Kim Analysis

We mentioned in our "In a Nutshell" section that not only was Rudyard Kipling born and raised in India (until he turned six and had to move to England against his will), but he also moved back to I...

The narrator of Kim is your average all-knowing third-person narrator: it reports on the feelings of the characters, and it seems to know pretty much everything about pretty much everybody. Of cour...

Everything about Kim screams adventure—from the stylized, exotic setting to the spy-heavy subject matter to the unpredictable and dramatic characters. What is more, this is a specific kind of adv...

Most of the story of Kim unfolds through dialogue. The novel features a big range of characters who are constantly talking to each other with their own personal, unique accents and modes of express...

In our section on "Tone," we mentioned that there is a good mixture of conversation and description in this book. We never go too long without two characters talking to each other, but we also neve...

We've got to say, it's a pretty straightforward, common choice to name your book after its main character. Charles Dickens did it with David Copperfield. Charlotte Brontë did it with Jane Eyre. Ri...

The most obvious quest in Kim is probably the Teshoo lama's search for his River of the Arrow (for more on this River, see our section under "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory"). Not only does he mention...

Kim still gets marketed as a children's book, which tells you one thing: it's easy to read. Even though this novel is over a hundred years old, most of the language is pretty modern, and the plot i...

This Kid Will Go Places (And We Mean That Quite Literally)The first chapter of Kim introduces us to, well, Kim—the probably-about-thirteen-year-old orphaned son of British parents who lives in La...

At the start of Kipling's Kim, we find this young guy who has a ton of imperialist potential: he belongs by blood to the ruling class dominating British India in the late nineteenth century, but he...

In Chapter One, we meet Kim and his complete, total opposite, the Teshoo lama; together, the unlikely duo hits the road and their whole roundabout journey begins. On the one hand, we have a kid nam...

We find it a little hard to imagine, since Kipling so strongly associates himself with the British Empire, but he actually spent some time living in the small American town of Brattleboro, Vermont,...

As a character, Kim is good at flattering and sucking up to people—men, women, young, and old—but we never see any kind of result from his flirtations. He never gets to first base; in fact, we...

Haroun al Raschid (1.5) The Arabian Nights (1.5) Stanislas Julien (1.54) lusus naturae (6.10) William Wordsworth, "The Excursion" (9.135) Shakespeare (12.115); King Lear (9...