Okay, having reread the book, I disagree. The stories are too well-structured, building on each other incident by incident, with the final story tying together elements from most (though admittedly not all) of them. And it's in that story that Beetle* as the first person narrator explicitly claims that all that social engineering that Stalky did throughout the stories was the perfect training ground for the social engineering he did to get his men out of the Hills. Key here is story where the chaplain gets the trio to use their skills for good, as part of training them up into "civilizers," and the story in Many Inventions that Beetle cross-references, "A Conference of the Powers," where he's the unnamed narrator reporting someone else's story, as so many of Kipling's unnamed first-person narrators -- in this case told by some subalterns fresh home on leave to a senior novelist, and opening his eyes to the ways of imperialism as it is practiced on the ground.
That Beetle claims in the final line that he wrote all this down by way of proving his argument does make it look like a rationalization after the fact. But the book is too well-structured, too deliberate, for it to really be tacked on.
My impression is, actually, that the revenge fantasies were put in there on by way of getting boys to read the stories and thereby drink in his lesson. But I have little by way of evidence for that. And, indeed, the omniscient narrator's apparent relish for that tediously long torture scene suggests there's at least some author appeal involved.
* Whose biography, talents, age, and appearance is suspiciously similar to Kipling's own.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-08-13 03:06 pm (UTC)That Beetle claims in the final line that he wrote all this down by way of proving his argument does make it look like a rationalization after the fact. But the book is too well-structured, too deliberate, for it to really be tacked on.
My impression is, actually, that the revenge fantasies were put in there on by way of getting boys to read the stories and thereby drink in his lesson. But I have little by way of evidence for that. And, indeed, the omniscient narrator's apparent relish for that tediously long torture scene suggests there's at least some author appeal involved.
* Whose biography, talents, age, and appearance is suspiciously similar to Kipling's own.
---L.