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Mortality and Denial
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LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Hanging, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
“A Hanging” investigates the experience of the bystander and suggests that bystanders are avoidant in two ways: they avoid acting in a moment of injustice, and then avoid their feelings of guilt after the fact. Orwell—who at the time was serving as a member of the Imperial Police Force in Burma (present-day Myanmar)—feels both guilt and extreme clarity when he reflects on the humanity of the prisoner who hangs. Orwell, who was in a position to resist the prisoner’s execution, feels disgust at “cutting a life short when it is in full tide,” and yet he stands idly by as the superintendent orders the prisoner’s death. After the fact, Orwell and the rest of the men in the prison laugh at terrible anecdotes, other horror stories of men who went to the gallows, and they seem to deliberately avoid acknowledging the inhumanity of the death penalty, which they carry out with some regularity. The essay seems to suggest that bystanders must remove themselves from unfortunate situations in both a physical and an emotional sense: not only do Orwell and his peers refuse to act to change the system in which they are complicit, but they also refuse to acknowledge their guilt. In this way, the essay assigns even more blame to bystanders than might be expected: though bystanders are usually portrayed as passive, the essay suggests that their emotional avoidance is an active choice. Orwell and his peers cannot cope with their roles in the hanging, but they avoid their guilt rather than confronting it; this, the story demonstrates, makes them culpable, as they neither stop the hanging nor confront their guilt.
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Bystanders, Guilt, and Avoidance ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Bystanders, Guilt, and Avoidance appears in each chapter of A Hanging. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Bystanders, Guilt, and Avoidance Quotes in A Hanging
Below you will find the important quotes in A Hanging related to the theme of Bystanders, Guilt, and Avoidance.
A Hanging
Quotes
We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot for drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
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[The guards] crowded very close about [the prisoner], with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.
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And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out to his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!” not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine.
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We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
[Breakfast] seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.
“Do you know, sir, our friend [he meant the dead man] when he heard his appeal had been dismissed he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwalah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”
We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’ anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
