I often wonder how those who suffer from a serious disease overcome it. A disease of the body is mostly in a doctor's hand, who takes every possible means to cure the patient with proper medication or surgery; thus, all one can do is to trust his doctor and pray to God. However, a remedy for a mental trauma seems to require a much deeper and more painful process since it is all up to oneself, not a doctor, whether one shall survive or die. Both Orwell and Baldwin suffer from intolerable trauma caused by hatred from others. Their essays, "Shooting an Elephant" and "Notes of a Native Son", depict how they go through their mental traumas with confusion, denial, rage, surrender, acceptance, and finally find a way to conquer it. Their essays are all about the battle for awareness, awareness of reality. They clearly remind us that for a mental trauma all you can depend on is yourself because you are the one who must face the reality, fight with it, struggle with it, and search for a remedy to overcome it.
In a prognostic symptom stage, a person is so naive and careless that he does not know exactly what is going on around him, even though he sees enough symptoms to make him confused, worried, and at a loss. Orwell is aware that he hates imperialism, for on seeing how Burmese prisoners are brutally punished by their oppressors, the British, he tells us of the "wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos." Such a cruel treatment of the Burmese makes Orwell depressed with an enormous sense of guilt since he is regarded as a part of the tyranny. However, he is too "young and ill- educated" to understand how imperialism really works and "can get nothing into perspective." Baldwin is constantly warned by his father's abnormal bitterness against whites, yet it is all beyond young Baldwin's comprehension what lays beneath the bitterness since he has not yet faced that reality. When a white school teacher suggested taking him to the theater, Baldwin suspected intuitively that "the color of this woman's skin would carry the day for me." On the other hand, despite the white teacher's generous help with the problems his family has had and her close association with his family for several years, his father's bitterness against whites was so strong that he never trusted her. Baldwin is too innocent to accept his father's warning about whites: "my white friends in high school were not really my friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible." Baldwin wants to believe his own perception and rejects his father's warnings with a feeling of disdain toward his father. Both men are puzzled and anxious with their situation, but do not take it as seriously as they do later on.
However, they soon begin to realize what is happening around them in a denial stage. Orwell notices that when he plays football with the Burmese, he becomes a target of "hideous laughter" because he gets tripped by them. Yet he keeps playing until "it happens more than once." It is the same with Baldwin. He keeps going to a restaurant where no food is served to him three times until he is finally told that "Negroes are not served there." However, he still goes back to the same place because he does not want to accept the reality.
Despite their trying to deny the reality, both men finally come to face the reality in a diagnosis stage. Just like when a doctor tells you what you have been afraid of knowing, both men are attacked by mixed feelings like shock, panic, despair, helplessness, and finally rage against their oppressors which occurred as the result of realizing their situation. Orwell realizes that he is stuck between his hatred of the empire and his rage against the Burmese. Orwell describes his dilemma: "with one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny...with another part I thought that the greatest joy would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." Baldwin experiences "Jim Crow" that his father tries to warn him about. Through many injustices he has gone through, such as no food served to him at many places just because he is a black, he sees the same bitterness that his father holds is building up inside himself. When his rage against the injustice reaches the intolerable point, he almost commits the murder of a white waitress who "repeats the formula: ... we don't serve Negroes here."
Both men are now completely aware of the reality that they receive injustice for no good reason. At the same time, they are aware that they are at risk of destroying themselves by the rage they are holding and need to change the focus from rage to others to protection of themselves. Thus, they eventually set aside their resentment in a surgery stage. They decide to surrender themselves to the situation, and take a treatment to protect themselves. As though they realize that cancer cells have spread all over their body, both men come to realize that there is no other way to survive but to give in and try to protect themselves. Orwell does not wish to shoot the elephant but he does after all because he wants to protect himself from ''looking like a fool.'' Orwell suddenly realizes that he has no other choices but to shoot the elephant because it is what the crowd expects him to do. Orwell feels ''their two thousand wills pressing him forward, irresistibly.'' The only fear Orwell has is not getting killed by the elephant but getting laughed at by the Burmese. He must do anything to avoid looking like a fool: "my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at." Baldwin realizes that what matters is not hatred, which can destroy himself, but his own life. When his hatred against whites and injustice is quietly built up inside of himself and finally reaches an intolerable point, Baldwin becomes out of control, loses his identity, and almost commits the murder. When he regains sanity, he realizes: "my life, my real life, was in danger and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart."
After the reluctant "surgery" that they have undergone, both men struggle to try to accept things as they are and soothe themselves in a healing stage. Orwell tries to justify killing the elephant against his will on some pretext or other like "its owner fails to control the elephant" or "the elephant killed a coolie." Baldwin comes to see the necessity of holding the idea of "acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are." They realize that they must get over what has happened to them and go forward for their own good. Orwell realizes that he should quit his job and get out of Burma where he must act not as he likes but as others expect him to. Baldwin realizes that he must fight injustice inside the heart so that hatred and despair will not destroy himself like they did to his father.
Both "Shooting an Elephant" and "Note of a Native Son" are so intense and compelling that the reader is naturally drawn into what Orwell and Baldwin are going through in their life. Their deep insight into their self- consciousness and awareness is extraordinary and helps us perceive what they are passing through in each psychological phase. We share their pain, struggle, despair, all of their emotions, with clenching of our hands, until the time comes when they finally reach their self-discovery. Orwell kills an elephant against his will only because he wants to avoid looking like a fool. On the surface, he acts like a dignified sahib who is strong-willed and has no fear of anything. However, in reality, he does not even have strength to follow his own will and just tries to follow what the Burmese expect of him with fear and trembling. He discovers that he is "an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind" and the power he holds in Burma is just a false image. Baldwin clearly tells us what he has discovered: "...this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; ... Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law." It might take a long time and great strength to reach such a discovery. However, what both men have finally discovered through their bitter experience reminds us of the importance of probing our consciousness to the bottom and ascertaining what truly matters because if we just give ourselves to circumstance, without knowing what matters and what doesn't, we may be unconsciously led on a path of self- destruction.
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