Rudyard Kipling's novel, Kim (1901), chronicles the story of a young Irish boy growing up in India during the waning years of British imperialism.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) is the story of one man's journey to the interior of Africa in pursuit of a tyrannical madman named Kurtz. The story "Mrs. Bathurst" has been compared to this novel.

In one sense, Kipling anticipates modernist writers who defamiliarize their narrative styles—make them obscure and cryptic—in order to emphasize the distance between narrative and reality."

The whole narrative may, in fact, be considered an extended example of aposiopesis."