Assignment for Essay #2 (Analysis of Orwell S Shooting an Elephant )
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SMU – English 1301 – Tindall
Assignment for Essay #2 (Analysis of Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”)
In this essay you will explain how Orwell, in “Shooting an Elephant,” uses logical reasoning, evidence, choice of words, selection of details, and other methods, to communicate a message to us, the readers, and convince us of its validity.
A more detailed description of the assignment appears later in this handout.
IMPORTANT DATES:
Friday, Oct. 8, 2004: Bring draft thesis to class, where we will work on improving it.
Monday, Oct. 11, 2004: No class. Fall break.
Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2004: Bring revised thesis to class.
Monday, Oct. 18, 2004: Draft of essay due.
Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2004: No class. Individual conferences on your papers Wednesday and Thursday. Attendance at conference counts as class attendance.
Monday, Oct. 25, 2004: Final revision of essay due.
PURPOSES OF ASSIGNMENT
The purposes of this assignment are to give you experience in:
1. Discovering some of the rhetorical and literary devices authors use to communicate their points to readers;
2. Explaining to someone else how an author uses some of those devices in a specific text;
3. Writing coherent paragraphs;
4. Using transitions to link paragraphs into a coherent essay;
5. Integrating quotations from other texts into an essay.
[continued next page] DETAILED ASSIGNMENT:
Choose some message or point or claim that Orwell is trying to communicate to his readers. This may be his main thesis or some subsidiary, supporting point. It may be something he states explicitly, or something he implies but does not come right out and say.
Then explain what methods he uses to get his point across to the reader and to convince the reader that the point is true or valid. These methods may include the traditional “types of reason and evidence” you’ve seen used in Postman, Etzioni, and other argumentative essays, and they may also include some of the other devices we’ve been finding in “Shooting an Elephant”: characters’ actions, spoken words, and thoughts; conflicts between characters; the author’s choice of negatively-charged, positively- charge, or neutral words; the author’s choice of details to include or omit; the author’s choice of point of view (first person narrator, omniscient third person narrator, etc.).
Support your analysis with specific passages from the text, cited by paragraph number.
EXAMPLE QUESTIONS:
Here are some possible questions your essay could answer. (As we did in class recently, I’m using Orwell’s real name, “Blair,” to refer to the police officer serving in Burma in 1926, and the pen name “Orwell” to refer to the narrator of the story 10 years later.)
You may use one of these questions, but you may also come up with your own, if you wish.
1. The narrator of “Shooting an Elephant” tells us that, as a young police officer in Burma, he was “all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British” (2). What was Blair’s attitude towards the Burmese people? How do his choices of words to describe the Burmese, and his actions towards them, prove his statement to be true or untrue?
2. How does Eric Blair feel about himself at the end of the story? Ten years later, when he is telling the story, how does George Orwell feel about his younger self, Eric Blair?
3. According to some witnesses interviewed later, Blair killed the elephant quickly, with one shot. Whether or not that is true, Orwell chose to show the officer shooting many times, ineffectively, and to show the elephant dying slowly as the officer walked away. Why did the author make that choice? How does that choice help to support his thesis or some other point he wants to get across to us?
4. The narrator says that the shooting of the elephant would be “a bit of fun” to the Burmese crowd (5), and that the crowd was “certain that the elephant was going to be shot” (7). How does he know what the crowd wants – “the will of those yellow faces behind” him (7)? According to the story, Blair did converse with a few individual Burmese people while investigating the report about the elephant, but did any of them tell him what the crowd wanted? What evidence did he use to reach the conclusion that the crowd wanted the elephant shot, or did he just make that up without any evidence?
5. The narrator says he had a hard time getting definite information about the elephant, and generalizes, “that is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes” (4). Do other events in the story tend to confirm or contradict that generalization? Or does the generalization apply to other societies, not just “the East” (that is, Asia)?
6. Blair/Orwell is narrator and witness and participant in the story. How believable is he? Is he more credible at some times than others? What elements of the text make him credible or not? How does his choice of a first-person narrator, rather than an omniscient (all-knowing) third person narrator, help to establish or damage his credibility? How do the narrator’s specific statements about himself (or the things he doesn’t tell us) affect our belief in him?
THE THESIS (DRAFT DUE FRIDAY, OCT. 8)
Choose one of the questions in this assignment or come up with your own to answer. What’s your answer?
Your “thesis statement” will actually contain two theses: (1) Orwell’s thesis (the message you think he is conveying) and (2) your claim about which methods Orwell uses to advance his thesis.
For example, Pope, in the last sentence of his first paragraph, states both theses: “Under imperialism, the oppresor often becomes the oppressed” (that is Orwell’s thesis) and “Orwell uses a metaphor comparing a rampaging elephant to the abstract idea of imperialism to show the fundamental irony of” Orwell’s thesis (and that is Pope’s thesis).
Orwell’s thesis, depending on how you understand it, might be a policy thesis, a definitional thesis, a cause-and-effect thesis, etc. Your thesis in this essay, however, will almost certainly state a cause-and-effect relationship: Orwell’s use of certain rhetorical and literary devices will be the cause, and the reader’s understanding of Orwell’s thesis will be the effect.
Apply the criteria in the THESIS WORKSHOP handout to ensure you have the best thesis statement you can write.
Usually, a good thesis will be “contestable”: that is, there should be a reasonable opposing argument, or else the thesis will be obvious and uninteresting. In this kind of essay, however, that requirement is not all that important. Your thesis need not be contestable or controversial (though your essay might be more interesting if it is), but it should at least show the reader some non-obvious aspect of Orwell’s writing in “Shooting an Elephant.”
One additional question to ask about your thesis is: Does it explain how different parts of the text work together as a unit? (For example, recall our class discussions of the phrase “As a police officer” considered in light of the theatrical metaphors in Paragraph 7, or the word “crucified” in the description of the crushed man together with Orwell’s concluding remark that the man’s death had taken away his legal guilt.)
On Friday, Oct. 8, bring TWO COPIES of your thesis: one to hand in; the other to exchange with another student. Also bring a copy of THESIS WORKSHOP handout. In class you will read each other’s thesis statements, apply the handout’s principles to them, and make suggestions for improvement. (Don’t rewrite the other person’s thesis; just tell them what you think is missing, what’s not specific enough, etc., and let them fix it.) Meanwhile I will look over my copy of everybody’s thesis. Then, when the class reconvenes, we’ll look at several examples of thesis and comments.
* * * *
Models you can use:
In Criteria: Pope, 48; Sanchez, 51; Richey, 53. In Quick Access: Choi, 438.
X x x x x x
DRAFT THESIS: WORKING THESIS: Revise your thesis and hand it in Wednesday Oct. 13.
INTRODUCTION AND ONE BODY PARAGRAPH: [After we’ve had some paragraph-construction instruction.]
Assume that your audience has read “Shooting an Elephant.” Your job is not to re-tell the story, but to give your audience the benefit of your insight into how the pieces of the story work to communicate Orwell’s point.