The Importance Of Home In Watership Down

The novel Watership Down is a book about finding home. Home is a tough subject to tackle. What is home? How does one make home? In the book, home is where the people you care about are. In Watership Down, Hazel and Fiver come across many different types of home, if they can call it that. Their first warren was home for them for a while, because the people they knew and loved were there. The first “home” they find after leaving their warren is at a farm, where a warren is already set. The life is easy, almost too easy. Even though the rabbits are friendly, they seem disconnected from their home. The home was not made through hard work, unlike the new warren, and at the end of the day, the feeling is right. It was to good to be true. The reason

'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” (Watership Down, Richard Adams) This quote, said by Strawberry to Hazel about Woundwort. However, this quote is not right. Woundwort is far from being an actual rabbit, and is violent, unable to compromise. He instead shows a very Hitler like mindset, thinking that violence wins. Hazel and Woundwort show very different types of leadership skills. Hazel is more in tune with what his warrens wants and needs are, while Woundwort thinks more of himself. In fact, it’s pride that leads to his

Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes-the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the centre and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves-until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at the work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea.”(Watership Down, Richard Adams) This quote is the very soul of what drove Hazel and the others to take down Woundwort. They all connected, and together with their combined forces, figured out how to fight him. They