"I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys" -George Orwell

In George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," he uses a metaphor to show his views on British imperialism. The autobiographical account literally shows how he killed an elephant because he felt that he had to, but beyond the facts he is explaining the nature of imperialism and being persuasive about it. If you read his essay at first you might think that it's just a story about his visit to Burma, but if you look deeper, you'll see that he uses rhetoric and fallacies to construct a point about the political and social situation of that time.

Orwell begins his essay with a bad example fallacy. He uses hyperbole and makes observations on Asia based on the few descriptions he gives or his personal thoughts. While there could be a lot of people in where he was, they surely didn't represent Burma as a whole or the nature of the British Empire. The author uses hasty generalizations when describing some of them, both literally and in the rhetorical sense. He doesn't do it because he hates a specific group of people based on a few he met, but because he's trying to show the reader his environment. Some yellow-faced Asian most likely did insult him, but he felt like the whole race was against him, a British police officer. Same with the Buddhist priests--the way he describes them, in a hasty generalization or based on merely his personal observation, shows that the British viewed an overly simplified situation. Because of his mental fallacy, or perceiving things in a way that lacked a connection between the evidence and conclusion, Orwell felt that he was a puppet of the empire and like "every Englishman in the East," he had to suffer in silence. He says, "Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty." His fallacies are certainly not to amaze the reader with the huge number of Asians or overly simplified descriptions, but rather to show how imperialism affected people's mind and perception. Through his essay, George Orwell describes the way imperialism affects the logical way of thinking.

After having described the way he lived in Burma, Orwell continues to tell about the event, killing an elephant, that allowed him to understand the essence of imperialism. He continues to make generalization about his surroundings as he describes how he felt pressured by the natives to shoot an elephant that had gone crazy. While he uses a few literal fallacies, Orwell's essay has a disconnect between the proof and the conclusion in the situation. He walked by a field with a gun, because he felt it was appropriate and he perceived that the Burmese wanted him to kill the animal, so he did. He was the authority, and was armed, so he could've done anything he wanted, but the effects of "tyranny" made unable to oppose to pressure. The proof in the situation would be that there was a crazy elephant and a lot of natives around, and the conclusion that you had to kill it, but the connection between them is flawed, he didn't have to kill it because of the pressure. Orwell writes, "I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle." It's a fallacy beyond just the writing. He shows that imperialism and despotism got into people's minds and made them act illogically. The division between the colonizers and the colonized made people act in the way the stereotype said they should, sort of like a false dilemma.