The hanging george orwell breakdown
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.
THE HANGING GEORGE ORWELL BREAKDOWN FULL
His narration is full of implied and understated emotion, which serves to highlight what he perceives to be the wrongness of what happened. Tone in George Orwell’s “A Hanging” Essay Example