Watership Down Themes

Though set in the word of humans, the plot of Richard Adams’s Watership Down borrows from classic epics and “hero’s journey” tales such as Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and even, in a meta-textual turn, the rabbit world’s own folk hero, El-ahairah. When Hazel and a small group of likeminded rabbits leave their home in the Sandleford warren after Hazel’s brother Fiver…

Though Richard Adams originally conceived of Watership Down as a fanciful tale about rabbits meant to entertain his two young daughters on a long car ride, the finished text is rife with violence, cruelty, and brutality, both physical and emotional. In highlighting the viciousness of the rabbit world in unsparing, often gory detail, Adams argues that though violence is indeed a part of nature, all too often, creatures both human and nonhuman use amplified, targeted…

The story of Watership Down is the story of a group of rabbits and their search for their forever home—a place where they will be free from oppression and fear, and able to live as they please in harmony with both nature and with one another. Through the rabbits’ story, Adams crafts a larger narrative metaphor about the importance of belonging—not just in the animal world, but in the human one as well, ultimately arguing…