No matter how many different books I read, my mind always drifts back to this book. I might reread it, or might not, or may just forget about it all together, which is exactly what I don't want to do.
Surprisingly, Watership Down is the only book by Richard Adams that I like so far out of the, um, 2 books that I've read by him. (And wow, I remembered his name!)
Watership Down just stands out to me by the depth in it's ideas. I probably have yet to figure out the full meaning of it even though I've spent so much time thinking about it.
My old entry on this book says something along the lines of "Hazel and Fiver want a perfect home where they can fit in." I still think that this is true, and I think that the books makes it quite obvious. Who wants to get picked on for a stupid piece of cowslip in their own warren?
I'm actually starting to think that (one of) the main ideas is perfection. It makes perfect sense! (No pun intended at first, but now that I look back it's kind of funny).
I think that a theme in this book is perfection because the whole point is that the homes Fiver and Hazel try to fit into aren't perfect.
In their original warren, they got picked on and hassled out of good food and high statuses because the weren't in the strongest group. In Strawberry's warren, the rabbits had to worry about the traps that farmers set up to catch them, a deadly secret that they kept. And in Woundwart's warren, the dictator of the warren, (I just said it all) the rabbits have no freedom, and are living in a kind of military camp.
None of the warrens they see and go to are perfect. They all have flaws one way or another. I guess that's why Hazel and Fiver want their warren to be perfect. And I guess this happens with humans too, when people see all the flaws around them and try to fix them. But flaws are so realistic, why bother to change? I guess I would want freedom, and a real family warren instead of other hostile rabbits, but sometimes you can't change anything even if you try hard, even harder that Hazel, Fiver, and all of their friends tried. For example, the flaws going on in the world right now, as you read this, there's war, trees being cut down, oil in the oceans, poverty, animals being abused, animals dying, humans dying, air pollution, land pollution, water pollution...I could go on forever and make this entry so long you couldn't even load the page without your computer freezing, and having a window pop up saying "The URL is not valid and can not be loaded", like mine. But somethings can't be fixed, no matter how hard you or I, or the whole world tries.
