Just So Stories

“So the Whale swam and swam to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West, as fast as he could swim, and on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing to wear except a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders (you must particularly remember the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, he found one single, solitary shipwrecked Mariner, trailing his toes in the water.”

This passage comes from the start of the collection’s first story and showcases many of the literary devices that Kipling uses throughout the text, including repetition and alliteration. Here, the narrator describes the Whale heading off to find the Mariner he plans to eat. He interjects to remind “Best Beloved” to pay special attention to the suspenders, reinforcing the frame that the narrator is telling the stories aloud to his daughter.

“But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale’s warm, dark, inside cupboards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and he danced hornpipes where he shouldn’t, and the Whale felt most unhappy indeed. (Have you forgotten the suspenders?)”

After the Whale has swallowed the Mariner, the man uses his intelligence and resourcefulness to cause such a ruckus in the Whale’s stomach that the creature is desperate to spit him out again. This passage is an illustrative example of Kipling’s use of rhyming, and it also illustrates the triumph of man’s intelligence over the brute size and strength of nature, reflecting The Relationship Between Man and Animals.

“In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most ‘scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said ‘Humph!’ Just ‘Humph!’ and no more.”

Many of the Just So Stories take place at the beginning of time and seek to explain the development of society as well as the natural world. “How the Camel Got His Hump” describes the domestication of animals like the Dog, the Ox, and the Horse, but the Camel refuses to participate out of laziness, which will later turn him into a lesson in the importance of