“The Man Who Would Be King” is a short story that belongs to the literary genre of romanticism. Not to be confused with “romance novels,” romantic fiction is a type of literature that centers on stories of adventure, including sensationalized events that would never happen in ordinary life. While realism became more popular in the 20th century, Kipling was still writing at a time when it was common to tell stories of heroic adventures and humorous defeats.
The events in “The Man Who Would Be King” are certainly far from ordinary—two rough-around-the-edges, uneducated men decide that they want to become kings of a foreign nation they have never visited, are somehow able to do so, and then have their situation reversed in a simultaneously harrowing and hilarious manner.
This story is also considered by some scholars to be a work of “colonial fiction.” This term refers to fiction written by people benefitting from colonialism (such as the white British Kipling) and using fiction in order to justify or perpetuate the harmful ideologies of colonialism. This term is often used alongside “postcolonial fiction," or literature written by people from formerly colonized nations attempting to challenge said colonial ideologies.
