Vilnius Pedagogical University Faculty of Foreign Languages Department of English Philology

Master Paper Inga Banytė

American Life and Values in John Updike’s Trilogy “Rabbit, Run”, “Rabbit Redux”, “Rabbit is Rich”.

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of MA in English Philology.

Academic Advisor: dr. D. Miniotaitė

VILNIUS 2005

Introduction

The aims of the Paper are to describe the mid – twentieth century social, economic, ideological and cultural processes in America and show the gradual formation of mass society with its shifting values in American writer’s John Updike’s trilogy “ Rabbit, Run” (1960), “Rubbit Redux “ (1971) and “ Rabbit is Rich” (1981). Using the descriptive method, we will try to rediscover American life since the 1950s and understand the human condition in America today. In the introduction I will describe American life in the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s with the characteristic social, economic and cultural events and changes of each decade. I will also introduce John Updike as one of the most accomplished American writers, and discuss the reflection of the American reality since the 1950s in his fiction, emphasizing the most characteristic features and dominant thematic concerns of his works. Finally, I will present J. Updike’s “Rabbit” novels , each reflecting a certain decade, starting with the 1950s and finishing with the 1970s, with their own social and cultural climate. In the third part of the Paper we will watcth the main character Harry Angstom in different phases of his evolutionary process. I will try to show the protagonist’s gradual loss of his individuality and spirituality against the background of different social and cultural processes in America. Through Harry Angstom we will see the formation of mass society in the second half of the twenticth century. In the fourth part of the Paper we will observe the decline of tradicional values in America. Through tht characters of “ Rabbit” trilogy I will analyse the dissolution of marriage and family life, and the lack of meaningful work in contemporary America. In order to discuss J. Updike’s literary work with its reflection of American life since the 1950s, we should, first of all, consider the era with its own climate in which every artist lives and through his own unique vision transforms his experience into a work of art. When World War II came to an end soon after the holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a new age was ushered in. The 1950s – “ that period of new cosmopolitanism, new

1 affluence and Cold War” ( 20,292) – roughly started with the death of the great American war-leader Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, and continued through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations which followed. It was an era when American influence spread its commodities, its trade, its mass culture, its achievements in science and the arts, and its institutions and styles almost everywhere. The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday life, left over from the 1920s – before the Great Depression. World War II brought the United States out of the depression, and the 1950s provided most Americans with time to enjoy long-awaited material prosperity. The country experienced phenomenal economic growth which had different sources. The automobile industry was partially responsible, as the number of automobiles produced annually quadrupled between 1946 and 1955. A housing boom, stimulated in part by easily affordable mortgages, expanded. The rise in defense spending as the Cold War escalated also played a part. After 1945 the major corporations in America grew large. Firms with holdings in a variety of industries led the way together with smaller franchise operations like McDonald’s fast-food restaurants. Workers found their own lives changing as industrial America changed. By 1956 a majority held white-collar jobs, working as corporate managers, teachers, salespersons and office emplyees. More and more Americans now considered themselves part of the middle class. But “ perhaps the most noticeable change of all in this period was the expansion of the suburbs” (31,288). Easy credit, cheap fuel, mass production of housing and cars were among the factors encouraging Americans to more off the farms and out of the cities into new communities – “ with homes that all looked alike – using techniques of mass production” (19,293). As suburbs grew, businesses moved into the new areas. Large shopping centres containing a great variety of stores changed consumer patterns. Television, too, had a powerful impact on social and economic patterns. Developed in the 1930s , it was not widely marketed until after the war. In 1950 “consumers were buying 250,000 sets a month, and by 1960 three- quarters of all families owned at least one set. In the middle of the decade, the average family watched television four to five hours a day” (19,294). Children watched popular shows; older viewers preferred situation comedies. Americans of all ages became exposed to increasingly sophisticated advertisements for products said to be necessary for the good life.

2 Americans were offered the good life with its real and symbolic marks of success – house, car, television, and home appliances. The age of so-called comfort began. American society followed conventional values and group norms. Sociologist David Riesman called this new society “other- directed” in his influential book “ The Lonely Crowd”, and maintained that such societies lead to stability as well as comformity (19,297). Television contributed to the homogenizing trend by providing young and old with a shared experience reflecting accepted social patterns. Similarly, philosopher and critic William Barrett in his book “ Irrational Man” observes that the last gigantic step forward in the spread of technologism has been the development of mass art and mass media of communication: the machine no longer fabricates only material products, it also makes minds. Millions of people live by the stereotypes of mass art, while human reality is fast disappearing. W. Barrett further writes “if here and there in the lonely crowd... a face is lit by a human gleam, it quickly goes vacant again in the hypnotized stare at the TV screen” (16,239). Critic Ihab Hassan provides an ironic image of man from mass society: “Together with his family as with himself, he expects any day the ambidextrous automaton, to fulfill all his physical needs at home; meanwhile, there is the astonished and astonishing muse of TV to provide his spiritual sustenance, and when the evening is done, he can sleep with an easy conscience, after the usual dose of Miltown, in the knowledge that when he wakes up at least one of the insolent chariots in his two-car garage will be ready to transport him to another appointment with a white-collar day....Happy, adjusted, prosperous, without an enemy or thought in the world, the American Adam fulfills his manifest destiny in the republic of consumers” (14,63). The surface image of contemporary American culture seems to be removed from spontaneity and spirituality. The enforced homogeneity of contemporary life and the compulsive materialism of the American tradition brought problems of alienation, and a sense of entering a world of moral emptiness and isolated insecurity. American life seemed to have been deprived of many of its certaities, creating a feeling of vacancy. Furthermore, the appearance of mass society during the affluent 1950s meant the disappearance of individuality and the loss of originality as many people conformed to the cultural norms of the decade. The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the Civil Rights Movements, feminism, protests against the Vietnam

