Common Themes In Kipling's The Graveyard Book

The bestselling children’s book The Graveyard Book was published in 2008 and is still being enjoyed by book lovers of all ages. The book is about a toddler who escapes the presence of a killer and finds refuge in a nearby graveyard. He is raised by many different characters and personalities, both living and dead in the graveyard. Unfortunately, another topic is creating a buzz about this novel other than its awards. The Graveyard Book is being called out because of its many similarities of the much older and equally popular novel The Jungle Book. The author of The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman, doesn’t deserve all of the credit for his bestselling novel because he wasn’t totally original. The Graveyard Book has many different scenes that are just like Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Gaiman does acknowledge that he wanted to follow the same fundamentals as The Jungle Book in his Newberry Medal acceptance speech when he said, “I

This idea is very evident and obvious within the text. Yet it isn’t totally original of Gaiman. The Jungle Book seems to have similar taste with not fearing the unknown. It could also have the theme to not fear adventure. Tara Prescott talks about the common themes of these two books, “Both authors are fathers writing stories for their children (and for others’ children) based on the same scenario: what happens to a child in danger, separated from his parents, and raised by an unorthodox surrogate family? Both stories ultimately reassure; there will be danger and adventure, but the heroes will endure (Prescott 66)”. This bit of text from Prescott is talking about the same sort of ideas of similar themes. Now, the fact that The Graveyard Book was written for his children is very sweet, but this doesn’t justify the fact that he is receiving awards for not totally original story ideas. He uses the same themes that Kipling based his writing off of nearly a century before