Western Literature Honors
May 5, 2014
Opening: Analogy
Closing: Echo
When a Hero Goes Up
In Flames
When
children think of a hero, they could think of a knight riding into a castle and
slaying a dragon to save a damsel in distress; or they could think of a superhero
going into a burning building to save a forgotten infants life. Both make it
out alive with the innocent and return to the world to be celebrated. What
children never see is the hero gone wrong. The knight rides in sword drawn and
battle flag flying only to be caked in the dragon’s fire, burning to ashes
instantaneously. The hero reaches the infant in the building, but before he can
get out, he is crushed by the collapsing building, thus killing both him and
the infant. The motive of the
story: not everyone can be a hero. Many can make it into the hero cycle, but
few can make it out. The rest are trapped in the middle of the cycle, and none
are a better example of this than General Woundwort in Richard Adam’s novel Watership Down.
General
Woundwort started the hero cycle like any other would. He was in his innocent
stage when he was young, as narrated to us in the following:
“Some three years before, he had been
born – strongest of a litter of five – in a burrow outside for a cottage garden
near Cole Henley His father, a happy-go-lucky and reckless buck, had thought
nothing of living so close to human beings except that he would forage in their
garden in the early morning” (305).
His innocence is marked not by his
actions, but that of his father. He lived close to the humans with his family,
and although not Woundworts decision, still shows his innocent thought of
humans causing no harm to his family. Of course, this innocence is brutally
ripped away when the farmer of the thieved garden shoots his dad, and digs his
mother and siblings out of their burrow. As the only survivors, he and his
injured mother flee to the nearby fields, only to be followed by a weasel.
Injured and bleeding profusely, his mother is attacked and killed by the
weasel, which after finishes his meal, leaves the young rabbit to mourn his
mother.
This
marks the end of his initiation to the world. His innocence is now ripped away
like a curtain from a window, leaving him with a view of the cold and brutal
world around him. From this he must go through several trials to show that he
could possibly become a hero. He escapes the clutches of another human, beating
a cat at the same time, and then single handedly taking over a warren. From
what he knew humans to be, Woundwort set out to preserve his warren from any
kind of human harm. Of course, he had the best intentions at first. He created
Efrafa to keep them a secret, and it worked well for a period of time. But then
things started to change.
At
the time Watership Down takes place,
Efrafa has grown by substantial amounts. In fact, now it is too big, causing
any potential litters to be reabsorbed by the mothers. Trying to keep everyone
safe and secret was becoming harder, and the people controlling them were
becoming more and more brainwashed. They no longer wanted control to help the
warren, but rather to have more privileges in the General’s system. This, along
with the unrepeatable events that happen in Watership
Down, allows the protagonistic warren to get a fair amount of does out of
Efrafa, right under Woundworts nose. This plunges Woundwort into his chaos
stage. Since his initiation, Woundwort had never been defeated in one of his
trials before. He was always able to use both the strength of his mind and body
to overcome whatever opposed him, and logically defeat them. This almost worked
in putting a stop to Hazel’s plan, when he was able to regroup and form a plan
of attack with his own rabbits, which almost stopped the getaway. Either way,
the rabbits got away, and Woundwort must go retrieve the does to maintain his
leadership. If he doesn’t, rabbits in his own warren may not see him as the
invincible leader he made himself out to be. If they were able to stop him, why
couldn’t they? So taking a strong and resilient group of his own rabbits with
him, he sets out to retrieve the does, and regain his status among the warren.
This
is the point at which we see that General Woundwort is not the hero he is set
out to be, specifically at one point. Once the group arrives, he is soon met by
none other than Hazel, who requests that instead of attacking, he create an
alliance with them, and form a new warren between the two of them. General
Woundwort sees this and responds:
“At that moment, in the sunset on
Watership Down, there was offered to the General Woundwort the opportunity to
show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed
himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and
cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit’s idea shone
clear before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had
pushed it away from him” (411).
The General pushes the idea away and
continues on with his attack plans, thus showing his flaws. His ego had shown
through, and everyone knew he was one for fighting. As said by the narrator,
“What he had learned from all his experience of fighting was that nearly always
there are those who want to fight and those who do not feel but feel they can’t
avoid it” (431). Using this, he became a fighting machine that, when faced with
troubles, always chose to fight it. Little did he know that at the attack, he
would fight his last.
During
the attack on the warren, Woundwort is defeated again. His attack on Bigwig
fails, and he realizes that he must find another way in. His whole strategy and
ego of straight up fighting is rendered useless, showing how his flaws don’t
let him finish the chaos stage. He ends up supposedly dying there on the down,
his flaws once again taking over as he is attacked by a dog. Instead of bolting
like any reasonable rabbit would, he chooses to stay and fight. His body is
never found.
