Rikki Ripson Analysis

Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a short story from his The Jungle Book collection that tells the tale of a young mongoose adopted into a family of mother, father, and son Teddy. The mongoose, the titular character, is kept about the house in order to ward off or kill snakes that may harm the family. As the story develops, Rikki becomes increasingly human-like. Eventually, the denouement arrives as Rikki kills the two cobras that had become the central threat in the story. Both the appropriation and anthropomorphizing of the animals within the story serve to convey certain aspects of the tale. The reading of the story is heavily influenced also by the author’s rhetorical strategies; these strategies are in turn influenced by the intended audience of the work as well as the author’s potential intended purposes. The author’s ethos is established primarily through the third-person omniscient narrative perspective. This perspective is established in the first lines of the story with the phrase “This is the story …show more content…
The use of human-like animals (Rikki, Darzee the bird, Chuchundra the muskrat, and Nag and Nagaina the cobras) is perhaps the primary demonstration of this appeal by the author; animal characters often indicate a certain mood, tone, and purpose of a story that would appeal to children, with minimal violence and a more light-hearted but still somewhat moral theme. Much of the story’s scenery and imagery also supports this hypothesis. Multiple references to calm sunshine as well as several spells of sitting in the family’s laps by Rikki further these appeals . Rikki’s anthropomorphized actions and qualities that portray this pathetic appeal also play into the thematic purpose of animals in this story: to add emotional appeals on an accessible and relatable