3 War, minority activism and the arrival of a counterculture. “It was an age of new theories, new arts, new consciousness...To some it represented the breakthrough into a new , unauthoritarian era of modern thought, cool, unrepressive, hedonistic, innovatory, a moral, erotic and intellectual millennium;to others it was a period of the collapse of fundamental social and moral values, a time of serious damage that only a return to more traditional moral and religious virtues could redeem” (20,325). The 1960s began with a period of extended optimism that was spread by President Kennedy whose “liberal reputation stems more from his style and ideals than from the implementatation of his policies” (19,306). He wanted to exert strong leadership to extend economic benefits to all citizens. That optimism was short, as in 1963 , the assassination of President Kennedy produced a nationwide emotional crisis. After his death he was seen as a liberal force for change. The decade is described dramatic also because of 1968 – the year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, a spokesman for civil rights, and Robert F. Kennedy, the most exciting political figure in the country who spoke for the disadvantaged and who opposed the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy were two important figures in the Civil Rights Movement. In the struggle for equality, black Americans sought reform through peaceful confrontation at first. They tried to capture media attention organizing “freedom rides”, in which blacks and whites boarded buses heading South toward segregated terminals where they expected confrontation. They also organized rallies with songs and speeches with the final address of Martin Luther King. But some blacks were disillusioned by the notions of nonviolence and preached the need for black power to be achieved by whatever means necessary. Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave black American citizens effective political and social equality, race riots broke out in several big cities in 1966 and 1967. The war in Vietnam was another source of outrage and protest as “ America’s political leaders, many of the protesters agreed, rode roughshod over all the individualistic and libertarian principles in whose name the republic had been founded” (20,341). The Vietnam War reached its peak under President Johnson (1963 – 1968) , when more than 543,000 American troops were committed. A massive bombing campaign wrought havoc in both North and South Vietnam. With grisly battles shown on television, Americans began to protest their country’s involvement in the war. Anti-war sentiment in 1968 led Johnson to renounce any intention of continuing the war. At the Democratic National

4 Convention in Chicago, protesters fought street battles with police. In 1973 the new President, Richard M. Nixon withdrew United States ground troops from Vietnam. The war had a tremendous price. It left Vietnam devastated, with millions maimed or killed. The United States spent over 150 thousand-million in a losing effort that cost 58,000 American lives. The war led many young Americans to question the actions of their own nation and the values it sought to uphold. It was against the background of massive protests that a strong women’s movement challenging traditional sex stereotypes began during the 1960s. The women’s liberation movement grew out of the civil rights movement. The demand of black Americans that all discrimination based on race be eliminated had direct relevance to discrimination based on sex as well. Another factor linked to the emergence of the movement was the sexual revolution of the 1960s , which in turn was sparked by the development and marketing of the birth-control pill. “By the end of the 1960s the women’s movement had succeeded in challenging nearly all of America’s tradicional cultural assumptions about women’s proper place” (30,263). The National Organization of Women ( NOW) and similar organizations challenged employment discrimination, bias against women in politics, in economic and social institutions, and helped make women increasingly aware of their limited opportunities and strengthened their resolve to increase them. Feminism, an organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests, reached high tide in the early 1970s. In 1972 an Equal Rights Amendment was passed. The courts also promoted sexual equality. A significant victory for the women’s movement was women’s right to abortion during the early months of pregnancy. College educated women increasingly declared that “ a career was just as important a priority as marriage. Thus, a great number of women were entering professional schools in medicine, law and business and were applying for different jobs. Shifting values and changing social and economic conditions produced new patterns of family life. The majority of women in the 1960s and early seventies no longer stayed at home to take care of children. Birth rates declined, instead of three children in the family there was one child (30,265). There were also new attitudes toward sex, self-fulfillment and gender roles. In the 1960s and especially in the 1970s “that emphasized personal happiness and immediate gratification, millions of Americans no longer were willing to sacrifice personal expectations of fulfillment and self-realization in order to maitain marriages or relationships that failed to meet their demands “, states William H. Chafe, a Professor of History (30,265 ). The divorce rate

5 climbed more than 100 per cent in the twenty years after 1960. The number of individuals living alone in single households skyrocketed from 10,9 per cent in 1964 to 23 per cent in 1980. Thus, the women’s movement resulted in the changes of family life, female employment and in the fulfillment of personal expectations. Another significant achievement of the 1960s was the space exploration programme. In the mid-1960s, U.S. scientists used the Gemini programme to examine the effects of prolonged space flight on man. The programme accomplished the first U.S. walks in space. The Apollo project achieved President Kennedy’s goal to land a man on the moon. In July 1969, with hundreds of millions of television viewers watching around the world, Neil A. Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon. When other Appolo flights followed, many Americans began to question the value of manned space flight. Many saw that space was an arena for competition to America after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik – an artificial satellite – in 1957. The space exploration programme in the United States was a declaration of the country’s prosperity and power.

