A Hanging

“A Hanging” is initially marked by the specificity and unfamiliarity of its remote setting, but the narrator’s incursions broaden the text into an explicit and more universal reflection on the wrongness of capital punishment.

Discussions of the death penalty often focus on the fittingness of the punishment to the crime, adopting or rejecting common arguments that tie execution to particularly violent acts. George Orwell precludes any such reflections in this story by providing no information as to why the prisoner was condemned. His focus is exclusively on the horror of deliberately curtailing any human life—“the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide” (Paragraph 10). He emphasizes the irrepressible life force of the prisoner, who instinctively acts to remain clean and preserve his dignity even when his death is just minutes away.

The members of the execution party implicitly justify their actions by creating a barrier between themselves and the prisoner. The dog’s behavior betrays the artificiality of these distinctions, prompting the narrator to recognize his unity with the condemned man:

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 (Paragraph 10).