When I was assigned to read Rudyard Kipling's
Kim, I was warned about its difficulty. Now that I have started to read
Kim I can understand what was meant by "difficult". So far I have yet to understand the pattern of Kipling's writing. It is not what I am used to but it definitely does not make it bad.
I am intrigued by the story because it brings an unfamiliar culture to light for me. Kim is a young boy who lost his father and was taken in by a woman. He runs in a beggars circle and seems to understand his status as well as others statuses around him. It is very early in the novel where we see hierarchal statuses brought up. In the start of chapter one we are introduced to the protagonist as "...white-a poor white of the very poorest" (Pg.53). His name was Kim and his father who was a member of the freemason's who died from what seems to be an overdose. We immediately see the un-stability of Kim's life. The woman who was responsible for Kim after his father's death, wrapped his papers and birth certificate into parchment paper and placed it around his neck. It is interesting to me that she would do that because it seems as though she did not want to take full responsibility for him; those papers state that he is not fully her child/responsibility. At the start of the book I immediately began to see Kim as a boy with dirty feet and raggedy clothes, but as I continued to read he seemed less raggedy and more sophisticated, not really sure why. I think it may be because of his knowledge of the culture, religion and hierarchal statuses.
As I read Kim I could not help but relate this novel to a little book called The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. Finn and Kim have a few things in common (other than the rhyming of their names); for one their social statuses. They are both poor with very little to no support from birth parents. Finn had an abusive father and Kim seems to have had an absent, drug addicted father. Having unstable upbringings defines both of these characters. Adventure is mainly what brought me to the comparison, "True, he knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of theArabian nights..."(pg.55).Both characters are intrigued by adventure and surround themselves with very similar characters. Being surrounded by the strong adventurous men that Kim surrounds himself with has made him a skeptic of others. Along with skepticism comes a lack of respect. When Kim first meets the old man in front of the wonder house he does not give him a title when speaking to him because he automatically assumes that he is of very low status. Although he is poor he has no respect for those who resemble his situation. Huck Finn has very similar characteristics.
I am looking forward to reading the rest of Kim and I am hoping the more I read, the more I will get used to Kipling's writing style and hopefully find more similarities to Huck-Finn.