The imaginary India of Kipling's childhood was a space of Edenic unity where he felt magically beyond all divisions of race, religion and caste, where the Indian child could be his imagined brother, and where his self could be enclosed within concentric circles of loving solicitude. This of course was before he knew of the ‘dark land’ that was England, of its darker rooms “full of cold,” and of the empire whose mission he would embrace as if its power could heal the fissure of separation from his earliest objects of desire. Kipling's ambiguous position between his lost Eden and the larger colonial structure was the subject of his life's fictions. The last fiction of his life was his unfinished autobiography Something of Myself for my Friends Known Unknown (1937) written during the last five months of his life. I use this work as an opening into Kipling's early fiction because we see in it some of the defenses that resonate through his life and art – the skepticism, the effort at self-protection, and the construction of synthetic world views as antidotes to the anxieties of division. Determined to control and yet passive in its acceptance of destiny and design, his method of narration reminds the reader of his tales as does his strategy of silence about certain deeply felt anxieties revealed more fully in his fiction. Even so, the book sheds light on Kipling's lifelong habits of dualistic discourse. The polarized structure of his autobiography resembles that of his early fiction, which, in turn, reflects the structure of his personal and political identity.