In the late 1960s , it seemed to many that there were two distinct American societies existing side by side- an “ official” America that tried to function just as it always had, and a counterculture of hippies, yippies, political activists, angry blacks, alienated youngsters, disenchanted parents. All of them were united by their sense of opposition to officialdom, represented many varied and often mutually contradictory strains. Some of the members of the counterculture emphasized free lifestyle and tried to shock by ostentatiously making love or consuming illegal drugs in public, or by wearing their hair unconventionally long. To them reality seemed so intractable that they were tempted to let fantasy take its place through drugs and rock and role music, that encouraged abandoment of traditional forms. Drug culture was among evidence of changing norms too. Despite punitive legislation, the lucrative market could not be controlled. Expanding drug use was related to the increased crime rate. Drug use caused insecurity and casual encounters in urban areas and produced bewildering, disoriented forms of public behaviour. Levels of gun ownership also increased. “Legal permissiveness, to some Americans, seemed as responsible for the problem of crime as anything else. Foreigners had before them the picture of a violent America tolerating... erotic public behaviour, crime, dirt, and a general deterioration of the public fabric” (30,150). The other group of the counterculture was more concerned with political issues. To them, reality was an

6 oppressive system of ideologies and institutions built up by the misguided liberalism of the early Sixties. They argued that nothing less than a fundamental overhaul of Western capitalist society could save America from itself. But the counterculture in all its manifestations was imaginative rather than intellectual, expressive rather than analytical, interested in trying new types of experience rather than improving old ones.. It was a culture that encouraged styles and images to be constantly remodelled and that offered in every boutique new versions of self and society” (20,343). The sexual revolution was another phenomenon of the 1960s. The sexual revolution was a liberation which presented itself “ as a bold affirmation of the senses and of undeniable natural impulse against our puritanical heritage, society’s conventions and repressions, bolstered by Biblical myths about original sin” (29,315).The limits on sexual expression disappeared gradually. The disapproval of parents of youngster’s living together unmarried was easily overcome. The moral inhibitions, the risk of pregnancy or disease, the consequences of premarital intercource were no longer so frightening. Nobody was any longer ashamed to give public evidence of sexual attraction. Books, magazines, films reflected sexual liberation of the decade. The sexual revolution seeked to legalize previously pornographic material and legitimated most types of sexual activity. Education and therapy on sex became normal. Birth-control devices and abortion were available to everybody. “The immediate promise of sexual liberation was, simply, happiness understood as the release of energies that had been stored up over millennia during the dark night of repression...” (29,316). In the 1970s there was less confrontation, less public drama, less political protest in America. There was more emphasis on personal integrity and local self-help, on matters more directly affecting the individual: prices at a time of inflation and unemployment, and the state of the physical environment in the country whose vast resources looked finite. The Vietnam War was inflationary, and the whole position of the United States was in danger due to the refusal of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to impose any curb on civilian incomes and consumption in the late 1960s. The result was the great crisis of 1973, when the cartel of oil-exporting nations first imposed an oil embargo and then took advantage of the apparently unquenchable American demand to increase oil prices by nearly 250 per cent. American industry allowed itself increasingly to be undersold by more efficient foreign competitors, so that exports steadily sank against imports. Economic uncertainty made the later 1970s a troubling time for Americans.

7 People commonly expressed uncertainty about their nation’s capacity to cope adequately with the problems it faced. Many now turned inward toward self-analysis. One commentator, the historian Christopher Lasch, noted the move from politics to what he called narcissism, a fascination and an unease with self and role, a deep concern with personal and interpersonal performance in everyday life (20,354). Sexuality was accepted more easily in the Seventies than before. All the statistics of contraceptive devices, venereal disease, illegitemacies and the rest seem to confirm this. The more open and explicit sexual books and films also showed that young unmarried people in the Seventies were more likely to be sexually experienced than in most previous generations. But they were less inclined to use sex as a weapon of shock than their sixties equivalents. During the “Me- Decade” emphasis on knowing your own mind and body, on trusting your own instincts was typical and normal. Thus, for the United States , the second half of the twentieth century has been a period of extraordinary turmoil and change. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the nation underwent a remarkable social, economic, cultural and political transition. “Where once the United States transformed itself over the slow march of centuries , it now seemed to reinvent itself almost by decades “ (19,328). American writing since the 1950s has been variuos and multifaceted due to the changes in history, society and technology. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magic realism,while the electronic era has brought the global village. The spoken word on television has given new life to oral tradition. Oral genres, media, and popular culture have increasingly influenced narrative. American novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker have borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs and oral history. The best contemporary writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Cheever are asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. What is common to all contemporary writers is that they moved away from the traditional social orientation of American fiction, and especially from the tradicional assumptions about the universe and man himself. In the already mentioned writers’ works an individual must somehow create meaning under a system of social repression and in a chaotic and seemingly empty universe. John Updike is one of the most prolific and successful of post-war American writers. He has gained both popular success and academic acclaim. He is the author of novels,

