Blog Post #2 Topic 1

           “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell both have people that feel superior than other characters in the story but in different aspects. In “Shooting an Elephant” the Englishmen spoke about the Burmese people like if they were below him and not humans. The native people of Burma didn’t have the same upbringing as the English so the English acted as if they were better or smarter people. “A Rose for Emily” was during a time period where slaves were already “free” but just worked as servants. The people in the story barely acknowledged Emily’s servant and kind of acted as if he was not there even though he probably knew the most details of Emily’s actions. The stories had a superiority complex to different groups of people but did not treat those oppressed groups the same way when compared to each other.  

            In “A Rose for Emily,” many questions the town had about Emily could have been potentially answered just by treating the servant like any other person. Instead, the people in the town didn’t even feel the need to interact with him. For example, when the narrator says, “The negro met the first of the ladies at the front door… and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again,” we see that nobody even felt the need to talk to the servant. The only time they really noticed him is when Emily died and he decided to leave the house. Doing something like this only would make sense in centuries from the past. Now everyone gets questioned by incoming people and police. Since this was written so long ago, we see how different the process is and we can even see the difference from something like this in America and something like this in a foreign country like Burma at around the same time. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the Englishmen did acknowledge the Burmese but barely as actual people. When the narrator said, “… the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed…” In this story, the narrator talks about the natives like they were pests. Coolies and Burmese people were dispensable. If an Englishmen had been killed by the elephant the story would have been completely different not only because they could have potentially been friends but because anyone other than an Englishmen meant nothing to the narrator. In the present century, I hope this dynamic would be different and all people would be mourned for. Neither stories treated non-white people ethically and right and the time period they were both written in contributes as to why. In both stories, we get the sense of superiority by the narrators over the non-white people.