Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The JungleThe Jungle Book is obviously set in the jungle. But which jungle? The Kipling Society places The Jungle Book in the Central Provinces of India, near Seoni (hence the "Seeonee" Wolf Pack m...
Narrator Point of View
You might think the narrative technique of The Jungle Book is third-person objective, following a different protagonist in each chapter, like Mowgli, Kotick, or Toomai and his elephant. But you'd b...
Genre
A fable is a story that conveys some sort of moral or lesson, using animals as the main characters. This goes hand in hand with the narration style of The Jungle Book. Our narrator is an unnamed ma...
Tone
To get a good idea of the general tone of The Jungle Book, look no further than the first line: It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his da...
Writing Style
Sit Right Back and You'll Hear a Tale…The narrator doesn't quite break the fourth wall, but he does break the spell of the stories occasionally by reminding us that he is telling them, and that w...
What's Up With the Title?
The Jungle Book is a little misleading. Out of the book's fourteen chapters, ten take place in the jungle, but the others don't. Kotick the seal would be pretty out of place in the jungle, and his...
What's Up With the Ending?
At the end of Mowgli's story, Mowgli kills Shere Khan and ends up with a nice tiger suit that wouldn't look out of place at Fashion Week. At the end of Kotick's story, the white seal finds a safe b...
Tough-o-Meter
The Jungle Book looks innocuous enough—sometimes there's a little elephant on the cover, or a still from the Disney movie—but the book was first published in 1894, and books were just harder to...