THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
by Rudyard Kipling, 1888

Rudyard Kipling achieved an artistic coherence in his short stories that he never attained in his longer episodic fiction. "The Man Who Would Be King," collected in Under the Deodars in 1888, is one of his best early stories, illustrating the skill with which he transformed apparently simple tales into multileveled fictions. Early readers like Henry James and Edmund Gosse admired his portraits of ordinary soldiers, whom he depicted with keen psychological insight. These early stories offer strikingly ironic pictures of British India and of the cultural divisions between the colonial rulers and their subjects.

"The Man Who Would be King" works on different levels, combining a tale of adventure with a realistic frame story. The sophisticated and skeptical narrator provides a frame of reference for the reader by knitting together the exotic and the familiar. By presenting divergent accounts of the exotic East, that of the jaded newspaper reporter and that of the romanticists Dravot and Carnehan, Kipling disturbs conventional attitudes toward colonial India. His blend of realism and fable is powerfully illustrated in the story's finale when the crucified Peachy displays Dravot's head, its withered, blind-eyed grimace symbolizing the blindness that destroyed the would-be king. Kipling's account of the red-bearded man's last public appearance is realistic whether we accept Peachy's story or challenge it as a product of his hallucinated state.

Early in the story Kipling gives a vivid account of the newspaper office where the narrator works, detailing the frantic rush to meet deadlines and the hours of enervating boredom, the demands by strange ladies to have visiting cards printed, and the repeated appeals for work from "every dissolute ruffian" who passes by. The precision with which the dreary place is described establishes the narrator's claim to be an accurate reporter not only of items in his paper but also of the character and appearance of Dravot and Carnehan. These two men represent a breed who have come to India to look for plunder but who have found to their disappointment that it is no longer possible to make a fortune in the tame lands under British rule.

"We are going away to be kings," says Peachy to the reporter during his first visit, meaning that they are escaping from colonial mediocrity. The narrator concedes that they are too big for the cramped room where he performs his editorial duties. He cannot resist a sneaking admiration for these tricksters, however, for they are both naive and endlessly resourceful, like the more genteel marauders who created the empire in times gone by. Drawing a parallel between past and present adventurers—Dravot dreams of ceding conquered territories to Queen Victoria and being knighted for his services—Kipling suggests that the empire is still mainly concerned with loot. Dravot and Carnehan represent the empire's underlying rapacity, the empire as it was before it was domesticated and turned into a government. They have made a contract, which expresses their English love of legal formalities regardless of how lawless the actual business involved may be. In this they parody the colonialist system of plundering subject states under the guise of normal commerce. Theirs is a cautionary tale about the dangers that await empire builders, and Kipling's blend of biblical language and racy speech provides an effective medium for that warning.

Carnehan's narrative is tinged throughout by our awareness of the storyteller's crippled state. The fable of a man who allows himself to be worshiped as a god suggests Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," written 10 years later, which also describes a colonial-ist who is lured to his death by dreams of unlimited power. Like Conrad's story, Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" reveals the underlying psychology of imperialism, especially the fall into megalomania, in ways the author himself may not have intended. Critics of the stories, Jeffrey Meyers, for example, have pointed out "the difference between their intended and actual effect. [Kipling's] art is sometimes in conflict with his thought." The narrator partly undermines the theme of "The Man Who Would be King" by romanticizing the two adventurers, and he fails to distance himself from the racist attitudes that underlie their enterprise. Nevertheless, the tale itself exposes the madness of claims to racial mastery. Dravot's belief in English superiority leads him to play god and sustains him until his subjects discover, as they must, that he is only human. Even Dravot's absurd attempt to narrow the racial gap by claiming the indigenous people as England's lost tribes rests on racism and further undermines his hold on reality. He is seduced by a vision of unlimited possibilities. "I won't make a nation," he says, "I'll make an Empire."

Dravot is corrupted by power, lust, and money. This petty adventurer who falls to his death from a precarious rope bridge illustrates the weaknesses of the colonial system, though the cynical narrator, distrusting large claims, keeps the focus on Dravot and Carnehan's personal tragedy. Still, Kipling's ironic vision admits the more universal reading. His art, as Henry James said, is "so mixed and various and cynical and, in certain lights, so contradictory of itself." Dravot's story, moreover, evokes Kipling's patriotic poem "Recessional." While celebrating the British Empire, "Recessional" warns that human empires melt away, destroyed by their power-mad rulers. "The Man Who Would be King" implicitly challenges English pride of conquest. At the end of the story, with the disappearance of Dravot's withered head, not a shred of evidence remains that his "kingdom" ever existed.

Kipling's naturalistic frame and romantic adventure blend into a successful hybrid form halfway between the popular tale and the modern short story. The use of an ironic narrator and the Christian and Masonic echoes add their special resonances. "The Man Who Would Be King" forms a complex whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

—Herbert Marder