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    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant
    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant
    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant
    Ebook30 pages18 minutes

    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535833073
    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant

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      Clear and concise guide. I really really enjoyed reading it.

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    A Study Guide for George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant - Gale

    1

    Shooting an Elephant

    George Orwell

    1936

    Introduction

    George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant first appeared in 1936. The British public already knew Orwell as the socially conscious author of Down and Out in London and Paris (1933), a nonfiction study of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and subsistence living on poorly-paying menial jobs, and Burmese Days (1934), a novel of British colonialism. Shooting an Elephant functions as an addendum to Burmese Days. The story and novel share the same setting, and draw on Orwell’s experience as a colonial official in India and Burma, two regions of the British Empire, in the middle of the century between the two world wars. The story (which some critics consider an essay) concerns a colonial officer’s obligation to shoot a rogue elephant. The narrator does not want to shoot the elephant, but feels compelled to by a crowd of indigenous residents, before whom he does not wish to appear indecisive or cowardly. The situation and events that Orwell describes underscores the hostility between the administrators of the British Empire and their native subjects. Both sides feel hatred, distrust, and resentment. The situation is universally degrading. The shooting itself involves enormous pathos conveyed economically in a few

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