Watership Down Chapters 18-23 Discussion

Blast! It seems I have forgotten that I needed to make a blog post on Thursday! I thought I'd already started the chapter 18-23 discussion and that we were on the next section, that appears not to be the case. I deeply apologize for the delay.

So here we have some interaction between the rabbits and other species around them. I thought it was a bit of an interesting shift on the author's part: the last few chapters had them dealing with other rabbits; now we've moved to other populations. I also liked the lingua franca of the field, that the field mouse and Kehaar both used. It makes sense that there'd be some form of communication between the species, I thought, since species often work together, or compete, or otherwise affect one another. The thing is, though, there isn't a real human equivalent: humans only really interact with other humans (in that other animals don't really have any sort of language). Dunno why I found that interesting, I just did.

Also...did anyone else find Holly's story to be incredibly chilling? The hair stood up on the back of my neck when he first came to the down, and in my opinion, one of the more powerful lines in the book is "It wasn't I who tried to arrest you, Bigwig--that was another rabbit, long, long ago." You never really realize just what sort of torment species go through when their habitat is destroyed until you see it from their point of view (well...a dramatized, somewhat anthropomorphic point of view).

The next hardship we're going to be seeing coming into play is breeding. This has been touched upon in the last chapter, but the warren's in need of does. We'll see how they handle that in the next few chapters.

Next reading: Chapters 24-29 for Sunday, September 27th. See you next time!