Despite
the readers biased perspective, Woundwort could have been a hero. Although he
is made out to be a villain in the story, he really could have been a hero to
the other rabbits. As Holly describes, “He fought because he actually felt
safer fighting than running. He was brave, all right. But it wasn’t natural;
and that’s why it was bound to fishing him in the end. He was trying to do
something that Frith never meant any rabbit to do” (458). His fight was his
ultimate downfall, and ended his run at becoming a hero. He never made it out
of the chaos stage, like so many others before him. But just because he isn’t considered
a hero doesn’t mean that he isn’t looked up to. After his supposed death, he
went down into legend as the first cousin of the Black Rabbit, who, “If ever
great danger arose, he would come back to fight for those who honored his name”
(464). And that was the end of General Woundwort.
The
tale of the failed hero is unpopular to most. We always want to see the
underdog come back from when he is at his lowest and heroically win. For every
story that has a hero, there are ten more untold stories of failed heroes. But
just because they failed doesn’t mean they are forgotten. Often, they are the
ones that go down as models. The models that are made from the ashes of a hero.
English
Ten Honors
English
Essay
-The
Cycles Within The Bigger Cycle
Lead
technique: Quote
Conclusion
technique: Quote/ Echo
Original
Word count: 2231
Goal Word
count: 2008
Final Word
count: 2006
The Cycles
Within The Bigger Cycle
“The
primroses were over,” (p.1) are the words Watership Down starts off
with. These four words already set the tone for what is going to follow. The
book can be seen as a cycle, but with smaller cycles within, all following
Campbell’s hero stages. The book in itself follows the hero cycle, but in
individual sections, it is also present. Watership Down is the story of an
adventure, starting a new population of rabbits in a healthy relationship with
each other.
The
end of the primroses brings a negative connotation with it, which shows the
need for adventure. The book starts off in peace and harmony. “The May sunset
was red in clouds, and there was still half an hour to twilight. The dry slope
was dotted with rabbits -- some nibbling at the thin grass near their holes”
(p.1). There is no danger for the rabbits, and everything is taken care of.
This is the façade, where everything seems happy and perfect, but this cover
hides a rotten and soon to collapse structure. This theme is also resembled in
the short story “The Garden Party.” The rabbits live in an old warren, which
has served many generations very well, but thunder is approaching. The danger,
which is a bout to come, serves as the need for the adventure. If there was no
evil to come, Hazel and his companions would not have to leave the warren, but
just like the primroses were over, the time of the warren has come to an end.
In the beginning, the
companions are truly in the innocent stage. They live in a warren, where
everything is organized, and they never really had to take any responsibility
themselves. No currently living doe has every actually dug a run herself,
because it was all done by previous generations. It is this reliance on old
structures, that lets the rabbits live in their own, self-centered universe,
where nothing is of real concern. Emmanuel Kant stated that “statutes and
formulas, these mechanical tools of a serviceable use, or rather misuse, of his
natural faculties, are the ankle-chains of a continuous immaturity. Whoever
threw it off would make an uncertain jump over the smallest trench because he
is not accustomed to such free movement” (What is Enlightenment? (1784)). This
destruction of the free character through society can also be seen in Cowslips
warren. The rabbits lost all their natural fear, and don't even check their
surroundings, when exiting a hole. Leaving the protected environment is so
hard, that “only a few who have pursued a firm path and have succeeded in
escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the mind” (What is
Enlightenment? (1784)). The one who succeed become known as heroes.
The
beginning of the realm of the unconscious, just like in the story of Red Riding
Hood, is the forest. The trees consume the hero, when he enters into the
forest, and hides the known world from him. The hero has thus entered „the
region(…) of the unknown, (…) free fields for the projection of unconscious
content“ (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.65). This separation from the
known world, into the abyss of the mind, is completed after the crossing of the
first threshold. For the rabbits, the threshold is the river. When the rabbits
first saw it, “it seemed immense, such a river as they had never imagined”
(p.18). Experiencing unimaginable things, and seeing the world with new eyes is
typical for the stage of initiation. After having crossed the river, that
rabbits are fully initiated. They wander through a world, which they have never
seen or even imagined before. The river, being the threshold, but also a major
obstacle for the rabbits acted as the first station in the road of trials,
which is bound to follow. The crow in the bean field and the stranger passing
by are all types of trials, which the rabbits have to face in the first section
of their journey. The first shed of blood, and the first injury in the bean
field, show the rabbits the duality of this new world, which has both death and
beauty for them. The rabbits become aware of their own mortality, and that they
are on their own from now. The old warren provided a framework of protection,
with guards and patrols. Now, every tiny mistake can potentially mean death for
the rabbits. The group continues to “journey through a world of unfamiliar yet
strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten (them), some of
which give magical aid” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.211).
Just like for Peekay on his journey, the goal for the companions is rather
abstract, and there are no clear rules or references for what path to take, in
order to succeed. Although the journey has parallels to The Lord of
the Rings, Frodo and his comrades have a direction, in which they have to walk.
