Rudyard Kiplings The Light Yhat Failed :: Essays Papers

Rudyard Kiplings The Light Yhat FailedRudyard Kipling is remembered today mostly as a childrens author. Kiplings poetry and handsome fiction are both cost serious examination The Light That Failed is probably the most important of his adult novels, in which he apparently makes the clearest statements of his beliefs about art and the purpose of life. Its a pretty bleak picture he paints, cloaked in finery and satisfy but at the core full of stoic acceptance of misery, stiffness and death. While there is a good deal of this that Kipling probably believed, level off a casual examination of his own life suggests that this book is much of a bare-bones explication of the fundamental issues than a fully fleshed out portrait of how an artificer ought to live. Its particularly telling in light of this that The Light That Failed is dedicated to his mother. How is somebody with an artists soul to live in a world where, despite both protestations to the contrary, not even the love of a m other -- much little that of any other woman -- can be relied upon? Dick Heldar is an orphan, a young savage who is not civilized by the beatings he gets from Mrs. Jennet, his foster-mother, nor by the contempt he receives from his school- cast offows for his cheap and shoddy clothing. Coming out of his childhood, he goes off to wander the world, learns to paint, and finds he can see things that others cant, and capture them on canvas. His childhood companion, Massie, who is aptly described as an atom -- indivisible and profound -- also learns to draw, but with considerably less success than Dick as she fails to give her whole life and soul to the work. Dicks career is given its stolon great boost by a chance meeting with Torpenhow, a Special Correspondent for a news syndicate sent to the Sudan to see the ultimately unsuccessful expedition to relieve Gordon. Torpenhow sees Dicks talents and immediately signs him up to bring drawings for his syndicate at a pittance. In this worl d of manly men, its delusive that the strong leave alone struggle forward on the thinest of chances, and the weak will be swept away. Dick and Torpenhow become close friends in the dividing line of the campaign, but in the midst of a battle Dick is wound on the head and has a moments flashback to the world of his childhood and Massie, whom he fell in love with shortly before they last parted.