Take out your reading questions Grab 2 or 3 class sets of the reading at the front table Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell Seminar In your groups discuss your first thoughts after reading the story using the questions on the worksheet to get you started ID: 705277
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Slide1
- Sit in one of the groups of four desks
- Take out your reading questions
- Grab 2 or 3 class sets of the reading (at the front table)Slide2
“Shooting an Elephant”
by George Orwell
SeminarSlide3
In your groups, discuss your first thoughts after reading the story, using the questions on the worksheet to get you started.
It’s okay if you have different interpretations!
Did you like it?
Did you hate it?
What’s even the point of this story?Slide4
Discuss examples of literary devices used in the story.
Were they successful?
Why use literary devices?Slide5
Simile
“It was an immense crowd… They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching.”Slide6
Metaphor
“I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly… in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.”Slide7
Metaphor
“in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it…”Slide8
Symbolism
“He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony… The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit.”Slide9
What does Orwell mean when he writes that he was “
theoretically…all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors”?Slide10
Does Orwell believe these conflicting feelings can be reconciled? What does he mean by “the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East”?Slide11
What is the significance of the statement “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”Slide12
What does the elephant symbolize?Slide13
Compare Orwell’s story with excerpts from the poem by Rudyard Kipling.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to
exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
…
Take up the White Man’s burden –
The savage wars of peace –
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to
nought
…
“The White Man’s Burden”Slide14
Closure Activity
Choose one of the following activities to individually complete on your own piece of paper.
Create a political cartoon about British imperialism from either the British or the colonized perspective (not using elephants
)
Rewrite one portion of the story from a Burmese person’s point of view (at least 2 paragraphs)