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Similes
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Powerless Colonizers:
At the climax of the story, Orwell looks around at the 2,000 Burmese people expecting him to kill a rampaging elephant (something he doesn’t want to do) and realizes that colonialism traps the colonizers just as it traps the colonized. This is an example of situational irony because readers expect Orwell, as an officer representing the British Empire, to feel he has power over the colonized Burmese population, not to feel powerless in the face of them.
The following passage—in which Orwell waxes poetic about the plight of the colonizer—captures the irony of Orwell’s situation:
It is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. […] To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible.
Orwell’s description of colonizers being forced to “do what the ‘natives’ expect” in every situation is deeply ironic, as it puts the native population into a position of (indirectly) dictating what the colonizers must do, essentially putting them into a position of power. Orwell ends this passage bitterly resigning himself to playing out the role that the Burmese onlookers expect of him (by killing the elephant), even though he doesn’t want to do it and, as readers later learn, other British colonial officers don’t want him to do it since they value the elephant’s life over the life of the Burmese man the elephant killed. In this way, Orwell proves to be powerless against the expectations of the colonized population.
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