Societal Influence on the Identity of an Individual: An Althusserian Reading of George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant

Abstract

George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant (1936) has long been read as a confessional critique of
British imperialism. This paper approaches the essay from a different angle, treating it as a site where
the social construction of individual identity can be observed with unusual clarity. Using Louis
Althusser's theories of ideology, interpellation, and Ideological State Apparatuses as its primary
analytical lens, the paper argues that the narrator's identity in the essay is not an expression of
autonomous selfhood but a product of colonial ideology and collective social pressure. The narrator is
interpellated into the role of the imperial officer not by any single moment of coercion but by the
accumulated force of institutional expectations, public observation, and the performative demands of
colonial authority. Close reading of Orwell's prose reveals the gap between his private moral
resistance and the identity he is compelled to inhabit in public, a gap that Althusser's framework helps
to theorize as the constitutive condition of ideological subjecthood. The paper also draws selectively
on Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism, Frantz Fanon's account of colonial psychology, and Michel
Foucault's thinking on surveillance to sharpen the analysis at specific points. The findings suggest that
Orwell's narrator is a subject whose agency has been so thoroughly captured by colonial ideology that
the act of shooting the elephant, which he knows to be unnecessary and wrong, becomes not a choice
but a performance of the only identity available to him. The essay ultimately functions as an
inadvertent anatomy of how societies produce the very subjects they require.