Study Guide to Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by John Updike, two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction in 1982 and 1991. Titles in this study guide include Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. As a prominent voice of literary realism for 1970s American fiction, Updike’s Rabbit novels commented on the changing social and political hierarchies of late modernism in America’s Eisenhour era. Moreover, Updike has been called a “maker of fables and parables, ” which can be seen through his use of symbolism and imagery. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Updike’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO RABBIT, RUN

THEME AND STRUCTURE: OVERVIEW

The theme and structure of the novel are in some measure already suggested in the title. The main character is rabbit-like, that is, inclined to run in all directions, generally easily frightened, highly sexually oriented, and always fearful of being trapped. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom has had that nickname since childhood; he has also inherited a questionable destiny, if we may analyze his family name: Angst (fear) + Strom (stream) = Angstrom, or “Stream of Fear.” (Students will also hear an echo here of the angstrom, a measure of wavelength, one ten-billionth of a meter!)

As a teenager, Rabbit Angstrom becomes a star basketball player, and so literally earns the nickname because of his rabbitlike agility and ability to run. So, for at least his earlier years, everybody is happy to see Rabbit run. But when the high school athlete begins to find adult life one continuous anticlimax after his glorious achievements as an adolescent, then the inclination on his part is to suspect a net or a trap every which way he turns, and that the best thing for him to do, as rabbit or man, is to run. In the course of the novel, Rabbit runs away three times, the first time probably the most meaningful of the three. Rabbit is on his way home from his job as a demonstrator of a kitchen gadget. At twenty-six, the prospect before him is not very bright. His wife is slovenly, pregnant, and inclined to drink. His job is still another one of the dead-end jobs he has been able to get since his discharge from service in the Korean War. His little son Nelson does not seem to have the hands needed to become a good basketball player. His in-laws, the Springers, own four used-car lots in Brewer, and never fail to remind him that their daughter has married beneath her.

On his way home from work on that day in March, Rabbit stops off to play a little basketball with some of the youngsters in his neighborhood. The feel of the ball sets off remembrances of glories past, also a reminder of the hole of unfortunate external circumstances in which he is trapped. When he arrives at home, the sight of his pregnant wife, watching TV with a drink in her hand and no meal being prepared, throws him into a state of despair. She orders him to pick up Nelson at the senior Angstroms’ house; instead, he takes off in another direction, hoping to head due south. After driving for some time, he finds that he has been going west, and is actually coming full circle back to where he started his flight. As we shall see later, he meets Ruth Leonard, the big prostitute with a heart of gold, with whom he will try to establish a creative sexual relationship.

The epigraph chosen for Rabbit, Run is Pascal’s Pensee 507: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.” We already know about some of the external circumstances of Rabbit’s life from the brief references to the plot above. We also know how Rabbit looks upon these circumstances as a net or trap (a key metaphor in the novel). We shall see how the hardheartedness of many of the characters, but especially Rabbit, turns away from “the motions of Grace,” and we shall try to identify those characters later on who, consciously or unconsciously, serve as agents or instruments of divine grace as they appeal to Rabbit. The theme of the novel, to reduce it to its most simplistic terms, may be stated as the struggle of a once graceful youth to become a mature, Grace-full adult.

GENESIS OF THE NOVEL

So far as we have been able to ascertain, Updike himself was never a “public” basketball player; nor do we know why he became so preoccupied with basketball in his writings. In any event, much of the general plot outline, theme, and characterization of Rabbit, Run was tried out in two earlier works: the poem, “Ex-Basketball Player,” in The Carpentered Hen, and the short story, “Ace in the Hole,” in The Same Door. In the short story, it’s Fred “Ace” Anderson, former star of the Olinger High School basketball team, who has the endless succession of dull jobs, and unlovable wife, a daughter who obviously cannot become a future basketball player, and dreams about his past athletic glory. But Fred is no rabbit type; he is satisfied with his dreams, and eventually even arrives at a meaningful sexual relationship with his own wife. Rabbit, on the other hand, is a captive of his memories of the past and of the visions of escape and freedom that assail him. Rabbit Angstrom runs, and he runs scared.

STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL

There are three parts (not chapters) to the novel, and in each part a key flight or run by Rabbit occurs. In Part 1, Rabbit takes off at the very beginning of the action (23), when he decides to drive south, instead of driving his son back from his parents’ house. In Part 2, the second flight is actually divided between Ruth and Janice. Rabbit has been living with Ruth for about two months, has a job as Mrs. Smith’s gardener, and expects to continue that way. Then Eccles calls to inform him that Janice has gone into labor. Rabbit leaves Ruth to go to the hospital. The departure from Ruth is at least a tentative one, knowing Rabbit as one does. The second flight becomes more definitive when Rabbit attempts to make love to Janice soon after her confinement. She refuses him, and he runs off in frustration and anger-to Ruth. Rabbit is with Ruth when the news reaches him that Janice has accidentally drowned the baby. Rabbit comes back (we are now in Part 3) for the funeral and possible reconciliation (at least Eccles hopes for one). It is in Part 3 (at the funeral) that Rabbit disclaims all responsibility for the baby’s death, and takes off for the final flight (with a brief stop at Ruth’s, for her final rejection of him) for freedom, for nowhere, into space.

