The Castaways (short story)

"The Castaways" is a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, which first appeared in the Strand Magazine in June 1933, and was included in the collection Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, published in 1935.

The story is one of many narrated by pub raconteur Mr Mulliner, and concerns his nephew Bulstrode Mulliner, a writer in Hollywood. Wodehouse here compares the labor of writing of dialogue for talking movies to being stranded on a desert island.

This is the last of 5 Hollywood stories recounted by Mr Mulliner, the storyteller of the fictional Angler's Rest pub. Like the others, it follows a story within a story format, in which an unidentified narrator briefly describes events in the pub—events that trigger a story of the tall-tale variety.

In this case, the barmaid mentions a book she is reading in which a couple of castaways are deposited on a deserted island, then fall in love with each other even though each is engaged to a different person back home. Mr Mulliner steps in with a story about his nephew, Bulstrode Mulliner, and an unrelated woman named Genevieve Bootle; he claims that their situation was "an almost exact parallel" to the barmaid's plot description.

The tall-tale aspect of the story begins with Mr Mulliner's claim that writing dialog in Hollywood really is exactly like being isolated on a remote island. This assertion, which will strike many readers as at the very least an exaggeration, actually does reflect some aspects Wodehouse's own real-life experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s, when he wrote dialog for movie studios and was disappointed when very little came of it (see below).

In the plot summary in the next section, items that correspond to aspects of Wodehouse's own life are keyed using {braces}. The present section gives references to the keyed items.

Wodehouse did a few stints in Hollywood, under contract to write dialog for movies, and was frustrated when almost none of his material made it to the movie screen. For example, in his letter to fellow author William Townend (dated June 26, 1930, in Author! Author! and Performing Flea), he wrote:

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