The Cobra Hole Symbol Analysis

The cobra hole is the spot beneath the ground where Nagaina retreats in her final battle with Rikki-tikki. It’s also the location of the story’s climax, where Nagaina is at her most dangerous but where victory will be final and absolute. In this way it symbolizes the ultimate test of Rikki-tikki’s bravery, the essential darkness he must defeat to fulfill of his status as a hero.

Rikki-tikki is essentially on the “Hero’s Journey,” a template for mythic storytelling first postulated by philosopher Joseph Campbell. The pattern can be seen again and again from stories all over the world, from the ancient Greeks to modern stories like Star Wars and The Hunger Games. In these stories, the hero always travels to a strange and dangerous land, in search of a cure for some ailment afflicting the community. It culminates with a final confrontation in a place of darkness, where the hero is alone and deprived of any allies or special gifts.

In “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the dangerous land is the garden, the threat is the cobras, and the hole is that final place where the evil is defeated once and for all. Rikki-tikki is sometimes likened to a knight, and Kipling describes him with knightly virtues like bravery and selflessness. If so, then the cobra’s hole is the dragon’s lair. It’s Nagaina’s home turf, after all, and “very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be, care to follow a cobra into its hole.” Only there, where his opponent’s power is at its height, can the final blow be struck.