“Oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!” was what they were all thinking. Furthermore, the prisoner’s firm determination in calling his god contrasts with the discomfiture of those attending the hanging. The repeated utterances of “Ram!” by the prisoner suggest the bawling of a child, imparting a tone of desperation and hopelessness. Orwell does not simply state that the prisoner repeatedly uttered, “Ram!” right before being hanged, but himself keeps repeating the word to allow the reader to “witness” it as close to firsthand as possible. “the rope was twisting on itself” The prisoner was “dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.” After the prisoner is hanged, the superintendent pokes the dead body and says “He’s all right,” an unexpected and perhaps inappropriate utterance that again underscores the “unspeakable wrongness” by trivializing what just happened. Unfeelingly Orwell describes the execution itself-the clanking noise, the dead silence.
#THE HANGING GEORGE ORWELL SHMOOP FULL#
He is never more explicit with his views than when he speaks of “the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” It serves to convey the Orwell’s main intention of making the reader realize, as he did, the “unspeakable wrongness” of capital punishment. The revelation he experiences upon witnessing the prisoner avoiding the puddle on his way to his own hanging is the most important event of the essay. Stepping aside to avoid a puddle is a very human thing to do, something that he and everyone else would be likely to do as well. His first and most important emotional involvement in the events occurs when he sees the prisoner step aside to avoid a puddle. Orwell is unmoved by the condemned man’s plight until almost halfway into his narration. By portraying the treatment of a life as unimportant, Orwell emphasizes the inhumanity and provokes the opposite sentiments in the reader. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over” and “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis… The man ought to have been dead by this time” seems to treat the coming hanging as nothing more than a chore to be quickly done with. The superintendent, who says “Well, quick march, then. In his cold and detailed exposition of his observations, Orwell brings to the foreground seemingly inconsequential details surrounding the execution. Instead of imposing emotions upon the reader by describing what he felt, Orwell mostly omits his own feelings from the narrative and instead allows the reader to “witness” the events unfolding as Orwell had witnessed them himself, leaving the reader to respond to the narrative with his or her own emotions. His narration is full of implied and understated emotion, which serves to highlight what he perceives to be the wrongness of what happened. Orwell utilizes a mixture of literary components, devices, and gadgets to pass on his disproval of the death penalty. The writer, George Orwell was motivated by as a head police in Burma to write this story. Tone in George Orwell’s “A Hanging” Essay Example A Hanging by George Orwell (Literary Analysis) A Hanging is a short story about the death of a prisoner who gets hanged.
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