Shooting an Elephant to save face

Getting at the truth, as Orwell put it, is one motivation for writing. This permeates Orwell's writing, his novels, his journalism, and his essays. One essay that most of us remember reading in school is his essay entitled "Shooting an Elephant". It is about the time that Orwell spent in colonial Burma working as a colonial policeman. He points out in this essay the "futility of the white man's dominion in the East." It was a hollow dominion for in order to keep the respect of those over whom Britain held dominion the British had to do what the population expected. In the case of this essay it was that Orwell had to shoot an elephant that he personally did not want to kill. However, as Orwell put it: "He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it." The crowd behind Orwell the policeman expected him to shoot the elephant, but he preferred not to, even though he was legally entitled to shoot it because it had killed a man. The truth that emerges and that Orwell has the courage to share is that he in fact did it because he was a coward; a coward to face the crowd, a coward of being - not hurt by them, but of being laughed at. This is what Orwell writes at the end of the essay:

"The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."