Watership Down Characters: Fiver

Fiver is very small and underweight. He is more tense and jumpy than the other rabbits. He has “wide, staring eyes and a way of raising and turning his head which suggested not so much caution as a kind of ceaseless, nervous tension.” As rabbits can count up to four, any number after that is hrair, “a lot” or literally “a thousand”. Fiver’s Lapine name is Hrairoo, meaning “Little Thousand” or “Little of a Lot”. He was the runt of a five-rabbit litter.

Fiver has a strange gift. He can see the future in bits and pieces, and can see through pretenses and shams. This makes him wiser than other rabbits, and he is truly the one who guides them to Watership Down. He is timid, but when he sees things as they truly are, he acquires a sort of quiet, almost eerie eloquence that commands attention. At one point, Bigwig gets furious with him because Fiver is the only one who can see that in the warren they have just found, there are snares everywhere and the rabbits are unwittingly a part of the man’s farm. “You wretched little beetle!” he yells. “It’s ‘me, me, me’ all the time, isn’t it! ‘Oh, I’ve got a funny feeling in my toe, so now we must all go and stand on our heads!’ And now we’ve found a fine warren and got in without a fight or even a disturbance, you’ve got to do your best to upset everyone! I suppose you’ll go wandering about now until an owl gets you!”

“No,” Fiver says quietly. “You are closer to death than I.”

“Are you trying to frighten me?” Bigwig snaps. “Well, I’m finished with you – and I’m going back to the warren to make sure everyone else is too!” He turns and dashes off through the bushes – and runs straight into a snare, proving what Fiver had been saying.

Fiver lends an air of mystery and things unseen to the story. “Fiver,” says Hazel, “what would we have done without you [at the farm]? We’d none of us be here, would we?”

“You’re sure we are here then?”

“That’s too mysterious for me,” replies Hazel. “What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s another place – another country, isn’t there? We go there when we sleep; at other times too [as in when we daydream]; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it’s all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think that only shows they don’t know much about it. It’s a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really – there or here?”

Fiver is admirable because he can stand firm in the face of disbelief. Richard Adams modeled him after Cassandra, the ancient prophetess cursed always to tell the truth and never to be believed. Even when everyone else thinks he is making a fuss about nothing, he does not squash his gift down and say, “Oh, yes, I’m sure I must have just eaten something that disagreed with me and I’m having a nightmare,” if he is really sure that this is his gift “speaking” to him. He “sticks to his guns” and always tells the truth. I admire him for his honesty as well.