Gimnasio Britnico English: Literature Juan Diego Herrera Mamanch 1103 28 November 2013 ENGLIS PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

FT Shooting an Elephant is a short story by British writer George Orwell which narrates the story of an English officer living in Burma during the British Colony. The character has to deal with a must elephant that is destroying the city and damaging not only buildings but also people. When he has no other choice, he tries to murder the elephant, but the elephant is just painfully hurt and finally ransacked to death by the Burmese around the scene. Regarding the story How a specific ethnic group is portrayed in Eric Blairs work? Specifically, how are Burmese portrayed in this oeuvre? Burmese are described to the public by the character as flesh-avid, unfair, evil, foolish human beings living in a filthy piece of Burma. When the officer describes his interactions with the people there, he tells the readers that they treat not only him but also his mates in a very unfair, passive aggressive way, presumably because they thought the officers were the cause they were living in such poor conditions in a very unfair regime made by the British empire. When the elephant is in the midst of his rampage, the character talks about the Burmese in a way that makes them look very unorganized and helpless. But then, when the elephant murders one of the peasants, according to the narrator, all the people there become crazy an aggressive, and madly ask for the pachyderms death, and they ask for an opportunistic solution: let one of the officers murder the creature. The narrator then has to deal with one big problem: he has a gun, and he could shoot the elephant, and also the Burmese are pressing him to do so, but it just contradicts his moral thoughts about killing innocent animals. When the Burmese are pressing him to kill the elephant, the narrator shows them as very vindictive people, rapacious of the flesh of the animal and appetent of his blood. As the peer pressure on the officer gets bigger and bigger, he gives up and he shoots three times the elephant, but the animal does not die. That is a metaphor, the elephant representing the liberty and freedom of the Burmese, the three shots representing the three Burmese wars that the people had to suffer before surrendering and conceding the power to the English, and the animal not dead but still suffering is representing how the will and the power of the people of Burma is not dead, but is dangerously dwindling. Then, the Burmese run furiously to the yet alive animal and they start to ransack him. The animal finally succumbs to his deadly injuries and eventually dies, this representing too how the Burmese just help their liberty to be stolen, by not doing anything to accept their fate. In conclusion, the Burmese are portrayed by the author as hollow, foolish, hungry and uncultured peasants that just accept their fate and live with it, only ruminating the hatred against the English, but not doing anything.