Blog 4.4

 In 1936, the same author that wrote the book, “Animal Farm” Named George Orwell published a short story called Shooting a Elephant. In this story we see and feel what the narrator thought in his head while he contemplated and ultimately shot and killed an elephant, which he later regretted. This short story puts a lot of emotion and feeling into the sentences and as I read it, I felt the same emotions as the narrator. The story starts off with the reader contemplating killing the elephant and you can see his inner thoughts as he fights his mind, playing tug a war on whether to kill it or not, eventually deciding to shoot it and regretting it deeply, The writer also was very graphic in describing the death of the poor elephant and mentioned that it slowly started dying and that the narrator could not finish him off so he left it to struggle as it died. The author used many forms of literature to get his story to be so emotional and the ones that I will be mentioning are form, structure and language. 

In the story, the author's form is used a lot. He wrote the short story for the general public and his goal in writing it was to show the emotion and the sadness of killing a beast like an elephant. He also used the first person to show the mind of the narrator to bring out more of the emotion and to make us imagine the same thing that the narrator is. Also, the author wrote this as a short story to be able to make it in a more informal way with less boundaries to follow and a less conventional writing style. This is also the reason as to why the author was able to narrate the story with the narrator's mind. This makes the author able to show the theme of the story, which is a chaotic battle between someone's mind and doing something wrong like taking the life of an animal.

Throughout the story, we are able to see the structure of the story change slightly. In the story, after he kills the elephant we are able to see his inner thoughts more and we can see the sentences getting shorter because usually we do not think in sentences but as clumped up groups of words. An example where the author uses this is when he said ‘One never does when the shot goes home”. The author also uses the structure of the paragraphs to show the embarrassment and how ashamed the author is to have killed the elephant. At the end of the short story, the author has a last sentence which is “In the end I could not stand it longer and went away”. This shows how the author could not deal with the guilt and ran away with the bad feeling still in his mind.

Lastly, the author uses a specific language that makes you feel guilty and moved after you read it, just like the narrator felt through the story. The author chose words that help you create imagery in your mind and almost make a scene inside of your head of what is going on. For example, the author used “His mouth slobbered” to show the reaction of the elephant as it started dying and described it very graphically showing everything that happened after every shot that he took at it. He also compared the elephant to a beast, and that it felt weird to see a beast slowly dying but still alive at the same time.