Shooting an Elephant quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which best describes the form of "Shooting an Elephant"?

   • Correct answer: Narrative essay
   • Fictional short story
   • Daily news dispatch
   • Philosophical treatise
   • Restoration comedy

   It is a narrative essay: a first-person incident with the shape of a short story, used to argue a political claim. The shooting is the vehicle; the thesis is what despotic governments do to the people who run them.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What is the narrator's post, and where is he stationed?

   • District magistrate in Rangoon, hearing colonial court cases in Upper Burma
   • Tea-plantation overseer in Mandalay, inspecting fields after a night of storms
   • Correct answer: Sub-divisional police officer of the town of Moulmein, in Lower Burma
   • British Army captain in Calcutta, called in to put down a waterfront riot

   The essay opens in Moulmein, in Lower Burma, where the narrator is sub-divisional police officer of the town. He is a colonial policeman, not a soldier, planter, or magistrate in another city.

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3. 3

   Question 3. Before the elephant incident, how does the narrator describe his feelings about empire and the Burmese?

   • Correct answer: He already hates the empire he serves, yet also rages at the Burmese who bait and humiliate him
   • He is a proud defender of the British Raj and hopes to make a long career of colonial police work
   • He has no opinion about empire at all and only wants to finish his shift and go quietly home to sleep
   • He secretly plans to join a Burmese uprising and turn his rifle against the other Europeans in town

   He has already decided that imperialism is an evil thing, and he is theoretically for the Burmese — yet he also hates the job, the guilt, and the people who trip him and jeer. He calls feelings like these the normal by-products of imperialism.

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4. 4

   Question 4. What kind of elephant is ravaging the bazaar?

   • A wild jungle elephant that had never been tamed or put to work
   • Correct answer: A tame working elephant that broke its chain after going "must"
   • A circus elephant that had escaped from a traveling European show
   • A temple elephant priests had decorated and then lost in the rains

   It is not a wild elephant, but a tame working elephant that had gone "must," broken its chain, and escaped. Its mahout — the only person who could manage it in that state — had taken the wrong direction and was twelve hours away.

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5. 5

   Question 5. When was "Shooting an Elephant" first published?

   • 1922, as an official police report filed in his first year in Burma
   • 1927, in a Rangoon paper the week he left the Imperial Police
   • 1945, as a preface issued with the first edition of Animal Farm
   • Correct answer: 1936, in the British magazine New Writing, years after he left Burma

   The essay appeared in 1936 in New Writing, years after Orwell had left the Indian Imperial Police (he served in Burma from 1922 to 1927). He is looking back, not filing a dispatch from the field.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Once the narrator sees the elephant in the paddy fields, why does he conclude he ought not to shoot it?

   • The mahout has already returned from the hills, taken up the chain, and is leading the elephant quietly home
   • Colonial law forbids a policeman from firing on any animal whose owner is Indian rather than European
   • The two-thousand-person crowd has already gone home, so he would be shooting with no witnesses left
   • Correct answer: The elephant is calmly eating, its attack of "must" seems to be passing, and a working elephant is costly machinery

   The elephant is tearing up grass with a preoccupied grandmotherly air and looks no more dangerous than a cow. Shooting a working elephant, he says, is comparable to destroying "a huge and costly piece of machinery"; he thinks the attack of "must" is already passing off.

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7. 7

   Question 7. What does the narrator say the elephant is worth alive versus dead?

   • Worthless alive, because a mad elephant has no market; priceless dead for ivory
   • Correct answer: At least a hundred pounds alive; only the tusks, about five pounds, if dead
   • The same either way, because the government reimburses the owner in full
   • Five pounds alive as a nuisance; a hundred pounds dead for hide and meat

   Alive, the elephant is worth at least a hundred pounds as working livestock; dead, it would be worth only the tusks, five pounds, possibly. That is why killing it is like wrecking costly machinery — and why the owner is furious afterward.

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8. 8

   Question 8. What does "must" mean in this story?

   • A legal order that every policeman fire on a dangerous animal
   • A British army telegram sent from Rangoon commanding a kill
   • The elephant's own name, painted on a tusk by its mahout
   • Correct answer: A periodic state of frenzy that overtakes a tame bull elephant

   In the essay, "must" is the condition that overtook a tame elephant: a periodic attack of aggression. Tame elephants are chained when the attack is due; this one broke its chain and escaped. The narrator later thinks the attack was already passing off.

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9. 9

   Question 9. Why does the narrator shoot the elephant?

   • The elephant charges across the paddy, and he fires in immediate self-defense
   • Correct answer: The crowd expects a sahib to act like a sahib, and he cannot bear to be laughed at
   • The owner of the elephant begs him to shoot it before it wrecks another hut
   • Headquarters has telephoned an order that every loose elephant in town must be killed

   He knows he ought not to shoot. He does it because two thousand people are watching him as they would watch a conjurer, and a sahib has got to act like a sahib. The last line states the motive: he had done it "solely to avoid looking a fool."

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10. 10

    Question 10. What does "sahib" mean in this story?

    • Correct answer: A European man in authority in British India, expected to look resolute and never foolish
    • A Burmese Buddhist priest who has nothing to do except stand on corners and jeer at Europeans
    • The official title of an elephant's keeper and trainer, the only person who can recapture a runaway animal
    • A courtroom paper authorizing a policeman to kill a mad animal on sight in the bazaar

    A sahib is the conventionalized figure of the white official. The narrator says a sahib has got to act like a sahib: appear resolute, know his own mind, and do definite things. "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."

