The British police officer does not want to shoot the elephant but feels compelled to remain resolute and callous in front of the Burmese natives, which is why he ends up killing the elephant against his will. As an agent and representative of the British Empire, the officer is forced to act composed, resolute, and authoritative at all times. As the officer searches for the elephant throughout the village, a crowd begins to follow him and anticipates him shooting the beast. When the British officer discovers the elephant, it is peacefully grazing and no longer a threat. However, a massive crowd has formed behind him, and the officer experiences immense peer pressure to shoot the elephant. He then experiences an epiphany, and Orwell writes,
I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it (8).
The officer then raises his gun and shoots the harmless elephant against his will to "impress" the natives and live up to his status as a representative of the British Empire. The British officer also does not want to look like a fool in front of the Burmese natives and becomes a victim of the British tyranny he represents.
At first, the narrator in this story states that he has no intention of killing the elephant. He picks up his gun, which is really too small to shoot an elephant with, as an act of good faith and in an attempt to calm the Burmese. When he sees the man who has been killed by the elephant, the skin stripped from his back, he seems to change his mind somewhat. He sends an orderly to borrow an elephant rifle, clearly thinking at this juncture that he may need to "defend [him]self if necessary." However, at the point of seeing the elephant, he is filled with "perfect certainty" that he should not shoot him.
What changes his mind fully is the sight of the crowd around him. This crowd is "immense," thousands of people all watching the narrator as if he is about to perform a trick. He knows he is disliked by them, but that for now he has the power to do something entertaining for him—they "expect" him to shoot the elephant, and therefore he realizes that he has to do it. He recognizes that the crowd is, while unarmed, much bigger than he is, and ultimately he is their puppet after all. He, supposedly the white "sahib," is actually beholden to the will of the people he is supposedly ruling.
The narrator shot the elephant "solely to avoid looking a fool." After the elephant storms through the bazaar and kills a man, it calms down fairly quickly, and when the narrator, a British colonial policeman (a position Orwell himself held for a time) encounters the beast, it is peacefully munching grass. Still, the Burmese crowd demands the death of the elephant, and expects the narrator to do it. He does not want to, but he really has no choice. In the British Empire, he says, "a white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened." He must kill the animal to maintain appearances for the crowd. Orwell comments on the bitter irony of the situation, one which demonstrates the extent to which imperialism corrupts Great Britain: the crowd, who identify the British with violence and tyrannical behavior, expect the narrator to behave in that way. In this case, that means killing the elephant in order to live up to the expectations of the crowd. Afterwards, his supervisors approve his decision and say he did the right thing. Doing the "right thing" from the empire's standpoint requires people to act contrary to their own sense of right.
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