He is still able to function and make decisions. When the prisoner leaps around the mud puddle, Orwell also comes to the realization that hanging him is "wrong".
While marching to the gallows, a dog interferes with the prisoner and their path, causing a few extra seconds of the prisoner's life to pass by. Because he often walks through the jail and observes the cells, he is subjectively involved with the "Hindu, puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes". Sympathetically, Orwell is involoved with capital punishment because while marching to the gallows he considers the fact that taking a "perfectly" well functioning human life is morally wrong. Due to his job, he is subjectively involved with this subject matter. After the prisoner was hung, the rest of the inmates were allowed to be fed breakfast. Because he was an officer in Burma, he was involoved at the jail and "set out for the gallows" with the wardens and the prisoner who was about to be hung. Throughout "A Hanging", Orwell lets his readers know that he is both subjectively and sympathetically involoved with capital punishment. He also shares how these hangings are most disagreeable and everyone knows it. One man says how troublesome it was to watch one of the men cling to his cell bars because he was scared of his pending death. At the end after the man was put to death he speaks to another and they share opinions on how the punishment is wrong.
#The hanging george orwell meaning full#
Orwell says, “I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy conscious man.” He realizes how the man is perfectly fine, suitable to live, he says in disapproval of it all, “Unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is full tide.” He mentally creates the connection with the man being put to death, he avoids a puddle like any other man would, he still thinks logically and all of his organs operate just as they should. Orwell shows a slight opposition to capital punishment he realizes how wrong it is throughout his passage. Capital punishment or execution is suitable to some but wrong and in human to others. In Orwell’s passage A Hanging he is obviously sympathetically involved in the subject matter of capital punishment.