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

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.