Points of View

The stories of Jungle Book are stories told in the third person by a narrator, as one might tell bedtime stories to children. Only in "The White Seal" and "Servants of the Queen," is the narrator actually mentioned, and then he is not identified. The reader gets the sense of a wise older narrator, one who is intimately familiar with Colonial Indian and the jungle therein, but not of it, as a British colonial officer would be. The narrator, for the most part, is impartial and allows the stories' characters to tell the story. Only occasionally does he interject, such as at the end of "Tiger, Tiger," when he tells us that the rest of Mowgli's story is a story for grownups. This is also true at the beginning of the "White Seal," where the narrator tells us of the winter wren that originally told him...