Rikki Garii Narrative

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a children’s book written by Rudyard Kipling, about a mongoose that was adopted into by an English family in India. The story begins with a little boy, Teddy, finding a mongoose washed up after a flood. The mongoose was friendly and would protect the house from venomous snakes; they named him Rikki-Tikki-Tavi because it is onomatopoeia for the sound that Rikki makes.

The story explains that mongooses are curious, so Rikki spent his time exploring everything in the house. When exploring outside, Rikki meets a bird that explains to him that one of his babies fell out of the nest and was eaten by Nag, the cobra. That night, Rikki overhears the cobras’ plans to kill the family, so that Rikki would leave and they could take over the garden. Nag sleeps in the bathroom overnight, planning to kill Teddy’s dad in the morning; Rikki attacks him, causing the father to wake up and shoot Nag, saving the family. Rikki also helps save the family by distracting Nag’s widow, Nagaina, as she was about to attack, eventually killing her as well. The family was very thankful, as he had saved all of their lives.

The story is written in a moralistic tone. After defeating the first snake, Karait, he could indulge and eat his kill or all the food offered that night as a reward, but he instead ate a light dinner because he knew there were more cobras to fight so he didn’t want to be slowed down. “That bite paralyzed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was just going to eat him up from the tail to the head, after the custom of his family, when he remembered that a big meal makes a slow mongoose” (Kippling 16). The tone of that passage suggests that this anti-gluttony attitude is one the reader should also take up when necessary. Many asp...

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...d use Rikki as a weapon to control snakes. “‘Teddy is safer with that little animal in his room than with a watchdog. If a snake came into his room-’ But Teddy’s mother wouldn’t think of anything so awful” (Kipling 5). In addition to keeping Rikki as a pet and companion for his son, he sees how it may benefit and protect his family. Teddy’s father sees Karait as a threat to Teddy so he beats the snake with a stick, and shoots Nag when he hears him fighting with Rikki. Instead of trying to rearrange the garden so the snakes can’t hide in the tall grass, he just uses his human power to remove the threat permanently.

This book could be seen as a reversal of the Garden of Eden allegory. Teddy is an innocent boy in a garden, threated by a snake. Instead of getting kicked out of the garden, the snake is defeated, his innocence is preserved, and he remains in the garden.