Conflicts Between "shooting an Elephant" and "fourth of July"

In stories, “Fourth of July” and “Shooting an Elephant”, the main characters’ experience a conflict within themselves. Without these conflicts, it would be hard for the authors’ to support their narrative point.

In “Fourth of July”, it seemed as if the main character was never truly informed of the racism in the world, almost as if her parents were trying to hide it from her. “I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those hands had been just before. My mother never mentioned that black people were not allowed into railroad dining cars headed south in 1947,” (Lorde, para5). In this paragraph, Lorde’s mother is trying to put a curtain over her eyes, to make it seem as if they cannot go into dining cars because the food is not sanitary, vice the fact they were not allowed. In “Shooting and Elephant”, the beginning he starts off by saying, “I took my rifle, and old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in torrorem (as a warning),” (Orwell, para3). But by the end, he is trying to make reason with himself for why it is all right to kill the elephant. This represents the conflict he is having within himself.

In “Fourth of July”, the main character’s conflict seems to be with her parents throughout the whole story. As was stated in the first paragraph, it seemed as if her parents tried to cover up the fact that racism, “Was a new and crushing reality…”(Lorde, para7). Another instance where her parents tried to cover up racism was when her sisters’ senior trip was to Washington, and her teachers returned her deposit to her saying that the hotel they would stay at would not make her happy. Later to find out that Negroes were not allowed in the hotel they were staying in. And then when they went to the ice cream parlor, and