The structure of the novel is not really that rigid: nor is it as loose or as sloppy as some more recent novels. It is fluid, it is in-or suggests-motion. “I originally wrote Rabbit, Run in the present tense, in a sort of cinematic way,” Updike told Jane Howard. “I thought of it as Rabbit, Run: A Movie.” And to Charles Samuels he explained that “The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.” The effect to be achieved was that of something happening to you at that very moment in which you are sitting there, reading the novel (or watching the film).

The cinematic concept is carried even further in the use of montages, both visual and aural. For example, on the drive down south (or at least he thought he was going south), Rabbit hears over the car radio a melange of popular songs, commercials, and news (29-30). In cinematic terms-or in current TV terms-such a montage could be a mere back-projection conveying the illusion of motion by Rabbit, although he, for all practical purposes, is going nowhere. Other examples of verbal montages may be found throughout the novel.

Another structural device used is the introspective interior monologue, or near-soliloquy, much in the manner of Molly bloom, in James Joyce’s Ulysses. One is by Ruth (122-24), the other by Janice (208-11), both with very strong sexual overtones. The passages are long, wordy, and in fact violate the principle of fluid or cinematic narration that Updike claimed to be following in writing the novel. The effect might have been stronger - and more consistent with the cinematic principle referred to above - if the first person singular had been used. On the other hand, the author may have intended the “monologues” to be that static in order to suggest the passivity of the two main female characters in relation to the more active Rabbit.

Updike has also made use of the parable or extended metaphor. Because the rabbit metaphor is probably the key metaphor of the novel (the trap metaphor may be a very close second), it is sometimes hard to differentiate it from the Peter Rabbit story or parable by Beatrix Potter. Although the allusion to the Potter story may have been an unconscious recollection on Updike’s part, there is a later admission by the author of the parallel between Harry and Peter Rabbit (which we shall explore in greater depth later). Still another parable-or parabolic use of it-may be found in the references by Jack and Lucy Eccles to the Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc. In both instances, the undisciplined Harry Angstrom, the “naughty man,” is placed alongside (hence, parable) naughty Peter Rabbit (Potter) and naughty Jim (Belloc).

MAJOR THEMES

“I once played a game real well. I really did, I once played a game real well. I really did, Rabbit tells the minister, Eccles. “And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second rate.” The “little thing” Rabbit is referring to is his marriage, that same second-rate marriage that Eccles is trying to save. And there was also that one second-rate job after another, and the second-rate 1955 Ford that his father-in-law sold to him in 1957, and his whole second-rate, anti-climactic adulthood following his glorious, free-moving adolescence. This is the main theme of the novel-a conscious attempt to reject the “net” of responsibility and an instinctive rejection of the phony, second-rate world around him. The result of this pathetic (not heroic, not tragic) disaffection with life is the powerful impulse to run away-once, twice, three times. The third and last time he runs away, it is the act of a desperate man driven by his instincts, his “feeling” for what is right. It is certainly the act of a coward, and in some ways futile (for he must eventually - and does, in Rabbit Redux-come back). But it is at the least a gesture, a token of his desire to continue to fight for life, as the author understands it. “Rabbit, run; it is the author’s urgent, ironic advice to his hero, an imperative cry from the heart.” Ironically or not, Rabbit’s mother echoes the same advice in Rabbit Redux: “Run. Leave Brewer. I never knew why you came back. There’s nothing here anymore... Don’t say no to life, Hassy. Bitterness never helps... Pray for rebirth. Pray for your own rebirth.” (175)

Rabbit’s life is mirrored in the structure of the book; it is as if his whole life consisted of a series of traps set for him by society. As soon as he escapes from one trap, he blunders into another; life for him seems to be one accident after another, a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, “a magic dance empty of belief.” While Janice is in the hospital waiting to be delivered of the baby, his doubts become even greater. “There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave.” (165) And so he just lived in his skin and didn’t give a hoot for the consequences of anything to anybody else. “If you have the guts to be yourself,” he proclaims, “other people’ll pay your price.” (125) But he hasn’t got the guts (his sister Mim has, as we find out later), and as Ruth reminds him, “Don’t you ever think you’re going to have to pay the price?” (122)

If Updike’s stories repeatedly support the idea that few if any causes are worth man’s sacrifices, and that the age of heroes is long past, then Rabbit, easily disillusioned as he is by a world which he has never made, is right in running. Impulsive as the gesture may be, it is still essential to his spiritual nature. Running, to be sure, makes him a social outcast; he has, after all, rejected his family and all the normal responsibilities which life has imposed upon him. Those rejections, one is led to believe by some literary theologians, are part of his “saintliness.” For Rabbit has “sampled conventional ethics and found them wanting.” Even Eccles, an ordained minister and theologian in good standing, recognizes some of the attributes of “saintliness” in Rabbit, and agrees that perhaps saints should, after all, not marry. Everybody is eligible for redemption, so long as their hearts have remained open for Grace. (101) And certainly Rabbit, a victim of his instincts, not of his head or heart, qualifies.

