George Orwell's A Hanging

In George Orwell's essay "A Hanging," an Indian condemned to the gallows is hanged before a crowd of prisoners, warders, magistrates and other onlookers. The narrator is a European magistrate in Burma during British rule. While most Europeans imposed their manners and values on Hindus, the narrator goes through a transformation during the hanging. Initially he appears sympathetic and empathetic with the condemned man's plight, "with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone one mind less, one world less" (Orwell 2). After the prisoner is dead, the narrator appears to "do as the natives do" in using humor to distance himself from the awful reality of what he has just viewed, "I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing" (Orwell 3). Orwell uses this transformation in the narrator to expose the absurdity of capital punishment being used by an allegedly "civilized" society.

Initially, the narrator in "A Hanging" seems to have great empathy for the condemned prisoners. Setting is used to show this. The morning carries "a sickly light," the men are in quarters "like small anima

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