Rudyard Kipling Analysis

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1. Introduction Kipling’s literary heritage is rather vast, among other works, he wrote more than 250 short stories (Malcolm 114). Some of the stories are related by the shared genre (Kipling’s historical stories “The Church that Was in Antioch” and “The Eye of the Allah”), some by the setting (for instance, such Indian stories as “The Man Who Would Be King” and “The Head of the District”) and some by the characters (the stories picturing three soldiers, for example, “Black Jack” and “The God from the Machine”). Yet, there exist also stories, whose similarity is evident on several levels; for example, “Mary Postgate” and “The Gardener” share not only the genre, but also the setting, the type of the protagonists and the flair/air/atmosphere…show more content…
Short Stories Rudyard Kipling, whose peak of popularity fell on the 1890s (Williams 266), is one of the classical British writers who “dedicated himself to the short story” and wrote, as already mentioned, quite a number of them (Malcolm 114). Hence, it is not a surprise that he covered a variety of topics and applied/used different settings and genres. Significantly, some part of his late stories feature women as their protagonists (Kemp 112); “The Gardener” and “Mary Postgate” are no exceptions. However different and numerous these stories/tales are, literary scholars and critics have found several features and characteristics that are inherent to all of them. In this paper, four such peculiarities have been singled out. First, notwithstanding the length and the genre of the short story, there is usually a single peripeteiac moment in each story (Hanson 53). Second, Crook claims that Kipling’s writing tends to be very detailed and, for this reason, Kipling himself has been sometimes compared to Chaucer, meaning that Kipling is, like the other author, “a teller of tales who delights in detail and a diversity of creatures” (111). Third, according to Malcolm, “there is a critical consensus that Kipling’s narrators are not fully reliable”. Fourth, the narrations themselves have a tendency to be very obscure (Malcolm…show more content…
The former story was written and published in 1915 (Page Companion 106) before Kipling’s private tragedy: his son died in the battle of Loos a few weeks after the story’s publication (Williams 268). The latter was written in 1925 and published soon afterwards, in the spring of 1926 (Page Companion 89) and, according to Bauer, is often regarded a memorial to his son
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