Sorrow and the redemptive role of fate: Kipling's "On Greenhow Hill"

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2003 by Dillingham, William B

For John Learoyd, Greenhow Hill brought on both grief and challenge. It was there that he sustained his most painful loss and there that he fought a crucial battle to retain his selfhood. Overtly this conflict is over a dog, Learoyd's pet, Blast, but it is much more than that: it is a struggle for identity. The chapel folk vehemently object to both the dog and its name, which suggests violence in its background, since it was the only survivor of an explosion, and in behavior, since its "business," as Learoyd puts it, is "fightin' every dog he comed across" (217). To the good Primitive Methodists of the community, "Blast" is just too similar in sound to "blasphemy," and most of them insist that Learoyd give up the animal because it is "worldly and low." They tell the distressed Learoyd that he will be "shut out of heaven" if he keeps Blast (217). A few of them would allow him to retain his pet, but they want the dog to reform, and they wish its name changed to "Bless." For Liza's sake, Learoyd tries hard to be one of the chapel folk and to become a changed man, but he draws the line with Blast: he will neither part with the animal nor change its name even if it means giving up paradise. "If th' door [of heaven] isn't wide enough for th' pair on us," he says, "we'll stop outside, for we'll none be parted" (218).

What Learoyd senses but does not articulate is that "me and Blast" (223) and "Blast and me" (228), as he puts it, are one. 5 His refusal to give up the dog is a refusal to abandon what is deepest in his nature, and that precisely is what the chapel folk demand of him. Kipling makes Blast a fighting dog to correspond with Learoyd's identity as a fighting man, a warrior. The frustration that he feels in trying to mold himself into a Primitive Methodist is reflected in his statement, "I were no better nor Blast chained up short and growlin' i' the depths of him while a strange dog went safe past" (226). One of the story's finest touches, Blast is a manifestation of that aspect of Learoyd's deepest self that cannot be changed or repressed without causing dire frustration and psychological fragmentation, both of which he would have experienced had he surrendered to the chapel folk's demands.

What finally delivers Learoyd from this dreadful struggle just to be himself is fate, that controller of events in Kipling's world. On the surface, however, it appears to have conspired with whatever it is that makes people be as they are-call it human nature-to bring a great darkness into Learoyd's life. Through the ostensible haphazard course of events that some people call chance and others inexplicable destiny, Learoyd is thrown with Liza Roantree, her father, and their acquaintances. He just happens to be in the Pately Brig area because he had left home after a quarrel. Then an accident occurs: he falls into a ditch, breaks his arm, and is knocked unconscious. By chance, Jesse Roantree happens to be coming by, sees him, and takes him to his home, where Liza, a beautiful young woman who is probably even then consumptive, tenderly nurses him. She is fated to die young, and when after some time Learoyd discovers that, he despairs and goes into town, where he just happens to bump into an army recruiting sergeant, who sees his opportunity and signs up the heartbroken lover. Practically his only friend during this sad period in his life is a dog, Blast, who is alive only through a strange twist of fate, for it unpredictably survived an accident, an explosion of gun power kept in the storekeeper's hut. This story of Learoyd's, shot through as it is with chance occurrences, is told within a frame narrative, which is almost equally marked by the same quality. For example, the native deserter, whose destiny it is to die by Ortheris's bullet, seals that fate by firing a random shot-into the tent of the man who will later kill him. He means to be harassing his own regiment, but in his mistake, he happens to come upon Ortheris and his friends. What stirs Learoyd into reminiscing is not only his seeing a landscape that reminds him of Greenhow Hill but also his neardeath experience at the hand of one of his fellow soldiers, who mistakes him for enemy, fires upon him, and grazes his tunica chance happening.