The Hypocrisy of Hanging
During the age of imperialism, the British invaded Burma and forced the indigenious Burmese to give their resources to them without consent. Since this exchange was involuntary and something that wouldn’t have occurred without the initiation of force by the Britsh, it wasn’t a win-win scenario. The British lost the opportunity to treat the Burmese with respect and it was a win-lose scenario. George Orwell describes this imbalance of power with piercing symbolism, biting irony and revealing imagery showing that it is immoral to execute people, subjugate them and ignore the fact that they are human - humans who have the potential to help enrich everyone else with their minds.
Orwell’s description of the Burmese prison and the prisoners is symbolic of the entire country of Burma which had been beaten down by the British. His comparison of the prisoner and the superintendent symbolize the disparity between the ruling British and the defeated indigenious people. The prisoner himself is condescendingly cartoonish with a mustache “absurdly too big for his body”. This idea is extended by the simile that compares him to “a comic man on the films”(2). The mustache of the prisoner is contrasted with the crisp “toothbrush” mustache of the superintendent which indicates the superior status of the British officer. Later, when the prisoner is taken to the gallows, he is described as like a fish “which is still alive and may jump back into the water”(2). This symbolizes the vitality of the prisoner and shows that the aware consciousness of the prisoner is still present even though it has been seemingly beaten out of him. A dog appears in the scene which symbolizes the joy which is clearly absent from any of these men. When this fragment of joy appears it is quickly squashed by the controlling guards.
Another powerful symbol is the puddle that the prisoner side steps. It is the nature of a puddle to reflect, and the puddle reflects the reflexes that are very much alive in the prisoner as he steps to a side to avoid it. Suddenly the prisoner is not just a subject of the suffocating British rule but a thinking and reacting human being. This prompts the narrator to see the “unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short”(8). The prisoner’s body is alive and this is made clear by a list which describes how each part of the body is functioning. “bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming-all toiling away in solemn foolery”(8). These symbolic elements show the dreadful harshness of subjugating people when they still have a working, useful mind.
There is an all encompassing irony to the whole narrative which shows the inconsistency between the British and the Burmese. They are hanging this man for some crime and we don’t know what it is, but the guards and all of the people involved in hanging him are the ones committing the crime. They are not being hanged for their crime. They get no punishment at all. The writer uses logic from the law of non-contradiction to show the irony of hanging people. The law of non-contradiction means that two things that are mutually exclusive can’t both be true. You can’t have A and not A be true at the same time. They are all humans, but the prisoner is being put to death for a crime and the other humans, who are executing the prisoner, are also technically committing a crime, but they are not hanged. Shouldn’t they both be sent to the gallows? The illogic of execution is astounding. Orwell again uses irony as he depicts the dog, the only expression of joy in the scene. It is ironic for a bouncing dog to be seen as “dreadful”, but in the upside down world that Orwell is showing us there is no room for spontaneity “A dreadful thing had happened-a dog come goodness knows whence...tried to lick his face”(5). A dog licking someone's face isn’t usually a dreadful thing, but when they are hanging someone the dog’s innocence illuminates just how immoral they are. In reality it is dreadful because it undermines the credibility of officious magistrates pursuing the act of hanging someone. One last bit of irony occurs when the officials discuss a previous hanging at which the guards were having trouble with a “refractory” condemned man. Francis complains to the prisoner, "think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!" It was the prisoner who was the one that was feeling the pain. He was going to be killed. The guard has it backwards; he is the one forcing the prisoner to be hanged, and the prisoner’s resistance somehow causes pain for the aggressor.
In A Hanging Orwell creates revealing imagery to show how horrible the injustice of execution is. The image of “brown men” who were contained in cages indicates that the indigenous were the only prisoners and the British were exempt from incarceration. Orwell shows the condemned prisoner as destitute and weak. He then shifts to a description of the British who are irritable and authoritarian. This shift increases a sense of disparity by juxtaposing the despair of the prisoners and the arrogance of the people in charge of the jail. When the guards are taking the prisoner to the gallows, the image of a dog licking the prisoner’s face increases the tension by bringing life and joy into the scene. At the actual execution the prisoner cries out desperately for his god. The writer causes our hearing to be pierced when he describes the prisoner’s tortured cry to his god before he is about to be executed “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”(10). This agonizing despair is emphasized by the fact that the dog answers each syllable with a whine. After the execution a Eurasian boy pulls out a silver cigarette case in an attempt to impress his superior and switch the subject from the reality of the life that’s been taken to a shiny object.
Orwell clearly shows that these hangings were desensitizing the minds of the British as well as the Burmese by making them commit acts that they found to be wrong. These horrid acts inhumanity needed to be emphasized in order to wake the reader up. To do this he used powerful symbols biting irony and vivid imagery to allow the reader to be there and experience the shame of the situation. The person who was hanged probably didn’t do anything that involved a victim or he committed a crime that the colonists did all the time. Stealing and killing were things that the colonists needed to do to keep power in Burma. If colonists didn’t steal or punish the oppressed people there would be no political power for the colonists. The British reasoned away their hypocrisy by viewing the indigenous people as subhuman, but Orwell, in his depiction of a brutal hanging, would not allow that. He wanted to show the world that the British refused to treat the Burmese like humans and, instead, they treated them like animals.