8 children’s books, short stories and poetry collections, and seven anthologies of non- fiction prose. He is most highly regarded as a fiction writer. His fiction represents a penetrating chronicle in the realist mode of the changing morals and manners of American society. J. Updike draws heavily upon his own life for subject matter, but transcends the particulars of personal experience, achieving encompassing vision of the contemporary American situation. The writer most frequently sets his fiction in small- town America – rural villages and prosperous New England suburbia. J. Updike has maintained and demonstrated that middle-class existence is more complex than American literature usually allows. Suburbia is the “compromised enviroment” in which his characters live and to which, like the majority of the American population, they have committed their lives. “Just how peole live with and within that compromise, and how they die of it, is Updike’s avowed subject “ (8,273). In a compendious study of American fiction since 1940, critic Frederick R. Karl offers a useful overview of J. Updike: “Updike’s fiction is founded on a vision of a compromised, tentative, teetering American, who has broken with his more disciplined forebears...”(5,135). A consciously religious writer, J. Updike repeatedly creates confused, unfulfilled characters unable to reconcile the opposed demands of the self and the social contract, particularly in the context of interpersonal relationships. Parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends encounter difficulties because they cannot strike a balance between license and repression. Usually this failure is linked to sexual avidity, and the resulting dilemmas are played out against a depressing background of vulgar materialism. J. Updike’s overriding theme is that of cultural disintegration, the abrogation, of the Protestant ethic. He considers religion and faith as ways out of the world of chaos. During the late 1950s and early 1960s , J. Updike himself faced a crisis of faith prompted by his acute consciousness of death’s inevitability. The works of a philosopher S. Kierkegaard and, especially, Karl Barth, the Swiss orthodox theologian, helped J. Updike come to grips with this fear and find a basis for faith. Thus, religious and theological concerns pervade J. Updike’s fiction. He acknowledges an external rationale for a traditional “ leap of faith” that will somehow restore a sense of stability and Christian community to that world. J. Updike also shows his concern with the existential problem. He raises the problems of the meaning of life, freedom of choise, vocation, individual moral responsibility and

9 guilt. Common to all of J. Updike’s characters is the fear of death. At the heart of his work is the universal angst and social ills of a society. J. Updike celebrates America as a place, with all its ugliness , where people hold on. J. Updike is for an anxious individual who fears and searches as anxiety is the way to preserve individuality and spirituality against the mass society in contemporary America. Common to J. Updike is the theme of sex. Since the 1960s, according to the writer, sex becomes the only religion (24,112). Sexual explicitness in his fiction provides the ground for J. Updike’s moralising. The disintegrating landscape of America’s urban and suburban sprawl, with its motels, fast-food joints and bars, is the result of a failure to cohere between its citizens. Through depiction of sex, J. Updike reveals contemporary man’s spiritual crisis as well as his lonelines and the fear of death. J. Updike’s characters are put in a situation of turmoil and must respond to situations that relate to religion, family obligations and marital infidelity. J. Updike is not, however simply a diagnostician of social ills and a novelist of the everyday. He fashions sparkling metaphors that invest his rather commonplace topics with flesh vitality. This keenness derives also from the striking specificity and exactitude that typify his presentation of sensory detail. He tells the reader not only what to see, but what to hear, what to taste and smell-a technique that he may have learned from the example of James Joyce. And although his content is highly contemporary he is in many respects a throwback to the nineteenth – century novelists of manners, capturing social nuances while plumbing the depths of his characters’ motivations and interrelationships. As the critic Charles Thomas Samuels said: “Updike offers the novel’s traditional pleasures “ (6,2). J. Updike is best known for his novels “ Rabbit, Run” (1960), “Rabbit Redux” (1971) and “ Rabbit is Rich” (1981). This literary trilogy is the focus of this Paper. The three books are depictions of the life of Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, through the ebbs and flows of his existence across the three decades – the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – of American social and political history. The novels are a kind of gauge of the changes occuring in America since the 1950s. J. Updike himself has explaned the reason for having written “Rabbit” trilogy: “I feel at home writing those books. Returning to them every 10 years, when the decade winds down, I found it’s still a comfortable thing. The books are not loved by everybody and may be deeply flawed, and there may be limits to my empathy with a man like this, but

10 the Pennsylvania setting helps make me feel like I’m full of material in some odd way “ (33). Thus, each “Rabbit” novel is a reflection of a certain decade with its characteristic social, economic and cultural changes in the human condition in America since the 1950s. “ Rabbit, Run” is a mirror of the affuent, but alienated 1950s during which American society leads a stable life full of material comfort but empty of spontaneity and spirituality. In the mass society Harry Angstrom finds himself an aimless, disaffected young husband. In his stifling existence he feels confused and yearning for something transcendent and , thus, he is running. At the same time, he seeks to avoid family obligations and chooses personal freedom. “ Rabbit Redux” – spotlighting the first manned space flight, the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement and the sexual upheavals as well as drug culture of the 1960s – finds Harry Angstrom, at first, a silent observer of the events around him, still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness. But by the end of the book Harry unexpectedly stumbles into the 1960s counterculture, freely accepting the “new values” of the decade – sex and drugs. In “ Rabbit is Rich”, Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance. Against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s Harry gives priority to his personal needs consisting of money, cars, house and sex. He lives in the country with less political and social protest but with economic uncertainty. But Harry feels untouched by the great oil crisis of 1973 and enjoys life while he still has it. Harry Angstrom is the central character, the axis of the trilogy. Through his eyes we will watch all America around him becoming a barren spiritual landscape.Through him we will observe the gradual disappearance of traditional values such as family, marriage, vocation and faith. Through his main character J. Updike also reveals the gradual formation of mass society in America – and the loss of frontier individualism. The “Rabbit” novels are real moral investigations of American life. J. Updike’s characters are representatives of middle class, they are ordinary people in everyday life scenes. But Rabbit became one of the most popular characters in American literature. The secret of such popularity may be connected with J. Updike himself. As he admitted in one of his interviews in the congress of book-selling enterprises in Las Vegas, he was called by the same nickname and Rabbit is only a year older in “Rabbit, Run” than the writer himself. Though the secret of such popularity can also be solved taking into consideration

11 the fact that almost the whole of America is a middle-class society. Thus, J. Updike does not criticize his main character as being a non-hero. The writer believes that “ the idea of a hero is aristocratic. As aristocracies have faded, so have heroes. ... Now either nobody is a hero or everyone is. I vote for everyone “ (10,69).

