Kim by Rudyard Kipling

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“Kim” Formal Commentary Hope Lehman Rudyard Kipling wrote “Kim” displaying his own imperialist beliefs. During this time “Kim” embodied the attitude Kipling observed between India and its British rule in the early 20th century. This book displays Kipling’s belief that Britain had a right to ‘own’ India and he never even thought otherwise. The main character Kim was born into this view that Britain owned India and grew up in this manner so naturally had no reason to question this way of life. Though it is hard to excuse Kipling’s attitude towards this decade in history, we cannot ignore the historical fact in which this book possesses. This book is told with the main character going on a journey as one of the lama’s guides. Kim is used as a symbol of the Eastern and Western spheres of influence. Every character in this book plays a role. The lama is of the most extreme case of Eastern thinking, including the idea of finding enlightenment and thinking against logic while the soldiers playing the role of the logical western thinkers. An internal conflict that the book navigates itself around is who Kim is as a person. Kim is seeking to find his place in the country in which he was born, while at the same time struggling to find, or create, an identity for him. By birth Kim is a white, Irish boy, Kimball O'Hara, whose father was a soldier in an Irish regiment. But, as we see in Chapter 1, he has grown up as an orphan on the streets of Lahore, 'a poor white of the very poorest', looked after by a half-cast woman, 'she smoked opium and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait'. With his skin 'burned black as any native' he looks and lives like a low-caste Hindu street-urchin, unable to read or write, or speak English very well, and known to all as 'Little Friend of all the
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