..The narrator tells the story in first-person point of view. He blames British tyranny and Burmese reaction to it for his troubles, as the following paragraph indicates:
I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
.......The narrator also asserts that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” But is he simply making excuses for his own shortcomings? After all, he could refuse to shoot the elephant and walk away. True, he would lose face. But he would retain his honor; his conscience would remain clear. However, under pressure to kill the beast, he cannot muster the courage to oppose the will of crowd. So he decides to shoot the elephant (even though he admits that he is a “poor shot with a rifle”). But that decision is not his only mistake. He also errs when he fails to seek advice—from someone in the crowd, from the sub-inspector, or from the owner of the elephant gun—on where to direct his shot. After firing the first shot at its skull in front of an ear, he wounds but does not kill the elephant. He then fires two more cartridges at the same spot. But the elephant, though down, refuses to die. The narrator then makes a bloody mess of things. First, he fires the last two elephant-gun cartridges into the body of the elephant in hopes of hitting the heart. When that strategy fails, he fires several rounds from his Winchester into the elephant's mouth and body. The elephant remains alive, and the narrator can do nothing but walk away. The elephant lies in agony for another half-hour before dying.
.......One may conclude that, yes, the British government is condemnable for its subjugation of the people of Burma. One may also conclude that individual British overseers are reprehensible for allowing government policy to run roughshod over their consciences.