"Shooting an Elephant"

Although known more for his novel that humanized animals, George Orwell reflects in an essay about the time when he had to, as a police officer in Burma, shoot a runaway elephant. The author presents this incident with humor, while also emphasizing his hatred of his role in the British Empire.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 12 Unit 1's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: My Papa's Waltz, in just-, The Last Word, Mushrooms, I Remember, Invisible Man, Four Skinny Trees, Dirty Work, On Seeing England for the First Time, Speaking with Hands, The White Man's Burden, The Poor Man's Burden, Shooting an Elephant, Lindo Jong: Double Face, Stranger in the Village
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. sneer
    smile contemptuously
    In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves.
  2. perplexing
    lacking clarity of meaning
    All this was perplexing and upsetting.
  3. imperialism
    a policy of extending your rule over foreign countries
    For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
  4. flog
    beat with a whip, rod, or cane
    The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lockups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of men who had been flogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
  5. supplant
    take the place or move into the position of
    I did not know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
  6. prostrate
    stretched out and lying at full length along the ground
    With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.
  7. mahout
    the driver and keeper of an elephant
    Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town.
  8. coolie
    an offensive name for an unskilled Asian laborer
    He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes.
  9. paddy
    an irrigated or flooded field where rice is grown
    The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away.
  10. ravage
    cause extensive destruction or ruin utterly
    They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot.
  11. immense
    unusually great in size or amount or extent or scope
    It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.
  12. garish
    tastelessly showy
    I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes--faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
  13. conjurer
    someone who performs magic tricks to amuse an audience
    They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick.
  14. futility
    uselessness as a consequence of having no practical result
    And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.
  15. sahib
    a title of respect for men in colonial India
    He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.
  16. squeamish
    easily disturbed or disgusted by unpleasant things
    At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to.
  17. senility
    mental infirmity as a consequence of old age
    An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him.
  18. agony
    intense feelings of suffering; acute mental or physical pain
    He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further.
  19. pretext
    a fictitious reason that conceals the real reason
    And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.
  20. solely
    without any others being included or involved
    I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
Created on Wed Mar 04 16:13:58 EST 2015 (updated Wed Mar 04 20:22:58 EST 2015)

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