Watership Down heard of." Fred Inglis, in his book "The Promise of Happiness: Value and meaning in children's fiction", praises the author’s use of prose to express the strangeness of ordinary human inventions from the rabbits' perspective. "Watership Down"'s universal motifs of liberation and self-determination have led to the tendency of minority groups to read their own narrative into the novel, despite the author's assurance (in 2005) that it "was never intended to become some sort of allegory or parable." The author Rachel Kadish, reflecting on her own superimposition of the founding of Israel onto "Watership Down", has remarked "Turns out plenty
Watership Down realm of terrors to bring back some boon to save himself and his people" is a powerful element in Adams's tale. This theme derives from the author's exposure to the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell, especially his study of comparative mythology, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (1949), and in particular, Campbell's "monomyth" theory, also based on Carl Jung's view of the unconscious mind, that "all the stories in the world are really one story." The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between "Watership Down's" characters and those in Homer's "Odyssey" and Virgil's "Aeneid". Hazel's courage, Bigwig's strength, Blackberry's