The Jungle Book: Point of View, Style, Technique

The Jungle book is written in third person, throughout each story within it. Despite this technique, Kipling manages to make the reader feel very close, almost as if they are looking over their shoulder, to the character being focused on. "He is a man-a man! snarled the pack; and most of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning to switch." (Kipling 37) This phrase creates the imagery of one being behind Shere Khan, at a low angle, watching the wolves close in on him. The third person style is the most effective style for adventure type novels, and gives the author the freedom to let the reader be close to, or see through the eyes of any character in the novel. A first person account of this book might be very awkward, as being close to more than one character is key in this particular novel. The novel is written in somewhat of a modern-middle english. It is very formal and uses language from both styles. Kipling, unlike many other writers using similar english, manages to convey the meaning behind his writing very well, and modern readers can enjoy it without putting in the annoying effort to 'decode' the middle english phrases. Regardless of the structure, this tale is extremely compelling, and incites a primitive satisfaction achieved through a simple task with a simple reward, that is generally experienced when reading about nature. The Jungle Book had a large effect on the world of fiction, and started a very popular trend of telling a story through the point of view of animals. This style tends to belittle the animals at the beginning of the tale, but as the story progresses, the reader feels as if the animal is at an equal, if not greater level of reasoning than the human subjects in the book. Generally, in alot of these stories, the humans are shown a simpler way of life by animals, that is in a way, more advanced than their current way of life, which turns the human characters against each other. I'm going to reference "Planet of the Apes" a second time to say that in the first film, the apes are thought of by the human visitors to be close minded because they try to protect secrets and see humans as perilous intruders, and will not recognize them as anything else, but in the end of the movie, the intelligent human realizes that the ape's simple way of life is far superior to the human's, when he finds that the earth was destroyed in a nuclear war. The Jungle Book has a very effective style overall, and led the way to an entire new genre of writing.