초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims to read Kipling's Kim, rather than reading it as a representative colonial novel, focusing on the narrative conflict between the Great Game, which allegorizes the British Empire, and the Tibetan Lama. The narrative conflict keeps creating tensions and ironies around Kipling's presentation of the relationship between the Empire and the colony. This requires the reader to re-think Kipling as a representative imperialist, and at the same time, to be more careful of the distance always existing between the writer and the text. It seems that Kipling used the discourse of Celticism in characterizing Kim as an Irish boy to reveal some sense of mystery of India. What is at issue is that Kim, caught in a sense of self-split between Britain and Ireland and India, plays an unexpected role of unsettling the British imperialist ideology, rather than playing a role of mediator to bridge the gap between Britain and India. Kim as an Irish boy, who has celtic sensitivity to nature and mystery, gets closer to the Lama than to the Empire based on reason and order. The narrative split pervading throughout Kim indicates that Kipling's presentation of India as a colony is not as one-sidedly colonialist as many critics have argued for.
