From 1922 to 1927, journalist and novelist George Orwell served in Burma (now the Union of Myanmar) as a member of the Indian Imperial Police. Out of that experience (though it's unlikely that Orwell ever observed a hanging firsthand) came the narrative essay "A Hanging." In the following two paragraphs, which appear midway through "A Hanging," the narrator shifts his point of view from that of a disinterested observer to one who identifies intimately with the prisoner. In classical terms, this sort of identification is known as ethopoeia.
from "A Hanging" (1931)
by George Orwell
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 gray 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.
"A Hanging" by George Orwell was first published in Adelphi, August 1931. In was reprinted in 1950 in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (UK edition, Secker and Warburg; US edition, Harcourt Brace & Co.).
