ABSTRACT
Coherence is a feature that distinguishes novels from collections of short stories. This chapter examines Rudyard Kipling's very first published short story cycle, Plain Tales from the Hills, to explore if and how it achieves coherence. The surprise elements of the story are evident: an Indian character, and a female one at that, is the most active figure in the tale. The subsequent tale in the Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills, "The Three Musketeers", goes several steps further in creating coherence even beyond the framework of the short story cycle. It introduces three soldiers, an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman, as personal friends of the narrator. The short stories in Plain Tales from the Hills are certainly not uncritical of the British, and this ruptures and destabilizes the characters that ought to provide identification for the reader.