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11. 11

    Question 11. What central claim is the elephant incident meant to reveal?

    • Correct answer: When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys
    • Imperial rule is justified because only Europeans can control dangerous animals
    • The Burmese crowd is the real government, and the British presence is only a rumor
    • Killing animals is always immoral, so colonial police work should be abolished overnight

    The narrator writes that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys." Seemingly the leading actor, he is only an absurd puppet of the crowd. Empire, in this view, traps the ruler as well as the ruled.

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12. 12

    Question 12. What does the elephant most clearly function as in the essay?

    • A symbol of armed Burmese resistance waiting in the hills to overthrow the British Raj
    • A symbol of the narrator's lost childhood in England and his homesick wish to sail home
    • Correct answer: An extended metaphor for empire: powerful, valuable, and dying a slow, ugly death
    • A symbol of industrial progress that the town must sacrifice in order to modernize its bazaar

    Alive it is costly working machinery; dead, only the tusks. After the shot it looks stricken, shrunken, immensely old, and takes half an hour to die — powerless to move and yet powerless to die. That lingering agony matches the claim that the British Empire is dying while its officials keep performing control.

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13. 13

    Question 13. Which cluster of devices most clearly shows that the shooting is a performance of power, not a necessity?

    • Heroic couplets and an omniscient third-person narrator who never once speaks in the first person
    • A surprise twist at the end revealing that the elephant was only a hallucination brought on by fever
    • Scientific charts, tables, and footnotes comparing rifle calibers, bullet weights, and elephant anatomy
    • Correct answer: Irony and theatrical imagery: the sahib as conjurer and puppet, with the theatre curtain going up

    The crowd watches him as they would watch "a conjurer about to perform a trick"; a happy sigh goes up as if a theatre curtain were rising; he looks like the leading actor but is an absurd puppet. The irony is that the man with the gun is the one who is not free.

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14. 14

    Question 14. After the shooting, what does the narrator admit about the dead laborer and his own motive?

    • He wishes he had saved the laborer, calls the shooting legally indefensible, and says he should have paid the owner
    • Correct answer: He is glad the laborer was killed because it put him legally in the right, and he shot only to avoid looking a fool
    • He pays the owner a hundred pounds in damages and is praised by every European officer in Moulmein as a hero
    • He is court-martialed by his superiors, stripped of his rank, and packed home to England in official disgrace

    Legally a mad elephant has to be killed if its owner fails to control it. The narrator is very glad the laborer had been killed because that fact put him legally in the right and gave him a pretext. He still wonders whether anyone grasped that he had done it "solely to avoid looking a fool."

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15. 15

    Question 15. How does the essay present the elephant episode?

    • As a courtroom transcript in which every detail has been independently proven as public colonial record
    • As openly invented fiction, with made-up character names and a colony that never existed on any map
    • Correct answer: As the narrator's own experience — a tiny incident that gave him a glimpse of the real nature of imperialism
    • As a cable he filed the same morning from the paddy field, unrevised and without any political thesis

    The essay presents the shooting as something that happened to the narrator as a colonial policeman in Burma, "a tiny incident in itself" that gave him a glimpse of "the real nature of imperialism" Whether every detail is literal remains disputed; what is not in doubt is the argument the incident is shaped to make.

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16. 16

    Question 16. How does the crowd behave once the narrator is seen with a rifle?

    • Correct answer: They flock after him for the show and the meat, having cared little while the elephant wrecked their homes
    • They plead with him not to shoot, insisting they still need the working elephant alive for the coming harvest
    • They ignore him completely and go back to the bazaar to repair the wrecked stalls, huts, and fruit stands
    • They attack him with bamboo poles and betel juice to stop a European from killing an animal they revere

    They had not shown much interest while the elephant ravaged their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. About two thousand people follow him.

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17. 17

    Question 17. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • The narrator is a sub-divisional police officer in Moulmein, in Lower Burma.

      Happened

      That is how the essay opens: in Moulmein, in Lower Burma, he is sub-divisional police officer of the town and an obvious target of anti-European baiting.

    • The elephant was a wild jungle animal that had never been tamed.

      Didn't happen

      It was not a wild elephant, but a tame working elephant that had gone "must," broken its chain, and escaped. Killing it, the narrator says, is like destroying costly machinery.

    • Before he sees the elephant in the paddy fields, he finds the crushed body of an Indian laborer.

      Happened

      An old woman shooes children away from a man's body in the mud: an Indian, a Dravidian laborer, killed minutes earlier. Only then does the narrator send for an elephant rifle.

    • He walks up to twenty-five yards to test the elephant's behavior, then shoots only when it charges.

      Didn't happen

      He knows that test is what he ought to do. He also knows he will do no such thing: he is a poor shot, the ground is soft mud, and he will not risk being trampled in front of the crowd.

    • The mahout stands beside him and orders the killing.

      Didn't happen

      The mahout, the only person who could manage the elephant in that state, had taken the wrong direction and was twelve hours away. No keeper is present to recapture the animal.

    • Afterward the narrator says he had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

      Happened

      That is the essay's last judgment. Older Europeans say he was right; younger ones call it a shame to shoot an elephant for killing a laborer. He still names the real motive as not wanting to look a fool.

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