Shooting an Elephant

Sinopse

Ainda não disponível em português — exibindo a versão em inglês.

"Shooting an Elephant" is an essay by British writer George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in late 1936 and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948. The essay describes the experience of the English narrator, possibly Orwell himself, called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant while working as a police officer in Burma. Because the locals expect him to do the job, he does so against his better judgment, his anguish increased by the elephant's slow and painful death. The story is regarded as a metaphor for colonialism as a whole, and for Orwell's view that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys". Orwell spent some of his life in Burma (present-day Myanmar) in a position akin to that of the narrator (he was posted as a police officer in 1926 in Mawlamyine, which is the setting of the essay), but the degree to which his account is autobiographical is disputed, with no conclusive evidence to prove it to be fact or fiction. After his death in 1950, the essay was republished several times, including in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957), and Selected Writings (1958). In a 2022 interview, Orwell's son Richard Blair said he thinks "Shooting an Elephant" is one of his father's two best essays, together with "A Hanging".

Licença do texto: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Fonte

Detalhes

Tipo

Livro

Lançamento

1 de janeiro de 1936

Gêneros

essay

Criado por

George Orwell

Países

United Kingdom