The Jungle Book

Analyze the songs and poems included at the end of each story. How do they relate to the themes of the overall stories? Why do you think Rudyard Kipling includes them?

What is the role of gender in The Jungle Book? How are female characters portrayed? What is different about gender between human and animal characters?

Who are the villains of The Jungle Book? Pick two antagonists from two different stories and compare and contrast them. What traits do they share and how does Kipling portray their opposition to the protagonists?

What does this collection of stories suggest about the concept of authority? Who are the leaders in this story and how are they depicted?

Analyze the speech patterns of different characters in The Jungle Book. How does their dialogue and word choice impact their characterization? What is the effect of Kipling writing dialogue using archaic language?

From an environmentalist perspective, what do the stories in The Jungle Book say about the relationship between humans and nature? How does Kipling portray positive and negative interactions between humans and animals?

Rudyard Kipling makes many literary allusions in The Jungle Book, both to stories drawn from the Christian Bible, and to Indian tales from the Panchatantra and Hindu mythology. Choose one of the stories and identify a literary allusion. How does Kipling adapt and transform the story for his own purposes in The Jungle Book?

Theorist Homi K. Bhabha writes about the notion of cultural hybridity in colonial and postcolonial societies. Rather than a conflict between a person’s native culture and an outside culture, Bhabha argues that in colonized nations, “we are confronted with the nation split within itself, articulating the heterogeneity of its population” (Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994). How would you apply this theory of hybridity to the characters in The Jungle Book?