3. The hero’s gradual loss of his individuality and spirituality

Harry Angstrom is J. Updike’s most important character in “Rabbit Trilogy. Harry’s evolutionary process reflects the development of American society since the 1950s. In “Rabbit , Run”, the hero sets on his spiritual quest. But his quest ten years later in “Rabbit Redux” turns into moral lassitude, and in the third novel “Rabbit is Rich” the hero is striving for worldly gain only. Thus, each “Rabbit” book is a step down in the development of the main character’s individuality and a step towards his spiritual “death”. We will watch the hero gradually become a faceless conformist- a true representative of mass society, the process taking up the three decades –the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – of America history.

3.1 “Rabbit, Run” –the hero’s spiritual quest

Critic Janis Stout maintains that American fiction has been throughout its history, a fiction zestfully commited to motion and to the free, transcendent individual whose quest is for knowledge of being or knowledge as being. Critic Ihab Hassan is his book “Selves at Risk” gives a series of the meanings of quest: seek, search, inqrury, expedition, pursuit, and venture. There is movement in the world, restlessness, the itch of want. The critic further explains that “there is a raving curiosity in some fabulous space. Yet uncertainty shadows quest. A self, othen solitary, is at risk and self – realization of the highest kind is the rare reward.” (12.19). Contemporary quest as a literary mode is related to its historical types: myth, epic and romance. The mystic hero seeks the knowledge of unity within the great cosmogonic cycle. The epic hero’s object of his quest is a deep knowledge of something beyond life or death. The true quester stands outside the circle of social obligations, he defends himself as his inner destiny is his law. For critic Northrop Frye “the quest –romance is

12 the search of desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain the reality...” (12.23). I. Hassan makes a conclusion that quest, adventure, travel coalesce in a contemporary, hybrid mode that conveys both the perplexities of the postmodern condition and the ancient visionary powers of myth. This mode raises fundamental problems of human existence, problems personal, social and metaphysical. The theme of quest is central in J. Updike’s first novel of the trilogy “Rabbits, Run” with the hero displaying all characteristic qualities of a true quester. Following I. Hassan’s book “Selves at Risk” in which he analyses patterns of quest in contemporary American letters we will raise questions concerning the subject, the motives and the space of quest as well as the result of contemporary quest in the novel “Rabbit, Run”.

The subject of quest in the novel is the protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a twenty- six-year-old married man, a former high school basketball star, now the blue collar proletarian living in Reading disguised as Brewer, a once prosperous but now decaying industrial town in the late 1950s, finds himself in a cul-de-sac. He rejects reality not trying to adapt himself to the world. Rabbit is caught in the potentially tragic clash between instinct and law, biology and society. The protagonist’s last name, “Angstrom”, explains his confused state the best: angst denotes fear and anxiety that man experiences at the moment of realizing that he is a unique and isolated individual in an indifferent or hostile universe, resposible for his own actions and free to choose his destiny. This spiritual anguish seems to be driving Harry on his quest.Not only his last name but also his nickname serves as a good explanation to his character and confused way of life. As the novel opens, Harry is described as “tall,... an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his breath nose... partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy.” (1.7). “Rabbit”also suggests fast running which made Harry a great basketballer and could explain his life full of what J. Updike calls “zig- zagevasions” from a series of traps set for him by society. In escaping from one trap Rabbit blunders into another ; his life seems to be a series of accidents. The narrative itself is fairly simple. Harry leaves his pregnant wife and takes up with a tough prostitute Ruth ; he returns to his wife Janice when she is having their second baby, leaves her again as a result of which she gets drunk and accidentally drowns their baby.

13 He returns only to flee once again from the funeral, and on discovering that his mistress is now pregnant he starts to run again. Harry’s trembling and constant running perfectly explain his nickname and last name and are reflected in the novel’s title and structure. But his running certainly has its motives. In the affluent 1950s , when everybody in America is offered the good life and shares a common lifstyle consisting of buying new home appliances, cars, houses and consuming things and food in large quantities and numbers, of watching television all day long, there seems to be no reason for running from comfortable life and seeking something else. Still, Rabbit runs fast and searches for something. To describe human behaviour in contenporary world, critic and scientist Robert Jay Lifton has coined a new word – a “protean man” – a new kind of man. “Protean” is derived from “Proteus”- in Greek mythology the God of Seas who “was able to change his shape with relative ease- from wild boar to lion to dragon to fire to flood. But what he did find difficult, and would not do unless seized and chained, was to commit himself to a single form, the form most his own, and carry out his function of prophecy. We can say the same of protean man...” (32.16). The protean style of self-process is characterized by a series of explorations, each of which may be readily abandoned in favour of new psychological quest.” The pattern in many ways resembles...”identity diffusion” or identity confusion”... the protean style is by no means pathological as such, and , in fact may well be one of the functional patterns of our day. It extends to all areas of human experience...” (32,17). Harry Angstrom may be discribed as a protean man who experiences “identity diffusion” and does not know where he belongs. Thus, “identity diffusion” is the first motive for Harry’s quest in “Rabbit, Run”. At the beginning of the novel when Rabbit stops to watch some kids playing basketball and joins in the game, he realizes his own displacement. The apex of his life had come in his senior year in high school when he had set a league scoring record in basketball. He was famous, now he feels “just one more piece of the sky of adults. ...They’ve not forgotten him; worse, they never heard of him.” (1.9). His fame has faded and since then he has drifted from one job to another, and now he is working as a demonstrator of kitchen gadgets in dime stores. On a basketball court he senses his insignificance and is plunged into the crisis of personal identity when “you’re out, and sort of melt” and that produces the moment of dread. Rabbit’s fear is the world-wide

