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.”
The story Watership Down by novelist Richard Adams details a small band of rabbits trying to find a new home. Fiver, a clairvoyant rabbit, convinced his brother, Hazel, and other rabbits to leave their current home and find a new one, due to a danger Fiver sees in his visions. American writer Joseph Campbell, known for his work in comparative literature, created the monomyth; a pattern of narrative found in many adventure stories. One of the many stages in the monomyth is Crossing the Threshold: the point where the hero leaves the mundane world and enters the world of adventure. In Watership Down, Crossing the Threshold appears when Hazel and his company arrive in the unfamiliar woods, just outside of their warren. After they enter the
“The Boat”, narrated by a Mid-western university professor, Alistar MacLeod, is a short story concerning a family and their different perspectives on freedom vs. tradition. The mother pushes the son to embrace more of a traditional lifestyle by taking over the fathers fishing business, while on the other hand the father pushes the son to live more autonomously in an unconstrained manner. “The Boat” focuses on the father and how his personality influences the son’s choice on how to live and how to make decisions that will ultimately affect his life. In Alistair MacLeod’s, “The Boat”, MacLeod suggest that although dreams and desires give people purpose, the nobility of accepting a life of discontentment out weighs the selfishness of following ones own true desires. In the story, the father is obligated to provide for his family as well as to continue the fishing tradition that was inherited from his own father. The mother emphasizes the boat and it’s significance when she consistently asked the father “ How did things go in the boat today” since tradition was paramount to the mother. H...
On the Waterfront directed by Elia Kazan about a man that once felt he owed something to the mob and now he wants to control his life. This film is a classic mobster movie that is well known for the filming techniques used whilst shooting. The method acting, the lighting, and the camera angles establish the plot.
"Oh Hazel! This is where it comes from! I know now—something very bad! Some terrible thing—coming closer and closer" (Adams, 1975, p. 21). This quote at the beginning of Watership Down is the first of Fiver's amazing forewarnings, that helps him to demonstrate both of the themes of "trust" and "survival" in the rabbit world. Trust and survival are two key components to the rabbits lives, and they cannot live without either. Because of his ability to sense danger around him, Fiver exemplifies the related themes of trust and survival in Watership Down.
After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for political commentary as some might suggest or was he simply another “childhood” that had; until that time, been ignored? If so, what inspired him to move in this direction?
Life does not always work out the way it should. Sometimes good loses, and the better man is the one begging. The Water is Wide is the story of injustice abounding. While the story may have been more appealing if Pat were able to stay on at Yamacraw Island, and I would certainly have enjoyed it more if the superintendent had been beaten, that story would have been a false picture of reality, worthy only of a children's bedtime collection. I...
This passage defines the character of the narrators’ father as an intelligent man who wants a better life for his children, as well as establishes the narrators’ mothers’ stubbornness and strong opposition to change as key elements of the plot.
...tal role in the mission to get the does which was ultimately what made up the new warren. From these two incidents in the novel we see how this civil rights leadership is shown through Hazel.
‘Some idea of a child or childhood motivates writers and determines both the form and content of what they write.’ -- Hunt The above statement is incomplete, as Hunt not only states that the writer has an idea of a child but in the concluding part, he states that the reader also has their own assumptions and perceptions of a child and childhood. Therefore, in order to consider Hunt’s statement, this essay will look at the different ideologies surrounding the concept of a child and childhood, the form and content in which writers inform the reader about their ideas of childhood concluding with what the selected set books state about childhood in particular gender. The set books used are Voices In The Park by Browne, Mortal Engines by Reeve and Little Women by Alcott to illustrate different formats, authorial craft and concepts about childhood. For clarity, the page numbers used in Voices In The Park are ordinal (1-30) starting at Voice 1.
Griffith, John, and Charles Frey. Classics of Children's Literature. 6th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. 21-29, 322-374. Print.
It has always been amazing to realize how well the literature I read as a child has stayed with me through the years. It takes an exceptional writer to compose a narrative that maintains a storyline on the same level of a child's understanding; it takes everything short of a miracle to keep a child's interest. However, that undertaking has been accomplished by many skilled authors, and continues to be an area of growth in the literary world. Only this year the New York Times has given the genre of children's literature the credit it deserves by creating a separate best-sellers list just for outstanding children's books. Yet, on another level, children's literature is not only for the young. I believe that the mark of a brilliant children's author is the age range of those who get pleasure from the stories; the wider the range, the better.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Voices in the Park were published at either end of the twentieth century, a period which witnessed the creation of the modern picturebook for children. They are both extremely prestigious examples of picturebooks of their type, the one very traditional, the other surrealist and postmodern. The definition of ‘picturebook’ used here is Bader’s: ‘an art form [which] hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning of the page’ (Bader, quoted in Montgomery, 2009, p. 211). In contrast with a simple illustrated book, the picturebook can use all of the technology available to it to produce an indistinguishable whole, the meaning and value of which is dependent on the interplay between all or any of these aspects. Moebius’s claim that they can ‘portray the intangible and invisible[…], ideas that escape easy definition in pictures or words’ is particularly relevant to these two works. Potter’s book is, beneath its didactic Victorian narrative, remarkably subtle and subversive in its attitudes towards childhood, and its message to its child readers. Browne’s Voices in the Park, on the other hand, dispenses with any textual narrative; by his use of the devices of postmodernism, visual intertextuality and metaphor, he creates a work of infinite interpretation, in which the active involvement of the reader is key.
Four characters are introduced in the story: the Cook, the Oiler, the Correspondent, and the Injured Captain.
Laura Ingalls Wilder may be viewed as one of the greatest children’s authors of the twentieth century. Her works may be directed towards a younger crowd but people of all ages enjoy her literary contributions. The way that Wilder’s books are written guarantees that they have a place among classics of American literature (“So many…” 1). Laura Ingalls Wilder’s form of writing portrays an American family’s interworking in a journey through childhood.
Literature has been part of society since pen met paper. It has recorded history, retold fables, and entertained adults for centuries. Literature intended for children, however, is a recent development. Though children’s literature is young, the texts can be separated into two categories by age. The exact splitting point is debatable, but as technology revolutionized in the mid-twentieth century is the dividing point between classic and contemporary. Today’s children’s literature is extraordinarily different from the classics that it evolved from, but yet as classic was transformed into modern, the literature kept many common features.