The Man Who Would Be King

3. Presented by
Fatima Nida 10
Faria Ishfaq 08
Fatima Ikraam 09
Presented to
Sir Bilal Asmat Cheema

5. Born: 1865
Died: 1936 with Brain Hemorrhage
Place of Birth: Bombay
Father: British Teacher
Poems Published: 1886
Other Poems & Short Stories: 1888
1st Novel: 1890(The Light that failed)
Marriage: United State(1889)
Award: He became the 1st English man who get Nobel Prize

6. Narrator of the story is a newspaper
man in India.
His Friend Danial Dravot.
Succeeded in crossing the border.
Daniel is the Son of Alexander the
Great.
Chooses a bride for himself among the
young women of his Capital.

7. Adventure
British Imperialism
Dichotomy between two
different kind of reality

9. The basic stylistic technique of the story is Kipling’s structuring it
in a sort of parody of biblical history, complete with numerous
biblical allusions. The purpose of these allusions is to give
Peachey’s tale an externally imposed story framework, indeed
the most basic and dignified story framework in Western
culture. Once Dravot projects himself into the role of god as king
and thus assumes a position in the kingdom as the fulfillment of
prophecy and legend (although it must be remembered that
Peachey and Dravot are themselves the authors of their own
legend), he is bound to this particular role. It is only when he
wishes to escape the pre established role and marry an Indian
girl that his world falls apart. When he is bitten by his frightened
intended bride, the cry, “Neither God nor Devil, but a man,”
breaks the spell of the story world and propels Dravot and
Peachey out of the fictional reality of their own making and back
into reality again.

10. Peachey and Dravot are not so much two separate characters as
they are double figures; this is indicated not only by Peachey’s
references to himself as suffering Dravot’s fate, but also by the
fact that if Dravot is the ambiguous god-man, then it is Peachey
who must be crucified. Kipling finds it necessary to make this
character split in his story, for he must not only have his god-
man die but also have him resurrected. Thus, it is necessary to
have two characters in order to create the mythic.

12. One of Kipling’s most Joseph Conrad-like stories is one of his
earliest pieces, “The Man Who Would 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 he says that Kipling evades the
metaphysical issues implicit in the story. Although “The Man
Who Would Be King” does not contain the philosophic
generalizations of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, serial;
1902, book), and is perhaps not as subtle a piece of symbolist
fiction, it is nonetheless a coherent piece of fabular fiction
carefully constructed and thematically significant.
The secret of the story is its tone; indeed, tone and style are
everything in the work

13. . The story focuses primarily on the crucial difference between
a tale told by a narrator who merely reports a story and a
narrator who has lived the story he tells. The first-person,
primary narrator is a journalist whose job it is to report the
doings of “real kings,” whereas Peachey Carnehan, the inner
narrator, has as his task the reporting of the events of a
“pretend king.” The primary narrator (Kipling) tells the story of
Peachey and Daniel Davrot, which, although it is fiction, 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 “as-if” real world of
the story into the purely projected and fictional world of their
adventure.
The tone of the tale reflects the journalist-narrator’s bemused
attitude toward the pair of unlikely heroes and his incredulity
about their “idiotic adventure .” “The beginning of
everything,” he says, is his meeting with Peachey in a railway
train

14. where he learns that the two are posing as correspondents for
the newspaper for which the narrator is indeed a real
correspondent. Role-playing is an important motif in the story,
for indeed Peachey and Davrot are always playing roles; they are
essentially vagabonds and loafers 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 of their fantastic plan and to try to obtain from him a
factual framework for the country where they hope to become
kings. “We have come to you to know about this country, to
read a book about it, and to be shown maps,” says Carnehan.
“We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your
books.” The mythic proportions of the two men—or rather their
storybook proportions, for “mythic” is too serious a word here
for the grotesque adventurers—are indicated by the narrator’s
amused awareness that Davrot’s red beard seems to fill half the
room and Carnehan’s huge shoulders the other half.