Structure and use of Point of View

I am reading Watership Down by Richard Adams and I have finished forty of the fifty chapters. As you know the point of view in any piece of literature is a huge factor in contributing towards the reaction of the audience, and Watership Down is no exception. The two most used points of view are that of an omniscient narrator, the main characters such as Hazel, General Woundwort, and Bigwig are given places in the novel where the story is told from their perspective but the reason for the omniscient narrator is so important that I am going to focus on that.

If Watership Down had been written specifically from the rabbits point's of view, the book would be quite confusing. They often use a "rabbit language" mixed within their English that makes absolutely no sense to a reader; Elil, Hlessi, Hrair, Hraka, Hrududu, Inle just to name a few of the words. But because these words are natural to the rabbits, they require no explanation to understand the words and in turn use them themselves. However on the flip side if the novel had been written from a human's perspective or at the very least a less than omniscient narrator the book would be much shorter. "Oh those rabbits are doing something...looks maybe like fighting...hmm..." and that would pretty much be it. But because the narrator knows everything it can stop an action at any time and explain everything we need to know in order for it all to make sense.

"The rabbits' anxieties and strain in climbing the down were different, therefore, from those which you, reader, will experience if you go there."

We're no longer restricted to a rabbit's view of the world, and can move between rabbit, human, and anything else when the occasion needs it. So the narrator can tell us what it's like for a rabbit to walk uphill in comparison to a human.