Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Three character traits are held above the rest for the animals in the story and become important motifs in the story: devotion, loyalty, and courage. Mrs. Frisby is the first to exhibit these traits, and she does so fully and passionately. When her son Timothy becomes severely ill, Mrs. Frisby’s motherly devotion propels her to acts of great courage to save him, such facing great heights on the back of a crow. She exhibits the same courage when Mrs. Frisby finds out her family must move in only five days in stead of the few weeks she had been anticipating. She does not hesitate to do whatever is necessary to solve the dilemma and seeks advice from a mysterious owl and a group of highly intelligent rats. Mrs. Frisby is terrified in each situation, but courage is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to conquer it, and this is just what Mrs. Frisby does. When Mrs. Frisby is required to step right into the center of danger to dose Dragon with sleeping powder, the very act that got her husband killed, she does so bravely:

I’m Timothy’s mother. If you, and Arthur, and others in your group can take risk to save him, sure I can, too. And consider this: I don’t want any of you to be hurt—maybe even killed—by Dragon. But even more, I don’t want the attempt to fail. Perhaps the worst that will happen to you, with luck, is that you will have to scatter and run, and leave my house unmoved. But then what will happen to us? Timothy, at least, will die. So, if there is no one else to put the cat to sleep, I must do it. (92)

For Mrs. Frisby, her devotion to her family is what fuels her courage. Mrs. Frisby also shows great loyalty in the way she upholds the rats’ request to keep their operations secret and makes lifelong friends of theirs in the end.

The rats exhibit great courage and loyalty as well, beginning with Justin’s first escape from the cage in the laboratory. Justin is the bravest and most intelligent rat, and he is always on the front line willing to do what is needed to keep his colony safe. His and Nicodemus’s devotion to the rats is pure and strong. The rats’ escape from the lab is also in itself an act of bravery, and their escape from the rosebush is perhaps the greatest act of courage shown in the novel. Ten rats, including Nicodemus, Justin, and Brutus, volunteer to stay behind and fool the humans into thinking they are seeing many more rats. They plan to escape at the last moment, but two do not make it out alive. One of these two, a rat who goes unnamed, goes back to save the other and is not successful. Mr. Ages remarks on how brave he was as the novel concludes.

Luck is also significant motif in the lives of the rats and mice in the story. Much of their success is due to chance, and the author makes this quite clear throughout by regularly reminding the reader of the influence of luck in any given situation. Mrs. Frisby’s good luck begins when she finds an abandoned cache of food, likely left behind by a squirrel or groundhog that was killed by the farmer. Next, she happens to find Jeremy tangled up, as Jeremy is the one who both tells her about and takes her to the owl, and Jeremy is lucky she came along to untangle him before the cat found him. Mrs. Frisby is lucky again when she and Jeremy just barely escape Dragon, the farm cat. Later on, Mrs. Frisby is lucky when she is caught by Billy, the farm boy, rather than the cat. Billy at least puts her in a cage, allowing her to survive. Mrs. Frisby is also lucky enough to run into Mr. Ages in the rat tunnel, who helps her gain access to Nicodemus. The entire Frisby family is lucky when the night is warm as the rats move the cinder block, and Timothy recovers perfectly well. Without luck, Mrs. Frisby and her family may not have survived those few days.

The rats’ intelligence is due to chance as well; they are selected for the A group, which is set to be injected the most, and thus become the most intelligent and live the longest. When they escape, they are lucky enough to have two mice with them, Jonathan and Mr. Ages, who help them remove the wire covering the air duct. The rats’ life outside the lab involved “some pieces of great good luck, two in particular, that help to explain” (140) how they got to the farm. The first was finding Boniface Estate, which happened to be unoccupied for the winter as the owners were away on their honeymoon. They were able to stay warm, safe, eat as much as they liked, and explore “the greatest treasure of all” (144), the study. It was filled with books on all sorts of topics, and each rat took to their interests fiercely, becoming experts in their chosen field of study. The rats’ second instance of luck was finding the toy tinker’s truck, full of mechanical bits, tools sized for rats, and more food. It supplied the rosebush home they developed, and it helped them learn how to apply the knowledge they gained at the Boniface Estate. Nicodemus makes it clear though that coming upon such a cornucopia was not as much of a blessing as it appeared to be. Instead, having everything they need and much more is making the rats complacent and useless—it puts them in the Rat Race. Their “almost luxurious existence” (166) is why Nicodemus decides to move them out to Thorn Valley, away from humans.

Engines appear as important symbols of industry, progress, and the dangers these things bring. The tractor engine starting up at the beginning of spring is a signal of change and danger for all the animals that make the fields their home during the winter. The sound of the tractor is especially alarming for Mrs. Frisby because it means she must move or her whole family will perish. This symbolizes the idea of rapid progress, which was of great concern for Americans when the book was published, as science was developing at exponential rates and genetic experimentation was entering the mainstream. Just as Mrs. Frisby was not ready to move her family, but the plow being brought back to life forced her hand to figure out a way to move, so too was the American public feeling a bit wary of science plowing ahead into ideas they weren’t ready to tackle. This symbol is further enhanced by the engine being the catalyst of death for the group of defector rats led by Jenner. The rats knew enough to understand how useful the engine could be, but they didn’t know enough to unplug it first, and lack of knowledge killed them. This illustrates how dangerous science and technology can be if it is used carelessly or decisions are made before the full repercussions of those decisions are understood, such as in the case of genetic research in the mid-20th century.