Brutal honesty hits the unsuspecting marks The memorial account George Orwell details, of his confrontation with a mad elephant, in his essay, Shooting An Elephant (1946 ) is engaging and stimulating. Born in 1903 in Bengal, India, to a British colonial official, Orwell states in his most powerful essay against imperialism: "I perceived in this moment that when the white man becomes tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys" ( Orwell, 1946, par.7). In a disarming and thoughtful style, Orwell expresses his point of view. that of maintaining illegitimate power when vastly outnumbered; he acted according to normative social influence rather than the dictates of conscience. Knowing that the crowd did not like him and would never like him, but He, the elephant and the "sea of ​​yellow faces" (Orwell, 1946, par.6), are all actors in the precarious theater that, "the uselessness of white man dominion in the East” (Orwell, 1946, par.7), he created. Clearly his situation included concern for his own safety as he could easily be trampled to death if the animal attacked him desire of the jeering crowd to entertain them cornered him as the spectacle of the hour if he succeeded in bringing down the elephant or the laughing stock of the city if he failed Of course there was also the elephant's owner, who being absent from the scene, would inevitably be furious at having lost the working elephant's strength at his disposal. Quickly evaluating all his options, Orwell realized that he had to shoot the elephant. Recognizing the pachyderm as the innocent victim of the situation, he evidently wanted to shoot it not, but expectations of the crowd prevailed. The spectators, his subjects, expected him to be in control of the situation and looked forward to the meat that the dead animal would provide. “A sahib must behave like a sahib” (Orwell, 1946, par.7), as the natives called himself and any other European officer. Lying on the ground to take aim, he shot in the wrong spot to kill the elephant in the most humane way possible. At the beginning of his essay, once again in a painfully honest way, he mentions smelly prisons, scarred bottoms and sullen faces, all images that are for him an indelible reminder of what totalitarian regimes entail. His developmental pattern is chronological and his use of language is graphic. For example, he claims that on the one hand he was secretly for the Burmese people and against their oppressors, and yet, as a European, he was oppressed by them in “a mean and aimless manner” (Orwell, 1946, para. 1). His description of the Burmese shoppers at the bazaar is one of cruel and cowardly subversion when he says that if a European woman were to shop alone, “someone would probably spit betel juice on her dress” (Orwell, 1946, par.1). . Orwell also recounts being laughed at, insulted, tripped while playing football, scolded and ridiculed, simply because he was European. As a result, Orwell says that all this treatment "got on my nerves" (Orwell, 1946, par.1). He describes his feeling of having an “intolerable sense of guilt” (Orwell, 1946, par.2) as part of the ruling class. But conversely he also harbored a desire to skewer his oppressors, the worst of whom were the Buddhists