Cocoon is a nest of an insect built around itself with its saliva to safeguard its life. The name of the insect is silk worm. The worm builds the shell-like cocoon of oval shape around itself but forgets or fails to live a vent to it. Therefore, the insect remains inside the cocoon and suffocates to death.
The author entitled the present novel as cocoon because he thinks himself to have been arrested himself into the labyrinths of complicated relations, activities, incidents, and misdeeds so much so that he feels like the silk worm that dies within the cocoon.
The hero becomes the secretary of students‘ council with good intentions such as setting an example for the society, proving his iron amongst his pals and also proving to himself to be of great valour. In other words, he turns a little more ambitious as he grows. In the first place, he deviates from his proper path of studying seriously for the exams and gets inspired by such unnecessary things for which his father had always discouraged him. Like any other father, Pandurang‘s father also wanted him to do good at studies and also wanted him to curb his expenses. But Pandurang, on the contrary, not only increased his expenses but went bankrupts by over expenditure and found himself in deficit of four hundred rupees. This happened out of his sheer immature behaviour. Unlike other fathers, Pandurang‘s father helps him timely by giving him four hundred rupees with which he not only comes out of the shell of difficulties but he gains a valuable life time lesson. The author‘s mental state is like that of the silk worm that arrests itself into the cocoon and suffocates. The author introspects on his own helpless condition in a very sincere manner when he says that his condition has become like the cocoon. He himself has created it around him and now the same cocoon is stifling him within.
We should not forget that though the author is thinking pessimistically and agonizingly on his present lot, it was his father who lends the hands of timely help and brings him out of this trouble. Thought he hero, Pandurang talks much against his father and carries an infected mind against him, we need to understand that he fails to comprehend his father to a great extent much because of a communication gap and not because of any other reason. We also should not forget that his father loved him beyond all limits but at the same time both of them seem to have failed to properly and timely express their love for each other. If only his father had expressed his love for Pandurang at time, Pandurang wouldn‘t have felt alienated and lonely and unattended like a loveless creature as he does.