14 sense of what critic R. J. Lifton has called historical dislocation. The critic stresses historical forces as having special importance for creating protean man. (32,16).

It is not only the loss of human identity that causes fear and motivates Rabbit’s seachhing. It is also his strong dislike of waste and disorder in the contemporary world that makes him run. As J. Updike’s hero moves with alertness among the objects and surfaces of the suburban landscape, he feels dread there as well, for things decay as well as people: “the deserted ice plant with its rotting wooden skids on the fallen loading porch... dead flowers... the skittering litter... sour aftermoke...”(1,9). Even his house he lives in has the smell of “something soft decaying in the walls.” (1,10). The universal fact of the inevitable collapse into nothingnesws falls like a shadow across American suburbia. “Waste” is repeated throughout the novel, and Rabbit senses the pathos and horror of a wasting world which prevent him from feeling too much at home as well. When he finds the apartment is a mess and moves amond the objects,” we can feel the accumulating weight of them pressing on his eyes and nerves and thoughts to the point of claustrophobia .” (8,280). Things are observed in detail, all are described and identified by name. That continual crisscrossing mess that “clings to his back like a tightening net”(1,15) makes Rabbit feel sickened. Undermining the national prosperity in America of the 1950s were the insatiable appetites of American consumer society. Among new things and objects man starts feeling uneasy and even guilty. Man senses that what is new will soon become old and useless. Even his pregnant wife “stopped being pretty” and he often feels “the undertow of liquor sweep over her and is disgusted.” (1,13). Among so many reminders of decay and decline wherever he turns, Harry experiences the dread. The stifling boredom of everyday life and the entropic process make him wonder, confusedly, what has happened to his life in which he also turns into an object of junk. His dislike of waste and litter make Harry by instinct a tidy man who likes neatness and order. But a thing- and-waste-packed world is alwaiys congesting Harry’s vision and he feels like running from the pettiness of the everyday world: his dumb, careless drinking wife, dull TV watching, mess around. Acting perhaps on a tip from Jimmy, the chief Mousketeer: “Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are.” (1,12), Rabbit on impulse one evening decides to drive all night to the Gulf of Mexico. At first the road is drawing him away

15 “with the washed feeling inside”, hinting at escape to a sunny mythical south. But he finds trouble maintaining direction. At one point he finds “he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody.” (1,25). Soon all roads seem to be “part of the same trap”. Just as the clutter of the house he has left “clings to his back like a tightening net” so the roads promising release become a net, a trap, both words are often repeated to emphasize Rabbit’s problem of mapless movement experienced in all its frustation. He cannot escape his vision either: “Poor Janice would probably have the wind up now , on the phone to her mother... So dumb. Forgive me”, “the boy is crying in backward vision” (1,24). The conception “yes-but” implies there are two sides to things. Rabbit will often say “yes” to his instinct, to his freedom, but soon will see the other side again, his responsibility and sense of guilt follows him. He gets in his car because his anxiety has simply raised the possibility of other ways of living or ways of being. But Rabbit turns his anxiety into guilt and starts to get the feeling that no matter how he moves he cannot get free of some kind of confused system: The land refuses to change. The more he drives the more the region resembles the country around Mt. Judge. The same scruff on the embankments, the same weathered billboards for the same insane products... the same net.” (1,32), and he wonders “...all America the same ... Js it just these people I’m outside, or is it all America?” (1,31). The realization that there is nowhere to go and no release from the chaotic reality, deepens his despair and he feels like an outcast, both imprisoned and alienated. It is part of the painful paradox of this sort of experience that Harry can feel as though he has fallen out of the given world at the same time as he realizes he cannot escape from it. In the 1950s most Americans feel entrapped by their affuence. An individual has no way out of mass society whose life is full of technological gifts. Technoligy seems to have reduced individual freedom and has come more and more to rule people’s lives. The individual’s sense of his own potency, his power to effect change and mold events seems in steady decline.It is no great wonder that an individual feels alienated, and the 1950s in America are described as affluent and alienated at the same time. The central motive for Rabbit’s guest and apparently for J. Updike as well, is not “ Who am I ?” Harry possesses an intuitive awareness of spiritual mystery that sets him sharply apart from the drab world of grimily industrial Brewer and its unimaginative populace.Harry’s religious feelings lead him to announce that behind all the decaying

