George Orwell

1 Pages 348 Words

George Orwell has two very conflicting feelings towards the Burmese people throughout his essay. He writes “I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts”(Pg.680), and then he turns around and says “Theoretically—and secretly, of course—-I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British.”(Pg.680). George Orwell then goes on to say that feelings like this were not unusual side effects of imperialism.

George Orwell was torn between two sides of himself. The sympathetic, guilty side of his inner self and the side of him that was just trying to get his job done and do it properly. George Orwell was suffering from an internal identity conflict, which was resolved by him shooting the elephant and leaving Burma to take a new job. George knew many hated him and that made him feel bad about who he was, the Burmese people treated him very poorly and that made him mad at them. George saw what went on in prisons. “The wretched prisoners huddling over stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboo—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.”(pg.680)

George Orwell’s ambivalence came from many mixed feelings and emotions that he was unable to share and communicate with others. “I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. He was very unaware of things going around him and unsure of his own life and his thoughts. All he knew was that he was “stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.”(pg.680). He was obviously torn due to what was expected of him by the British empire and by what his conscience and heart expected and want him to do....