The rabbits have no clear idea of where they are, or where the new home, which
Fiver described, is to be found. The need for some sort of guidance is
essential. The rabbit’s guide, as in many other stories, comes from the
supernatural world. Fiver’s connection to greater depths of the unconscious,
than know to any other rabbit, provides them with a basic plan. The Israelites,
when searching for their new homeland, were guided by “a pillar of cloud(s) to
guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so
that they could travel by day or night” (Exodus 13:21). In both stories the
objective of the journey was a new homeland. For the Israelites it was the
“land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 33:3), for the rabbits it is a new
place to build a warren: Watership Down. During their travel to that place, the
rabbits learn a lot about themselves, their group members, and life.
The
stage of chaos puts all the newly learned things to a trial. The trials of
initiation are nothing compared to the powerful force, that steps between the
hero and the fulfillment of the mission. The hero experiences the worst side of
the world he discovered not long ago. He has to face an enemy, or a system,
which seems insuperable, and which greatly threatens the hero's adventure.
Considering the entire book, the conflict with Efrafa marks the Chaos stage,
but each section in the book embodies the hero cycle individually. In section
I, the happenings at Cowslips warren are the chaos stage. The rabbits are
confronted with a society unfamiliar to them. The rabbit’s freedom is being
traded for security, resulting in a mixture between Anarchy and Communism. This
is rather a passive danger, but it nevertheless threatens to consume and split
the group. Death is present in the stage of chaos, and also marks the climax of
tension in all sections of Watership Down. In the first section, it is
the near-death of Bigwig. His death was so certain, that “it came to Hazel,
(that Bigwig) (…) stopped running” (p.68), detecting no traces of life in him.
This descend into the land of the dead of the hero is very common in the hero
myth. Batman ‘dies’ in the house of the League of Shadows, but then gloriously
returns from the fires of the netherworld. In The Dark Knight, the Batman
also leaves the earth as we know it, after he has saved Commissioner Gordon’s
Family from Harvey Dent, but returns eventually. “The two worlds, the
(netherworld) and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each
other—different as life and death, as day and night” (The Hero with
a Thousand Faces, p.188). This is why it is not certain for the hero
to return. The reentry is often very complicated, and sometimes unsuccessful.
In rare cases, the gap between the kingdom of the unconscious, and the earthly
kingdom, has become too big to be crossed. Some heroes have altered too much
for the world to be able to welcome them again. In this case, “instead of
returning, (the hero) decide(s) to retreat one degree still further from the
world” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.169). The world has lost its hero
in the depths of the abyss. All rabbits were certain, that Hazel did get killed
by the farmer, who shot him in the field. Hazel entered a place between death
and life, where only Fiver could still reach him, and bring him back to this
wold, which marks the stage of chaos for section ll. The chaos in section lll
breaks out during the rabbit’s attack on Efrafa, where most of the warren’s
members almost got eliminated by the mighty General Woundwort. In the final
section of the book, the counterattack of the Efrafan rabbits greatly threatens
the warren, and brings chaos to the rabbit’s peaceful new home.
The
reason for the adventure is always obtaining something, that was not present or
possible to obtain in the ordinary world. This can be the acquisition of “runes
of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, (…) (the hero's) sleeping princess,” (The Hero with
a Thousand Faces, p.167) some elixir for the restoration of society” (The Hero with
a Thousand Faces, p.170), or the ultimate boon, which „(saves) the
world“ (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.211). During the stage of return,
the hero makes this boon available to the earthly world. After his return from
the dead, Bigwig fully understood his position in the group, and becomes an
even more loyal warrior, risking his life for the warren by going into Efrafa,
and later protecting the run in the Honeycomb from the attacks of General
Woundwort and his followers. Hazel obtains a special connection to El-ahrairah,
who sends him the idea of final rescue from the Efrafan attack. The battle of
Efrafa, followed by the final escape and return on the small boat, brings does
to Watership Down, which enables and creates life, and a future for the warren.
Observing the story as a whole, the adventure grants the rabbits a new place to
live, in peace, and in a healthy relationship with nature, and other animals.
The rabbits have successfully build up a functioning society, which is neither
based on Communism nor Fascism, and which is going to be the home for many more
generations. They were also able set up a good relationship to the Efrafan
rabbits, which enabled the creation of many more warrens in the future. Frith’s
promise to El-ahrairah, that his tribe would “never be destroyed” (p.17), has
seemingly also extended to Hazel-rah’s warren. The rabbits have learned from
their hero, having used his tricks and though like a trickster.
Watership
Down is a great example of the hero cycle being present in modern
literature. Every one of the four section of the book embodies one of the
stages of the hero, and also has a smaller hero cycle within. The book tells
the story of rabbits starting off totally innocently, experiencing the world,
fighting it’s ogres, dragons and demons, and winning gloriously. It is important
to note, that the rabbits only won, because they believed in, and followed
their own hero myth, being inspired by El-ahrairah. They have learned from his
ways of solving problems and winning battles. The hero embodies the
characteristics valued by a society, and the rabbits have adopted these. They
have created a peaceful, new warren, which can be the place where many other
hero stories begin in innocence. The hero cycle of Watership Down collates with
the cycle of nature, because at the end of the adventure, “the first primroses
were beginning to bloom” (p.283).
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