16 visible scenery that he is running from “ there’s something that wants me to find it .” Rabbit thinks that “ if there’s this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space.” ( 1,96). Throughout the novel guided only by his instinctive feeling for the reality of this upward dimension, Rabbit tries to find his place in it and sincerely attributes his need to run – i. e. to seek personal freedom – to a basically religious yearing. Rabbit is portrayed as a knight – errant in guest of a metaphysical grail. The British critic Tony Tanner has observed that “ it is the old problem for the American hero of whether he can transform “ from” into “ towards “ : like many good men before him Harry cannot get beyond enacting a mode of motion – running... “ ( 8, 282). And he runs in a void. The space of his guest consisting of people around him is quite empty as they all misunderstand , or fail to perceive, his sense of wonder and his vaguely comprehended but strongly felt intimations of Something Beyond. First of all, in the Springers, his wife’s parents, and the Angstroms, J. Updike illustrates the failure of the solutions to Harry’s spiritual problem. The Springers have adopted a purely secular solution. Although they belong to Episcopol church, their lives are controlled by their social consciousness. Mrs. Springer is worried more about what people are saying about Janice and she sees Rabbit’s motives as entirely practical ones. Rabbit must escape from their trap ( Springer suggests trapping) . Still, Janice’s mother tells that Rabbit “ has no reason to come back if we don’t give him one, “ and the Springers give Rabbit a job as a used- car salesman in an effort to keep him with Janice. Their hatred for Harry is carefully masked by social propriety. Here J. Updike criticizes modern Protestantism caught up in the secularism of the expanding megalopolis. In the environment which produced Rabbit we can sense the tough, practical nature of Mr. Angstrom : “ They’ll get through, “ he thinks. J.Updike compares Rabbit to “ an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother’s ugly behavior, his father’s gaze of desertion,...his mother’s oppressive not saying a word...” (1, 192). His parents are also unaware of the spiritual dimensions of their son’s problems. Tothero, Harry’s old coach, offers him another alternative, a world in which God never existed.: “ Right or wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We . We make them. “ ( 1, 232). “Tothero’s revelation chilled “ Rabbit, J. Updike says, because “ he wants to believe in the sky as the source of all things.” ( 1,233). The revelation has the flavor of a deathbed confession: Tothero had suffered two strokes since he had taken Rabbit whoring in

17 Brewer; he is now a “ smirking gnome, brainlessly stroking the curce of his cane “. As a coach Tothero had preached the gospel of self-reliance, and his final revelation to Rabbit is undercut by Rabbit’s awareness of Tothero’s paralysis, subconsciously the paralysis of the doctrine itself as an adequate approach to life. Ruth, Rabbit’s mistress offers another equally unsatisfactory alternative. She has experienced the death of God in her life when “ the whole world trees sun and stars would have swung into place if she could lose twenty pounds just twenty pounds what difference would it make to God... “ ( 1,77). What Ruth has seen of nominal Christians has made her doubt religion itself. One man used to leave her bed to teach his Sunday- school class. Yet Ruth misses her belief, and she is drawn to Rabbit party because she sees the same unsatisfied spiritual hunger in him: “ in your stupid way you’re still fighting, “ she says. She answers Rabbit’s question about the thing behind everithing with a blunt “There’s no why to it. Things just are.” (1.78). The only thing she can offer Rabbit is authentic sexual experience. This may, indeed, provide an opening, and on his first night with Ruth, Harry feels “He is out of all dimension”. Since such moments cannot be extended into a programme for everyday living, Harry’s movements can have no constructive goal, no destination beyond that of renewed sexual passion, a new “religion” of empy sensuality does not coincide with his spiritual quest. The society fails to understand Harry and this deepens his alienation. All these people around Harry are presented as unfulfilled individuals bereft of the spiritual fortification. They illustrate J. Updike’s concern with the rejection of religion in our time, which “has caused many of our current problems. J. Updike implies that institutionalized religion has degenerated into a self-parodying ineffectuality.” (6,23). In their failure to assist Rabbit, the two ministers of the novel personify the contemporary church’s generalized failure. The Reverend Mr. Eccles, although sympathetic, cannot relate to Rabbit’s visionary impulses, because he does not share Rabbit’s intensity of conviction. He tells Rabbit: “I don’t think that thing exists in the way you think it does.” Indeed he finally confesses: “I don’t believe in anything.” (1,223). He is too enlightened to take Rabbit’s “irrational” faith seriously, and he treats Rabbit’s search for it ironically: “What is it ?What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” (1,112). Eccles struggles with the conflict between his own rational belief and Harry’s intuitive awareness of Something Beyond. Although he senses the reality of Rabbit’s desperate search, he cannot acknowledge the reality of what Rabbit is looking

