George Orwell
A Hanging
!
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the
high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted
with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare
within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were
squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men,
due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a
shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting mustache, absurdly too big for his body,
rather like the mustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and
getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the
others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his
arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a
careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men
handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting,
yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant
barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily
prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey
toothbrush mustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,’ he said irritably. ‘The man
ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?’
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black
hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall
proceed.’
‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.’
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles
at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at
once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly,
when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful
thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came
bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with
glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah.
For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the
prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at
the dog.
‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!’
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gamboled
just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a
handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its
yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously,
as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed
to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the
dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching
in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of
the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of
hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in
spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the
path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the
unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was
alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin
renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would
still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a
second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered,
foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together,
seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one
of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown
with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and
above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in
the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch
as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever,
half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman
climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows.
And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high,
reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but
steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The
hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down
over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again:
‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The
steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!’ never faltering for an
instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick;
perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number — fifty, perhaps, or a
hundred. Everyone had changed color. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of
the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his
cries — each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly,
get it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion
with his stick. ‘Chalo!’ he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was
twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when
it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood
among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s
body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a
stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly.
‘He’s all right,’ said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep
breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Eight
minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.’
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having
misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells
with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command
of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each
man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it
seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that
the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone
began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing
smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been
dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do
you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European
style.’
Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well, sir, all hass passed off
with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so — oah, no! I
have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs
to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!’
‘Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,’ said the superintendent.
‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss
cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge
him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain
and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!’
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You’d better all come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I’ve got
a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.’
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. ‘Pulling at his legs!’ exclaimed
a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that
moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and
European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
1931
T H E E N D
!
Please answer the following questions in complete sentences on a separate piece of paper: !
1. Why does Orwell choose to describe the condemned prisoners’ cells as looking “like animal cages”
and the handling of the prisoner as “like men handing a fish?”
2. Why was the narrator so interested in the fact that the prisoner side-stepped a puddle on his way to
the gallows (place of hanging)?
3. The superintendent states “For God’s sake, hurry up Francis. The man ought to have been dead by
this time.” What does that tell you about the superintendent?
4. Orwell describes the prisoner’s bodily functions in detail (nail growth, stomach digestion etc.). Why
does he do this? What point is he trying to make?
5. Why do you think Orwell chose to leave out the reason why the prisoner was being executed?
Rubric for Narrative Essay
Rubric
Categories
Excellent (25 each)
Good (22 points each)
Average (19 points each)
Needs Improvement
(17 points each)
Not present or lacks clarity (0-13 points each)
Word Count/ Paragraphs
475-500 words. Three-Four paragraphs are used: Introduction, 1-2 body paragraphs and conclusion.
400-474 words. Three-four paragraphs are used: Introduction, 1-2 body paragraphs and conclusion.
350-399. Less than three or more than four paragraphs are used: Introduction, 2 body paragraphs and conclusion.
300-349. An attempt was made to have a full paragraph, but it may only have one body paragraph or be missing the introduction or conclusion.
Over 500 word or under 300 words. The paragraphs lack organization
Content / Sources
The writer has clearly researched the topic of the essay and has included at least three (3) quotations from the stories and one outside source using proper APA formatting.
The writer has provided some research on the topic of the essay and has included at least three (3) sources from the stories but no outside source. An attempt to use APA was made.
The writer has provided some research on the topic of the essay and has included at least two quotes from the stories An attempt to use APA formatting was made.
The writer used at least two quotes from the stories, but they may not fully support the points. No attempt to use APA is present.
The content is lacking in detail. If any source is provided, it is from an unreliable or invalid source. There is an attempt to use a quote from the story, but it is not cited properly.
Interest/Topic
The paper is interesting and uses language to keep the reader’s attention. The topic is skillfully discussed.
The paper is somewhat interesting and keeps the reader’s attention for the majority of the paper. The topic is present in the paper.
The paper is average in terms of interest. The language is simplistic. It is difficult to tell if the reader has addressed the topic.
There is a lack of effort in terms of interest. The paper may repeat information and/or be quite simplistic in nature. The topic is either incorrect in part or completely ignored.
The paper is not interesting and may or may not be off topic.
Structure/Grammar
There are no errors in the structure or grammar in the essay. The language use is sophisticated, and there is a variety of sentence structure. APA formatting is used skillfully.
There may be one or two minor errors in the essay. APA is used correctly.
There are various issues with grammar/structure, and the majority are simple sentences. An attempt is made to use APA formatting.
There is little to no attempt to use APA formatting, and the structure and grammar issues make reading the essay difficult.
Most areas are difficult to read. Little attention paid to grammar & structure. APA formatting is not used.
TOPICS FOR NARRATIVE ESSAY
Directions: Choose one of the topics below and create a 3-4 paragraph outline (and later essay) on the topic. Make sure to review the rubric to understand the requirements. In particular, pay attention to the use of quotes and outside sources in the essay.
1.
Discuss the underlying meaning of A Hanging by George Orwell. What do you believe was the author’s purpose in writing this story.