Watership Down (Criticism)

Criticism

Kelly Winters

Winters is a freelance writer and editor and has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses themes of the hero's journey in Richard Adams's Watership Down.

Throughout prehistory and history, people have told stories of wanderers who, seeking a better life, travel through adversity, danger, and hardship to a new home. Richard Adams's Watership Down is a classic example of this "quest" story, and in his epigrams to the chapters, Adams pays homage to previous literary quests, citing John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur about the quests of noble knights; the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest quest stories known; Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which examines quest myths and stories worldwide; and Walter de la Mare's poem "The Pilgrim," and in the text, he mentions that "Odysseus [the mythical Greek wanderer] might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero."

In the classic quest, according to Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces, the hero, in this case Hazel, is called to leave home and begin a new life. Fiver's prophetic vision, which is sparked by the human scent of a cigarette butt lying in the grass, is of the field where they live, covered with blood. This sense of the imminent, violent destruction of their old life leads Hazel, Fiver, and a few other rabbits to leave their comfortable warren — where no danger is yet evident — in search of a new home, which Fiver intuits will be a high, clean hill, far from humans and other dangers. Joseph Campbell calls this stage of the journey "the call to adventure," and writes that this call "signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown."

This means that the journeyers can no longer count on things they previously did, and that once they leave home, they must contend with a variety of dangers, both seen and unseen, some physical, some psychological. Like other wanderers, the rab-bits must break out of their accustomed patterns of thought and try new things — such as crossing a river on a raft made of an old wooden notice board, digging a home for themselves, and making friends with a mouse and a seagull; must escape from predators such as dogs and foxes, and must contend with subtle, hidden dangers. When the sleek, ultracivilized rabbit Cowslip invites them to his wealthy warren, at first they are lulled by its prosperity and peace, and by the physical health and ease of its inhabitants. They are in great danger, but none of them know it except Fiver, whose intuition tells him this is a dangerous place and that death is near. They finally discover, almost too late, that a nearby farmer is snaring the rabbits, but not before Bigwig is snared and almost killed. Campbell calls this phase of the journey "the road of trials," and tells of the tests, ordeals, and dangers that other heroes faced in dreams, literature, and myths from all over the world.

The rabbits finally leave the treacherous warren and make their exhausted way to Watership Down, where they begin digging a new home. No quest is that easy, however; as Campbell wrote, "The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path." The rabbits realize that it's not enough to find a home; they must also secure a future for themselves, and without families and offspring this is impossible. They need to find female rabbits, and this need sparks two perilous expeditions: one to a nearby farm where humans and dangerous cats and dogs lurk, the other to Efrafa, a repressive, totalitarian warren from which no rabbit has ever escaped alive. Like the larger journey to Watership Down, both of these journeys are fraught with perils, ordeals, and trials involving predators, treacherous terrain, doubt, and fear. In the end, both expeditions succeed, but not without great cost; rabbits are injured and changed forever, and some are killed. Like many heroes of the great quest myths, the rabbits face the presence of death, and although they survive, they are never the same.

They also grow through their adventures. Hazel matures from a yearling with potential into a calm, wise, balanced, and beloved leader. Bigwig mellows from a rather overbearing type into a seasoned, compassionate, and protective old soldier who is loved by the young rabbits, and Fiver's prophetic and intuitive gifts are respected as the ultimate source of guidance and safety in the warren. "As long as we've got some of that," Hazel says of this gift, "I dare say we'll be all right."

Journeyers in all ages will recognize this pattern. Even in modern times, those who take to the road undergo these same phases of leaving home, facing trials and dangers, and sometimes even death, and of being buoyed up by intuition, a connection to mystery, and coincidence. In The Archetype of Pilgrimage, Jean Dalby Clift and Wallace B. Clift quote Alan Nichols, who rode a bicycle through Central Asia and was lost in a blizzard: "I accepted the fact that I was going to die. I told myself I would fight to survive as long as I could. I prayed. After a time, the first of my miracles occurred. The snow storm stopped, the wind died down, and the sky cleared leaving only a huge full moon in the sky. I took that to be a sign that I would survive."

