The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling
One of Kipling's most Joseph Conrad-like stories is one of his early pieces, "The Man Who Could Be King," which Henry James called an "extraordinary tale" and which many critics have suggested is a typical Kipling social parable. about British imperialism in India. One critic, Walter Allen, calls it a "great and heroic story" but says Kipling evades the metaphysical problems implicit in the story. Although "The Man Who Would Be King" does not contain the philosophical generalizations of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899, serial; 1902, book), and is perhaps not such a subtle piece of Symbolist fiction, it is nevertheless a coherent piece of fabulous carefully constructed and thematically significant fiction.
The secret of the story is its tone; in fact, tone and style are everything in the work. The story focuses primarily on the crucial difference between a story told by a narrator who simply tells a story and a narrator who has lived the story he tells. The main first-person narrator is a journalist whose job it is to report on the deeds of "royal kings," while Peachey Carnehan, the internal narrator, is tasked with reporting the events of a "mock king." The main narrator (Kipling) tells the story of Peachey and Daniel Davrot, which, although fictional, is presented as if it were reality. The secondary narrator (Peachey) tells a story of Peachey and Davrot in which the two characters project themselves out of the real "as if" world of the story into the purely projected and fictional world of their adventure.
The tone of the story reflects the journalist-narrator's puzzled attitude toward the unlikely hero couple and his disbelief about their "idiotic adventure." "The beginning of it all," he says, is his encounter with Peachey on a railroad train, where he learns that the two are posing as correspondents for the newspaper of which the narrator is in fact a real correspondent. Roleplay is an important theme in the story because, in fact, Peachey and Davrot are always playing roles; they are essentially homeless and lazy with no real identity of their own. After the narrator returns to his office and becomes "respectable", Peachey and Davrot interrupt this respectability to tell him their fantastic plan and try to get from him a factual framework for the country where they hope to become kings. "We have come to you to see this country, read a book about it, and show us maps," says Carnehan. "We want you to tell us that we are stupid and show us your books." The mythical proportions of the two men, or rather their storybook proportions, because "mythical" is too serious a word here for grotesque adventurers, are indicated by the narrator's amused awareness that Davrot's red beard seems to fill half the room and Carnehan's massive shoulders. the other half.
The royal adventure begins with an additional role-play in which Davrot pretends to be a mad priest (a tongue-in-cheek image that he will actually fulfill later on) advancing with whirlpools (playful crosses) to sell as amulets to savages. The narrator is "respectable" again, focusing his attention on the obituaries of the royal kings of Europe until three years later, when Peachey returns, a "whining cripple," to confront the narrator with his story that he and Davrot have been crowned kings in Kafiristan, exclaiming, "You have been sitting here ever since, oh Lord!" Peachey's embedded story thus contrasts with the pedestrian story of the narrator's situation and is contrasted with it by its fantastic, story-like nature, in which Peachey and Davrot have set themselves up as fictional kings in a real country.
The narrative nature of the adventure is indicated first of all by Peachey's frequent confusion with Davrot and by his frequent third-person reference to himself: there was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that he was with ...
