The Jungle Book: Intrinsic Merit, Pleasure, Universality

Intrinsic merit is a book's ability to remain popular and enjoyable through generations of time. Despite being written in 1894, The Jungle Book was a surprisingly good book to a teenager living in the 21st century. The language is slightly reminiscent of middle english, "Did'st thou think these creatures could move so swiftly?" (Kipling 106)and some of the explanations of a situation run on for a long time, but the story is very enjoyable. The book has the same feel of "Lord of the Flies", that 'nature' kind of feel, that makes the book seem simple. Simplicity can be enjoyed through all generations, no matter how much media or advertisement they are exposed to. I myself found the book captivating, and it sort of let me forget that I had hours of homework to do later that day. Because the book is seen through the eyes of the animals in a jungle, who have no responsibility other than to stay alive, the reader feels a similar captivation while experiencing the book. "We are great, we are free we are wonderful. We are the wonderful people of the Jungle!" (Kipling 71)The book is pleasurable, and in my opinion, underrated. The Disney adaptation is surprisingly not far off from the book itself, and achieves the same simplistic feel reached by the novel. The stories at the end of the book are simple as well, very short, and for lack of a better term, one might describe them as 'cute', excluding of course the section of "the white seal" in which the seal goes on a killing spree. At the beginning of that story, there is sentimentality, as the baby seals are learning to swim, and playing on the beach. "Rikki Tikki Tavi" is the most relatable to it's reader as the story takes place in a secluded home in the woods, with a family of three. "Toomai of the Elephants" achieves the most sentimental feel throughout the entire book, because of the bond between Little Toomai and the elephant. The book is very universal, and caters to almost every demographic, except multiple times throughout the book, Kipling references the Indian people as very foreign, which of course they are to him, and to the characters in the book, because they are two very different societies, but more than once, the Indian people are referred to by Kipling as 'brown people'. Other than thet small matter, which can be excused because of the time in which the book was written, the story can be understood and enjoyed by most of the inhabitants of the earth. The story is told through animals, so to every reader, there is a foreign air about it, but Kipling words the accounts of the animals so well that it almost seems as if the humans in the stories are foreign. He does a very good job of personalizing the story's effect to each demographic equally and greatly.