Kipling’s Triumph: The Double Boyhood of Kimball O’Hara

Abstract

In the powerful, though erratic, arc of Kipling’s climb to greatness during the 1890s, Stalky has the look of a jeu d’esprit, an escape from the highly personal, even confessional writing he was engaged in — this despite the serious pretensions of the schoolboy stories that we have explored. Missing from Stalky was Kipling’s most dynamic, life-giving theme: the divided self. It was to this fruitful obsession he returned in Kim. Trilling observes that “Kim, like The Jungle Books, is full of wonderful fathers”,¹ yet, paradoxically, too many fathers are not enough. More than any of Kipling’s other boys’ books — perhaps more than anything else in Kipling’s entire oeuvre — Kim concerns itself with the search for an identity. As we have noted, this quest is central to the adolescent experience in Kipling’s fiction. An identity problem, a divided mind of some sort, has been discernible in each of the Kipling heroes we have examined thus far, with the sole exception of Stalky. In Soldiers, where the protagonists are caught up, at least superficially, in the traditional clash between civilian and military ethoses, the conflict is at its lowest intensity. In the Mowgli stories, where the boy’s divided loyalties are the dominant source of emotional tension, the identity crisis is particularly acute.