This article argues that the multiplicity of its protagonist's identities generates in Kim anti-imperialist meanings that subvert both his author's wish to have him serve as bearer of an imperialist message as well as the postcolonial interpretation of Kipling's novel as being a successful vehicle for an imperialist ideology. Illustrating how principal characters wish for him to reflect behavior befitting of a protégé, the article excavates a desire in Kim to express such personal qualities as will please the character communicated with at any particular textual moment, such that Kim projects distinct personae with successive shifts in scene. The article concludes that it is the relativity of each persona's corresponding value schema that raises Kim above the hierarchy of nation and race upon which the British Empire was structured and makes of Kim a parody of the imperial project that his author intended to defend here.
