Ross Reads: Watership Down (8th Grade Version)

Dear Mrs. Lister,

     In Watership Down by Richard Adams a group of rabbits leave the main warren to seek safety because a rabbit has prophetic dreams.  The book is about their struggle to survive in a strange world, a world of men, predators, and militias evil rabbits.

     There are many aspects of realism in a novel.  Some of these include setting, characters, and conflicts in the book.  Watership Down uses many of these aspects.

     The setting of Watership Down is very realistic.  It mainly centers on the group of rabbits' new home in a patch of beech trees on the down.  Other settings include the warren of the Efrafa, the fields at Cowslip's Warren, and the farm in which three rabbits are rescued from hutches.  These settings are all described so realistically that they could be just over the hill past my house.

     Even though the characters are rabbits, their could be real.  the speech, however, is not very real.  It is english mixed with the rabbit language.  A glossary of the language of the rabbits is in the back of the book.  I think the author used the rabbit language in the story to keep the animals from becoming too human-like, among other reasons.  This language reminds the reader the personalities he/she is reading about are animals and not humans.  However, the behavior is very realistic.  The book explains what kinds of running paces the rabbits use - headlong run for the bushes when chased by enemies and easy lope around the warren - and how they eat.  Using these explanations with the not-so-obvious reactions of rabbits such as jumping at every sound and sniffing for enemies, the author makes the rabbits seem like rabbits that live in the wild today.  I know this because I did some research on rabbits.

     My next topic for criticism is conflict.  Most of the conflicts in the book are not realistic.  These include leaving the warren because one rabbit says so, rescuing rabbits and getting shot by a rifle, and getting captured by evil rabbits.  Judging by what I know of rabbits, I would say none of these conflicts were really happen to rabbis.  On the other hand, these conflicts could happen to people.  This is because the rabbits are personified, as are their conflicts.  We find these sort of books interesting because they show how human life is and other people are very interesting.  If one was to just write about rabbits as they truly are, the book would be very boring. 

     Therefore, this story is interesting because it compares humans with rabbits; making what the rabbits do and what is done to them human-like.  But, these conflicts are a little far-fetched and exciting for regular life, and I think this story has "a little too much juice"; there are too many adventures than rabbits can handle.  In The Hobbit; Bilbo got tired of the adventures after a few exciting things happened to him.  On the other hand, the rabbits never seem to tire from their many adventures, so the book is not as realistic as I would like it to be.