![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmc28In the Sandleford warren, Holly had been a rabbit of consequence.
[This post is part of my Watership Down read through. You are welcome to join in at any time; please read my introduction post first.]
[This post is part of my Watership Down read through. You are welcome to join in at any time; please read my introduction post first.]
no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 09:03 (UTC)I liked Strawberry getting a chance to be useful and feel useful, and of course it's terribly helpful for the ongoing story that the Honeycomb is ready enough to be useful by the time Holly has recovered enough to tell his story.
Other things I noticed in this chapter:
Bigwig and Pipkin and the mouse all acknowledge an instance of Hazel's help to them in this chapter; all of those were cases where Hazel acted on impulse/instinct rather than thinking it out first, as contrasted to his thinking out the idea of the Honeycomb and sounding out Blackberry about it.
It's Bigwig who directs how to help Holly and Bluebell recover, but delegates it to rabbits better suited; it's Hazel still doing the ongoing care of Buckthorn's rat bite, inflicted off stage two chapters ago.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 14:23 (UTC)Holly is so heartbreaking.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 22:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 12:26 (UTC)You could argue that that's because Strawberry comes from a warren in which the rabbits had ample time to learn more about abstract thought, or Doylistically you could argue that Adams has just temporarily forgotten what the cognitive limits are supposed to be in this book, but my feeling is that it's entirely deliberate, and reflects the rabbits' thought processes being not so much weak as specialised – as a burrow-dwelling species, they've had generations to get good at burrow-related thinking specifically, and not so much about rafts.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 20:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-09 22:09 (UTC)