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 adult fiction are both worth sober 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 raw picture he paints, cloaked in finery and delight but at the core full of stoic acceptance of misery, hardship and death. While there is a good deal of this that Kipling probably believed, even a casual examination of his own life suggests that this book is more of a bare-bones explication of the fundamental issues than a amply fleshed out portrait of how an artist ought to live. Its particularly telling in light of this that The Light That Failed is dedicated to his mother. How is someone with an artists soul to live in a cosmea where, despite all protestations to the contrary, not even the love of a mother -- much less t hat of any other woman -- can be relied upon? ray 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-fellows 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 impenetrable -- withal 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 first great hike up by a chance meeting with Torpenhow, a Special Correspondent for a news syndicate sent to the Sudan to cover the ultimately unsuccessful dispatch to relieve Gordon. Torpenhow sees Dicks talents and immediately signs him up to supply drawings for his syndicate at a pittance. In this world of manly men, its a ssumed that the strong will struggle forrad on the thinest of chances, and the weak will be swept away. Dick and Torpenhow become close friends in the course of the campaign, but in the midst of a bout Dick is wounded 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.