Rabbit’s angst arises from a fear of nothingness, the consequence of man’s having fallen from grace, according to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s definition of Existentialism differs from the more popular one given by Heidegger. The latter claimed that man finds meaning only within himself, a definition that Rabbit would gladly live with, if he could; the former claimed that the subjective understanding can be acceptable only when it coincides with “objective truth.” Rabbit could find some assurance in Pascal’s notion that man “is a creature of contradictions and ambivalences such as pure logic can never grasp,” but he could never free himself of the fear of having fallen from grace. And this is the full thrust of the Pascal pensee in relation to the whole novel. Rabbit dreams of founding a “new religion.” (234) He conceives of his running as in the nature of a quest, a search in the spirit of Grace. The reader is more inclined to evaluate this running as a product of his fear and irresponsibility, and also of his hardness of heart (e.g., in his reasonable and unreasonable sexual demands upon Janice and Ruth, in his readiness to abandon them and his son Nelson); but he is often soft (“I am lovable,” he tells Ruth). He keeps trying to escape from the traps of external circumstances, and, being rabbitlike, he often does. But he never manages to attain that state of grace urged upon him by several “agents of grace”: the old farmer at the gas tank, Tothero, the Chief Mouseketeer, Mr. and Mrs. Angstrom, Jack Eccles, Fritz Kruppenbusch, the “Lord’s Grace Table Napkins” radio commercial, and others (to be developed below under “Religious Influences”). But Rabbit is not yet ready to found a “new Religion” (the concept is, however, more fully explored by Updike in Rabbit Redux), even though he has much in common with Pascal, according to the following passage on the nature of human existence: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity, before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished being here rather than there, why now rather than then.” Or, as our frightened and astonished Rabbit would ask, “Why am I me?” (235) In the context of his character and the circumstances prevailing, he cannot choose to be otherwise. For no matter how hard he may try to be otherwise, he will still be (in the words of Pascal) “an All in relation to Nothingness, a Nothingness in relation to the All.”

STYLE: LANGUAGE

In reviewing Rabbit, Run, Whitney Balliett said that “John Updike ... writes only for himself. The results of this total self-absorption come very close to the ultimate achieved by all consummate writers-a new prose.” Norman Mailer, on the other hand, spoke of the “mud pies in prose” that Updike was guilty of in the same novel. The fact is that Updike’s prose is neither; it rarely defies analysis, as does Ulysses or Orlando (by Virginia Woolf), and can be understood by any reader who makes fair allowance for the occasional poetic flourishes and the long, sustained passages of introspection and recollection, as in the Ruth and Janet “soliloquies” and Harry’s visions (especially the one at the conclusion of Part 2). Mailer’s reservation (and he had many) is based on (a) Updike’s refusal to use real mud in making his pies, and (b) the absence of simple, journalistic prose in a work of fiction.

There are, to be sure, many poetic flourishes in Updike’s prose, and we shall give some examples below. There is also a tendency to employ euphemisms in several of the sexual passages, and this, too, we shall illustrate below. The euphemisms are completely abandoned in Rabbit Redux, and it is therefore possible to suggest that Updike was trying to reflect the more proper atmosphere of the Eisenhower Fifties in Rabbit, Run, as the more explicit language in Rabbit Redux reflects the greater permissiveness of the Sixties.

On his way south to the Gulf of Mexico, Rabbit passes through Delaware, the home of the Du Ponts. He begins to imagine “A barefoot Du Pont. Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left.” (25) Note the inevitable (for Updike) alliteration. But note, also, how appropriate both the language and the imagery are for Rabbit. More alliteration now, and note, also, the appropriateness of “hot hollow” for a rabbit: “Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep.” (43) Now a sexual passage, as seen through a very slight film of euphemism: “He returns to her back, until his wrists ache, and flops from astride his mermaid truly weary, as if under a seaspell to sleep.” (One can quarrel with the image of...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to John Updike
• Introduction to Rabbit, Run
• Character Analyses
• Criticism
• Introduction to Rabbit Redux
• Character Analyses
• Essay Questions and Answers
• Bibliography