Orwell's essay is written primarily to persuade its audience that imperialism is a cruel system which controls those who are in charge as much as it does the native people oppressed by it.
We know that this is a persuasive rather than an informative essay because it appeals primarily to our emotions (pathos) rather than our intellect or logic (logos). Rather than using the dispassionate, objective language of a person communicating facts and statistics (he provides no statistics), Orwell instead uses heated, emotional language. For example, speaking of the Buddhist monks in Burma who jeer at and passively aggress against the imperial police, Orwell's narrator states:
I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.
This is not the language of logic but the language of intense subjective feeling, which is what Orwell explores in this essay. In fact, in the very next line, the narrator mentions the word "feelings:"
Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
Orwell uses pathos to examine the irrational "logic" of imperialism and the corrosive effect it has on the ruling class.
The main story, the shooting of the elephant, is meant to elicit an emotional response. Orwell uses language that emphasizes the cruelty of killing the elephant, who, at the point his narrator arrives, is harmless. He wants his audience to feel repelled and revolted by the waste and suffering that this killing, meant only to save face, causes. He writes:
At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body ...
This is language meant to twist the heart strings, using description to cause us to feel all the pain of the elephant's slow death. In addition, more abstract words like "desperate" and "agony" are words written to convey emotion.
Orwell was writing to an audience that already knew imperialism oppressed a conquered population: he wanted to emphasize in an emotionally powerful way the cruelty and tyranny it also imposed on the overlords, who were forced to violate their consciences to uphold an irrational system.
Orwell's autobiographical writings are, at the very least, embellished and rearranged considerably for effect. The incident described in "Shooting an Elephant" may not have happened at all and, if it did, it may not have happened to Orwell himself.
Orwell spent five years in the Burmese Imperial police force. When he left, he had been sickened by seeing what he called "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters" but he did not yet consider himself a political writer. His first novel, published in 1934, was set in Burma and has as its background the tyranny of the British Empire, but it is far more concerned with aesthetics than politics.
Two years later, when Orwell came to write "Shooting an Elephant", his political views had matured somewhat and the essay makes various caustic points about the position of the white man in the East. These are arguably all the more persuasive for the lack of obvious rhetoric, Orwell's famous plain, declarative style of prose.
There is no doubt that "Shooting an Elephant" is a persuasive essay and it remains persuasive even if one treats it as a short story. The absurdity and redundancy of the central event make it difficult to disagree with Orwell's scathing assessment of the political situation which causes it. However, the essay, or story, remains informative. Even if Orwell did not shoot an elephant, he did serve in the Burmese Imperial police for five years and his minute observations are evident throughout the piece. He certainly intended to inform his audience as well as to persuade them. Indeed, he thought that a well-informed audience would be most readily persuaded of the truth.
While Orwell did spend some time in Burma as a servant of the empire that he was becoming increasingly ambivalent about, the essay "Shooting an Elephant" is not entirely autobiographical, and there is no suggestion that the anecdote it contains has any basis in fact.
In writing it, his intention is not to tell a true story so much as to tell a persuasive story and bring his protagonist to a point that justifies Orwell's key argument: a point at which "as I stood there with the rifle in my hands . . . I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
This section is separated from the matter-of-fact narrative of the rest of the essay, as the protagonist explains that he was only "an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind." As far as Orwell is concerned, the purpose of the essay is to illustrate how ludicrous the idea is that servants of the empire are at all dignified or truly in charge:
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.
Generally, Orwell expected his audience to agree with his points: he does not go to any great lengths to explain himself, choosing to let the illustrations provided speak for themselves. The essay was first published in the extremely left-wing periodical New Writing, which was notorious for its commitment to anti-Fascism and general disillusionment with the empire. Orwell's sparseness guides the audience to interpret his comments as he states them. The paragraph in which he sets out the "moral" of the story assists them in this interpretation, and Orwell's conversational tone suggests that, for this audience, the point of his argument should really go without saying and certainly does not require any significant elaboration or persuasive language. So, while Orwell's writing is more to persuade than to inform, it lacks the obvious markers of some persuasive texts, relying instead upon the power of its imagery and storytelling.
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