Watership Down Analysis

Richard Adams' classic novel Watership Down isn't simply a book about rabbits. Adams tackles profound concepts, such as the importance of storytelling in societies, the essentiality of community, and the values of a brave heart in a dangerous world with his timeless epic, which has been compared even to Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey.

Adams places great emphasis on story. Legends permeate Watership Down, with stories in many chapters. When continuing on seems aimless, and the migrants need reassuring, their own storyteller, Dandelion, tells myriad tales of El-Ahrairah, “Prince with a Thousand Enemies.” Not only do they have legends concerning the mythical El-ahrairah, but, by the end of the journey, it is clear that the adventures of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Dandelion are already becoming the stuff of legends, and their story will become part of rabbit lore for future generations. The chief 'villain' of Watership Down, a violent and sadistic buck by the name of General Woundwort, himself becomes a personification of folklore--a bogey rabbit whom parents use to keep their kits from misbehaving.

“Mother rabbits would tell their kittens that if they did not do as they were told, the General would get them—the General who was first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself.”

Hearing a depiction of Watership Down, you might justly conjecture that it is a children’s book, a kind of fable with talking animals reminiscent to Beatrix Potter's work. Not an entirely untrue deduction, as Adams conceived his characters and settings for Watership Down from stories he would tell his children on long drives through the countryside. What sets Watership Down apart from comparable children's literature is its length--in paperback it i...

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...ivilization. He develops from being a relatively reckless and bullish character, to eventually becoming firmly steadfast and just, having learned to rely on judgment rather than muscle, though still with enough fierceness and determination to be of unstoppable capability when paired with Hazel's insight. Hazel's warren would certainly have been destined to failure without Bigwig's immeasurable courage, without his resolute conviction and readiness to forfeit himself for his friends--a trait he would not have acquired if not for the friends he made on the night of the run from the doomed old warren in the quest for the foretold Watership Down. In the end, Hazel has learned to see the strengths and weaknesses in others; Bigwig has learned to see them in himself.

“My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here.”