The story is told in two senses: the past and the present. What effect does this have on its telling?

The past gives us a sense of the imperialist mentality as well as Orwell's struggleds to reconcile both his job and his identity. Orwell knows he is, in the end, part of a foreign occupier. Orwell in the present shows his ambivelence to being in Burma and being the only man with a gun.