Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a children's book written by Rudyard Kipling, about a mongoose adopted by an English family in India. The story begins with a young boy, Teddy, who finds a mongoose washed up on the shore after a flood. The mongoose was friendly and protected the house from poisonous snakes; they called him Rikki-Tikki-Tavi because it's an onomatopoeia for the sound Rikki makes. The story explains that mongooses are curious, so Rikki spent his time exploring everything in the house. While exploring outside, Rikki meets a bird who explains that one of her babies fell from the nest and was eaten by Nag, the cobra. That night, Rikki overhears the cobras' plans to kill the family, so that Rikki will leave and they can take over the garden. Nag sleeps in the bathroom overnight, planning to kill Teddy's father the next morning; Rikki attacks him, causing his father to wake up and shoot Nag, saving the family. Rikki also helps save the family by distracting Nag's widow, Nagaina, as she was about to attack, eventually killing her as well. The family was very grateful to him because he had saved all their lives. The story is written in a moralistic tone. After defeating the first snake, Karait, he could have indulged and eaten his prey or all the food offered that night as a reward, but instead he ate a light dinner because he knew there were more cobras to fight so he didn't want to be slowed down. “That bite paralyzed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was about to eat him from tail to head, according to his family's custom, when he remembered that a large meal makes a mongoose slow” (Kippling 16). The tone of that passage suggests that this anti-gluttony stance is one the reader should also take when necessary. Many asp......middle of paper......use Rikki as a weapon to control snakes. “'Teddy is safer with that little animal in his room than with a guard dog. If a snake came into his room…' But Teddy's mother would think of nothing so terrible” (Kipling 5). In addition to keeping Rikki as a pet and companion for her son, she sees how this could benefit and protect her family. Teddy's father sees Karait as a threat to Teddy, so he beats the snake with a stick and shoots Nag when he hears him fighting with Rikki. Instead of trying to rearrange the garden so the snakes can't hide in the tall grass, he simply uses his human power to eliminate the threat permanently. This book could be seen as an inversion of the Garden of Eden allegory. Teddy is an innocent boy in a garden, threatened by a snake. Instead of being driven out of the garden, the serpent is defeated, its innocence is preserved, and it remains in the garden.