The Counter-Discourse of Colonialism in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Orwell's Shooting an Elephant

In the course of history, we see the colonizers tyrannizing the colonized in almost every mild and intense mode of action. But what if the colonizers get entrapped by their own system? The prevalent discourse of colonization is obvious in numerous writings of both the white and the black world. But very few could truly exhibit the other truth i.e., the counterdiscourse of it, which if not equally, but went quite abreast with the discourse. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and George Orwell's semi-autobiographical essay Shooting an Elephant served as the critique of the discourse and showed that not only the colonized but the colonizers too, became a prey to its own schema. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Annette and Antoinette, being the wife and the daughter of an ex-plantation owner respectively, went through a number of trauma and died at the end. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell, being a white police inspector, becomes a victim of the power-politics game. My paper aims at analyzing those characters who fall in the pitfalls of colonization and get stuck in it badly and wants to get out of it. Within the context of this paper the story of the 'Subalterns' will be examined from a post-colonialist perspective through the representation of several characters and it would be apparent how their hybridized state leads them to the state of nihilism.