shooting elephant

  To begin my analysis with the Excerpt,’ Shooting an Elephant’ the writer begins his writing with the use of first person narrative and continues this throughout the entire excerpt. The writer goes and uses past tense showing that he has already been through what the story is telling and he has already been through the excerpt.

The author rotates between using longer and shorter sentences adding emotion to what the reader is saying. An example of this was,”His mouth was wide open- I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat.” This adds emotion to the words used before and after due to the use of dramatic tone in shorter sentences. Another example of how the author uses shorter structured sentences was,”In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant.” This constant use of commas and pauses in the sentence add tone to the speaker's language, giving it a mysterious or suspenseful tone not knowing whether or not the man will shoot the elephant or not.

  The tone in the excerpt starts off in the first few paragraph starts off in a tone that is more confused and not really knowing what is going on by describing that he knew what he needed to do but didn't know if he should do it or not, as it states in the quote,”It was perfectly clear to me what i ought to do… I did not know that in shooting the elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar.” This brings a state of confusion which later becomes suspense as the reader starts to debate to himself on whether or not he wants to kill the elephant or not. 

The writer's tone towards the end then begins to turn into a more sad and dreadful tone as the character ended up shooting the elephant, however, the elephant began to suffer. As the elephant suffers the character begins to regret that the elephant is suffering which helps create this tone the writer is trying to develop. The author during this time also begins to use more descriptive words such as,”rattling gasps” and “legs sagging and head drooping.” This helps show what kind of state the elephant is in and helps the reader connect to the feelings the main character and the elephant is experiencing at this time.

As the story continues the writer tries to build more and more suspense throughout the tone and language of the excerpt which is leading to a big jump at the end of the story which ends up being the main character leaving the elephant. The author uses the elephant suffering and the describing of the suffering and the character deciding on whether or not he should put the elephant out of its misery as the tone of the story goes. What helps this is also the authors thought on what the croud might think which is the main reason why the author has not decided if he would want to completely shoot the elephant or let it sit and suffer. 

The author's main aim of the story was to depict what he wanted to do to the elephant and what he wanted to end up feeling with the elephant. The author repeats himself, helping us think about what might happen as the story progresses, helping him create the tone in the beginning as he improves with his word choice. The story ends with the writer leaving and not shooting the suffering animal.