Shooting an Elephant...

Shooting an Elephant

To begin, the form used in the passage, “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell is very formal. The reasoning for this is that the author is trying to inform the reader of information that happened in the past. The author shows how difficult it was to make the decision to shoot the elephant. The story starts from the beginning to the end, with no jumps or twists meaning that it simply stays in chronological order. It starts with him at quite a ways away from the elephant until he shoots it and watches it continue to suffer until he cannot watch it anymore and simply walks away from guilt. This story was also told from the perspective of the first-person which gives the reader more detail as to what the narrator is thinking and experiencing. In the text, it states,” I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step.” This shows us what he was planning in his head before he even took a shot yet. First-person is the most interesting perspective as it gives us multiple details that we would not know about had it been in any other type of perspective. 

The next big part of this piece of text is the use of structure. I already touched on this a little bit, but we know that it was in chronological order as it was very clear on, and did not take any weird backstory or change the presence of where the timeline was at all. I think that this made it very easy to interpret and understand, especially for the audience. This chronological order should be used by more people to get their point across quicker than taking a random approach to it. The text was also chunked up into five different paragraphs which allowed for it to be spaced out. The first four paragraphs were much larger than the other ones and allowed for it to create a short conclusion. The text overall was very descriptive and used multiple in-depth sentences to make the text a little more interesting. An example of this is when it states, “At last, after what seemed like a long time - it might have been five seconds, I dare say - he sagged flabbily to his knees.” Notice how there are also some spaces in the text here that the author takes advantage of in order to make the text more dramatic and appealing for the reader to see. 

This leads me to talk about the incredible language that was used in the text. I think what was really impressive about the language which was used here in the text is the amazing use of verbs. Some examples of the verbs he used are, “could,” “here,” “shoot,” and multiple more. An example of him using a verb is when he states, “I could not stand it any longer and go away.” This shows that he had the ability to stay there or go away but decided to go away as it was quite an image. There was a lot of decision-making involved in this specific piece of writing and it was a great piece that the author incorporated into this. 

Furthermore, the style that George Orwell used had a perfect mix of form, structure, and language that made this piece interesting for the reader and as if you were right next to the narrator as it was very easy to imagine. This made the flow, tone, and emotion of the story come out to its fullest potential and I enjoyed every single moment of it.  The chronological order made this very easy to follow and allowed for no confusion to kick in. Overall it was an interesting easy read.