell waits outside of a makeshift prison in Burma (present-day Myanmar) and observes a Hindu prisoner who has been brought out of his small, cage-like cell to be hanged. The man has a shaven head and a moustache that strikes Orwell as comically oversized. The small man does not resist when six Indian guards, two of them armed with bayoneted rifles, surround and restrain him. As the guards guide him towards the gallows, he remains calm, but they seem uneasy about his cooperation, handling the prisoner as if they’re afraid he will slip from their grasp.
As a member of the Indian Imperial Police, Orwell holds a position of power, and his feelings about the Hindu prisoner reflect his relative comfort in that position. He’s a colonizer helping run a small prison, and though he observes most of the goings-on objectively, his few subjective quips come at the expense of the prisoner: he pokes fun at the man’s facial hair and emphasizes his submissiveness. Though Orwell’s judgments are few, he seemingly makes them without further reflection. The prisoner, on the other hand, seems the opposite of what the crowd expects. He has accepted his death sentence, and his calmness stresses the relative uncertainty of the entire prison system (and thereby the colonial one).
Themes
At eight o’clock, a “desolately thin” bugle call sounds. The prison superintendent irritably pressures Francis, the head jailer, to get the hanging over with quickly, as the rest of the prisoners must wait until then to eat breakfast. A “Dravidian” in gold spectacles, Francis hastily assures the superintendent that everything is ready and waiting.
The superintendent and Francis are a microcosm of the colonizers’ presence in Burma (present-day Myanmar). The superintendent, a British man, is known by his title and his duties, but Francis is described by his ethnicity (“Dravidian” refers to people who speak the languages used in southern India and Sri Lanka); he seems panicked by the presence of the superintendent and embarrassed that he hasn’t already completed the task at hand.
Themes
On the walk to the gallows, a “dreadful thing” occurs: a dog appears in the prison yard. It is energetic and happy and runs directly to the party guiding the condemned prisoner to his death. It jumps at the prisoner and tries to lick his face. Everyone is too stunned to try to catch the dog, but eventually they pursue it. After various attempts to drive the stray away, someone catches the dog, gives it to Orwell to guide, and the procession continues. Through all this, the prisoner looks on impassively.
Orwell’s description of the dog’s appearance as “dreadful” suggests that it’s upsetting to him, likely because the dog serves as a reminder to both Orwell and the rest of the prison that the man about to hang is no different from them. The dog is ignorant of the circumstances and thus treats the prisoner the same as it treats the guards and Orwell, and this creates a deep discomfort among the men about to carry out an execution. Until this point, Orwell and his peers had a sense of unchallenged superiority over the prisoner, but the dog demonstrates how fallacious that superiority is.
Themes
As Orwell follows and watches the prisoner, he experiences a moment of lucidity, noting many physical details about the man who is going to hang. Then, the prisoner steps around a puddle, and Orwell is overwhelmed with the true gravity of killing a living human being. He is reminded that the prisoner is still thinking, reasoning, and growing, and he dreads the coming moment when the man will be removed from the world.
As Orwell is forced to confront the prisoner’s humanity, he begins to panic about taking a life. It’s clear that he’s been shaken, as he’s fallen out of his objective reporting and into a more subjective commentary on the execution. Still, however, it never occurs to Orwell to say something or try to stop the hanging.
Themes
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The guards lead the prisoner to the gallows, where another prisoner serves as hangman. The hangman greets the group “with a servile crouch.” Two guards half lead and half push the prisoner onto the gallows. When the noose is fastened, the prisoner begins a steady chant to his god, calling out “Ram!” over and over but without emotion. The dog whines in response. The hangman covers the prisoner’s face with a cotton bag while the prisoner continues repeating “Ram,” muffling his chant.
