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ACTIVITY 1.18 continued
11 As students are reading and annotating, check that they discover the significant event that occurs in Chunk 6.
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SCAFFOLDING THE TEXT-DEPENDENT QUESTIONS
9. Key Ideas and Details (RI.11–12.1) What miscalculation does the narrator make as
he prepares to shoot the elephant? How does his error affect what happens next? In paragraph 10, what knowledge guides the narrator in his actions? In what way is that knowledge faulty? What is the direct result of his faulty knowledge?
10. Craft and Structure (RI.11–12.6) Reread Chunk 6 and mark the text for details describing the elephant’s collapse. What do these details reveal about the writer’s attitude? What specific details does the narrator use to describe each step in the animal’s reactions? What feelings do the words evoke?
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ACTIVITY 1.18
continued
Reading with a Cultural Criticism Lens
My Notes
10 There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and
lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theater curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not know then that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from earhole to earhole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his earhole; actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
Chunk 6
11 When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick—one never does
when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered.
An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly erect, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for
him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly toward me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
12 I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pink throat.
I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He
was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
Chunk 7
13 In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took
him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs8 and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by afternoon.
8 dahs: bowls
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.