This paper discusses Richard Adams’s `Watership Down`, which uses rabbits to symbolize the struggle of humanity that has plagued the world for centuries.
This paper explains that, unlike many writers who use animals as mere stand-ins for human characters, Adams did hard work on his research and in making the rabbits into believable animals and not just furry people. The author points out that Adams’s story begins with fleeing from the old civilization in hopes of starting a new one, just as modern civilization in the West really starts with these two accounts, the Jewish Exodus that created our modern Judeo-Christian morality and mythology, and the founding of Rome, which defined the political history of our culture. The paper relates that, in many ways, Watership Down follows the traditional course of an epic in the mono-myth style, containing many stories within the story, which is typical of works like the Iliad and Odyssey.
Watership Down begins with the story of a band of chosen people fleeing the destruction of their former civilization. In this way it can be seen as typical of a great many myths and histories regarding the foundation of civilization. One can see it as a parallel to the myths of a time after the great flood whose echo lives in so many cultures, which speak of a remnant recreating society. More historically, one might read it as the story of how the ancient Jewish people fled from authoritarian Egypt: the story of the Exodus. Egypt was the first great civilization, and ruled under a total if benevolent monarchy that reminds one strongly of the Sandleford warrens. The Jews, who like Fiver and Hazel were members of a lower class (an enslaved class according to Jewish texts, though not according to Egyptologists), were led into the desert by divine revelation.