The expected solidarity between prisoners is absent when the sentenced man approaches the gallows, only to find that another prisoner will be the one to hang him. Once the noose is fastened and his death is all but certain, the prisoner’s chant serves not as a plea but as a statement of life. He may be calling out to his god simply because he still can, but Orwell has retreated into his objective reporting and refuses to divulge more than the discomfort he feels. Even when the prisoner’s face is masked and his voice muffled, he lives and therefore continues to chant.
Themes
The superintendent waits quietly; the crowd grows uneasy and almost desperate for him to give the kill order and stop the chanting. Everyone’s faces have changed color as they watch and listen to the hooded man, “each cry another second of life.” Finally, the superintendent shouts the order, and the prisoner disappears from sight. Orwell releases the dog, which runs around the gallows and seems surprised at what it sees.
The prison’s power dynamics become explicit when everyone must wait for the superintendent to order the prisoner’s execution, despite the event’s inevitability. Orwell, the other British colonist present, has his last chance to speak out, but he only sits with his fellow guards and feels the same discomfort that they feel. This sense of passivity becomes communal, and the superintendent must make clear his distinction from that community when he gives the kill order. He is the only bystander who takes an active role in the execution. All the while, the prisoner continues his life-claiming chant, highlighting that he is human, alive, and aware of what is happening. Finally, after the death, the dog once again seems to express the compassion that the surrounding men are incapable of or unwilling to show.
Themes
Orwell joins the others behind the gallows and observes the prisoner dangling and slowly revolving. The superintendent checks the body by poking it with his stick and confirms death, saying “He’s all right.” No longer looking moody, the superintendent leads the party away. The dog follows as the group walks past cells of other condemned prisoners and joins the other convicts at breakfast.
After the prisoner is dead, his body and the execution become both a spectacle and a routine. Observing him after the fact, the group can marvel at what they’ve done without fearing it or feeling so explicitly uncomfortable: they’ve made it past the chanting and are, briefly, only relieved that the hanging is complete. The superintendent even minimizes the death, which seconds ago was devastating for them all. Together, the group moves past it, silently forgiving one another for their complicity in the imperial cruelty. Even the dog leaves the body behind, recognizing it, finally, as different from the other men.
Themes
Orwell and his peers feel an immense relief, now that the man is dead; indeed, the meal is “jolly,” and they start to chat “gaily” as though nothing happened. A Eurasian boy tells Orwell about the prisoner’s terrified reaction when he heard about his sentence, and many laugh. Francis shares a story about a man who wouldn’t let go of the bars of his cell to be hanged, and how it took six men to pull him off. He recalls that they tried to reason with the prisoner about how much trouble he was causing them. The whole prison crew finds Francis’s story hilarious, guards and Englishmen alike. Orwell finds himself laughing loudly along with the rest.
The group’s collective identity shifts once they reach breakfast and the task of the execution is totally behind them. They seem almost to forget the events of the morning, and even when the prisoner comes back up, it is as a comedic object. The men laugh, relieved to have a feeling about the late prisoner other than discomfort and guilt. Eventually, the sharing of morbid stories becomes a trend, and Francis shares another anecdote that is horrifying but that the group again treats as comedy. The group has been affected by the hanging and clearly does not know how to process what has happened, but they have safety in their numbers, and so they rely together on humor to move past the event together. This, it might be said, is quite literally gallows humor.
Themes
The superintendent invites them all to his car for a drink of whisky. The indigenous guards and the European warders share a drink, still laughing at the “extraordinarily funny” anecdote, only one hundred yards away from the hanging body of the unfortunate prisoner.
When the essay ends, the men are all—indigenous and colonial alike—briefly equal. They share a drink, and Orwell emphasizes the diverse makeup of the group. It’s almost as if they’ve learned from their experience with the prisoner not to devalue one another. This, of course, is pure posturing, and readers know the colonial power structure will return once things settle. The group is still laughing (and therefore still collectively processing what has happened) when the essay ends, but the prisoner’s hanging body serves as the reminder that things must soon return to the way they were when the morning started, with a clear and cruel colonial structure in place.
Themes