This is remarkably similar to the tale of the rabbits in Watership Down, who tell stories of their gods and heroes and draw upon their strength in dangerous times. When Holly, Silver, Buckthorn, and Strawberry escape from Efrafa, they experiences a miracle in the form of a train that thunders down the track they have just crossed and cuts off the rabbit soldiers pursuing them. When Hazel is shot by men and left bleeding to death in a drainage ditch, he is found and saved only because Fiver, in a vision, sees where he is and summons help.

At Efrafa, the danger is both physical and mental — rabbits are tortured and killed, and they are also deprived of free speech and the right to think independently. In a harrowing scene, the dissident Blackavar is exposed for all to see, his ears ripped to shreds, as he pathetically mumbles his crime: wanting to leave Efrafa. Bigwig courageously goes to Efrafa and, with the help of the other rabbits and the seagull Kehaar, manages to escape, bringing female rabbits from Efrafa with him. A very similar, but true, story of an escape from a totalitarian prison is told in Slavomir Rawicz's gripping book, The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Free-dom, in which Rawicz describes his and his companions' three-thousand-mile trek across Siberia, through China and the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and across the Himalayas to India in the early 1940s, after their escape from a Siberian prison camp in the Soviet Union. Like the rabbits in Efrafa, Rawicz learned early on that "the prisoner was left in no doubt that a deviation off course to right or left would mean death from the carbine or pistol of the guards marching two paces behind him." Blackavar, who likewise is always accompanied by two burly guards, tells Bigwig what he has been taught to say: "Every Mark should see how I have been punished as I deserve for my treachery in trying to leave the warren."

Another aspect of the classic journey is that when the journey is over, the journeyer must share the story with others, thus inspiring them. At the end of the book, the rabbit Vilthuril tells the young rabbits the story of the wandering rabbits' adventure, except that now it has been incorporated into the rabbits' body of myth; Hazel and the others have become the rabbit hero El-ahrairah and his people, and Cowslip's wealthy, civilized warren is now a place where all the rabbits "were in the power of a wicked spell. They wore shining collars round their necks and sang like the birds and some of them could fly." Likewise, Kehaar the seagull has become "a great white bird which spoke to [El-ahrairah] and blessed him."

Just because the rabbits' true story has become amplified into myth, however, does not mean that it is now distorted. As Gregg Levoy wrote in Callings, "myths may not be literally true, but they are psychologically true. The pattern of breaking away from home, undergoing trials, and experiencing change and growth as a result is something that everyone, in every age and culture, can relate to and learn from. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the success of Watership Down." Levoy wrote that two similar stories, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz, are not just the stories of Odysseus and of Dorothy, and in the same way, Watership Down is the story of everyone who struggles to find the way home. Above all, Levoy noted, these and similar quest stories are "stories of transformation: from chaos to form, from being lost to finding our way. They describe the stages of life, the initiations we all go through as we move from one level to another: child to adult, young to old, single to married, cowardly to courageous, life to death, death to life."

Source: Kelly Winters, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

What Do I Read Next?

• Tales from Watership Down, by Richard Adams (1998), continues the story of Watership Down and includes new tales from the rabbit mythology.
• Richard Adams's The Plague Dogs (1978) tells of the adventures of two dogs who escape from an animal experimentation laboratory.
• In Richard Adams's heroic saga of a mythical past, Shardik (1975), people worship a giant bear.
• Traveller (1988), by Richard Adams, tells the story of the Civil War from the point of view of General Robert E. Lee's horse, whose name was Traveller.
• In Brian Jacques's Redwall (1998), the one-eyed rat warlord, Cluny the Scourge, is hell-bent on destroying the tranquillity of Redwall Abbey as he prepares to fight a bloody battle for its ownership.
• Mossflower, by Brian Jacques (1998), is the story of how mouse Martin the Warrior and his woodland friends fight ruthless wild cats for leadership of the abbey and Mossflower Woods.
• In Brian Jacques's Marlfox (2000), when marl-foxes steal the precious tapestry of Martin the Warrior, the children of warrior squirrels must follow in their fathers' heroic footsteps to recover it.