ABSTRACT
Barbara Everett has discussed the ‘primitivism’ of the story, the way it reaches ‘something buried, infantile, vulnerable in the reader’. This primitivism is ‘equalled and balanced by everything in the telling which is cold and detached, so formally ironic as to make Kipling sometimes the easiest of great writers to find repellent’ (1991, p. 13). The balance of detachment and primitivism leads her to suggest that we should not read the story as a narrative, puzzling over the identity of the tramps, but as the unfurling of a metaphor: the coup de foudre, love’s lightningstroke which at once illuminates and destroys, turning the lovers into charcoal. In its favouring of metaphor over metonymy, in its resolute indeterminacy, it is thoroughly Modernist (Lodge 1989).