18 for, as he cannot admit the failure of his own tenuous faith. Eccle’s God is theoretical, and he believes in a theoretical hell of separation from God. But he must deny Rabbit’s assertion that we are all in that hell even though he knows that Rabbit is right. Instead, to mask his own failure and to justify his own uneasy compromises, Eccles patronizes Rabbit: “Of course, all vagrants think they’re on a quest. At last at first.” (1,107). The implication is that Rabbit may outqrow his immature need far the real experience of God. But Rabbit sees through Eccle’s masks and thinks “what ministers need is to cut everybody down to the same miserable size.” (1,107). Later Rabbit observes Eccles in the service and acknowledges the minister’s inadequate response to his position:” Eccles wrestles in the pulpit with the squeak in his voice. His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks. It is an unpleasant and strained perfomance, comforted, somehow, he drives his car with an easier piety. In his robes he seems the sinister priest of a drab mystery.” (1,197). By emphasizing the unproductive parrying that occurs between Rabbit and Eccles , J. Updike criticizes most directly the increasingly futile attempts of religious institutions to provide a stable reference point for the American middle class. J. Updike accentuates God’s place in our life. Belief in God gives people reassurance in the moments of crisis. But the writer observes the “nothing” aspect of creation that contemporary society has to come to terms. And J. Updike expresses his dissatisfaction with the clergy’s failure to enflesh that marginal belief which underlies life for an increasing number of Americans. Neiher Eccles nor the book’s second Reverend Mr. Kruppenbach serve as a source of strength to Rabbit. Being the Lutheran minister, Kruppenbach expresses with authority the argument against Eccle’s position. He tells Eccles that if God had wanted to end misery, the milenium would already be here. The duty of ministers toward their parishioners is to “burn them with the force of our belief... There is nothing but christ for us . All the rest , all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.” (1,143). To Kruppenbach Rabbit is a Schussel, in colloquial German denoting a hasty, careless person, whose behaviour is the least of God’s concerns, ”one childish husband leaving one childish wife.(1,143). Despite Kruppenbach’s lack of interest in Rabbit’s spiritual component, his view seems to be saner than Eccle’s ineffectual meddling in Rabbit and his wife’s affairs. Kruppenbach talks of the force of belief, and it is the quality which Rabbit admires and seeks for. Kruppenbach and Eccles objectify two religious alternatives: One which Rabbit admires but cannot reach , the other which envelops him in its do-goodism but which he cannot respect.

19 Together, these alternatives define the boundaries of the modern wasterland, the trap in which man must run , but from which there is no exit. Rabbit cannot commit himself fully to any solutions provided to him by society and he cannot break out of the trap of existence into the certainty of essence. According to philosopher Sartre: “Man is comdemned to life”. (18,171). “That’s what you have, Harry: life,” old Mrs. Smith had told him.”It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.” (1,186). If Rabbit has life, he has freedom to say No to any ready-made systems offered to him by society. According to William James ,a modern thinker , a true quester possesses “ will to believe” and only his “total character and personal genius-not logic, ideology, system-give him the “solving word” when he finds himself on trial.” (12,58). Rabbit feels that there is something precious and inexplicable, which is the very essence of the self, that has to be guarded against external manipulation.” He’s safe inside his own skin, he doesn’t want to come out... All I know is what’s inside me. That’s all I have.” (1,91). But his moments of confidence when he feels free of all external pressure , when “the world cannot touch him”, are very short. J. Updike fills Rabbit with the ambiguity of the “yes-but” stance toward the world. When Rabbit says “yes” to pure uncluttered freedom and runs seeking for meaning, soon his freedom becomes problematic. He has discovered that if he has the guts to be himself, other people will pay his price. Here we can state that there is another motive for his running. His spiritual quest is at the same time an escape from responsibility: from supporting his family, from any clots of concern and worry about his son or pregnant Ruth. He simply flees away from matter or weight of responsibility, thus revealing his weakness and egoism. To echo Ruth “that was the thing about him , he just lived in his skin and didn’t give a thought to the consequences of anything.” (1,125). Being often insensitive and self-centered, he does not care about the feelings of the suffering women-he uses them sexually-he is taking a lot by giving back nothing. Rabbit\s zigzagging movements from wife Janice to mistress Ruth wreaks havoc: Janice accidentally drowns the baby and Ruth is impregnated and seek abortion. His freedom “costs” him alienation and a sense of guilt. Standing with Ruth on a hilltop, he wonders: “What is he going here, standing on air? Why isn’t he home? He becomes frightened…”(1,96) After the child’s death Rabbit simply says:” I know this has been my fault. I’ve been like a, like an insect ever since the thing happened.” (1,232). According to critic R. J. Lifton, in our contemporary world man

20 perceives the symbols of his cultural tradition-family, idea systems, the life cycle in general-“as irrelevant, burdensome or inactivating, and yet man cannot avoid carrying them within or having his self-process profoundly affected by them.” (32,16). Though the women are affected by Harry’s manoeuvrings, J. Updike shows with impartiality and insight the damage done to them when Harry’s insurrectionary self refuses the bondage of its undertaken and imposed responsibilities. J. Updike neither approves of his characters’ irresponsible behaviour nor accuses him of avoiding family obligations. J. Updike’s position is similar to critic R.J. Lifton’s emphasis that contemporary historical forces are responsible for creating a contradictory personality such as Harry is in “ Rabbit, Run”. J. Updike communicates the unfocused urgency and panic that Harry senses when something irreplaceable is drained out of him while the environment moves to imprison him. That something he sees in “ the ones dressed for church,… who walk in Rabbit’s eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of relief,… they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated with happiness,… he has come into a field of flowers.” (1,196). Here Rabbit experiences God. But the consequences of his running and searching sometimes cause painful doubts to Harry about the existence of God in this chaotic world. Sitting in the waiting room in the hospital, Rabbit is overwhelmed by a sense that his “ life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of Belief. There is no God, Janice can die” (1,165). Contradicting himself, Rabbit turns to be drawn to Ruth’s position about the absence of God, draining the water from the tub in which his baby had drowned he “thinks how easy it was, yet in all his strength God did nothing. Just that little rubber stopper to lift” (1,230). Throughout the novel Rabbit lives with the fear of death and experiences a crisis of faith and feeling of insecurity and uncertainly in the contemporary world. Rabbit sees death in people around him: in Ruth and his old coach Tothero, in his sleeping son who may never wake, Janice when she is in hospital. It seems to Rabbit that “ someone is some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies” (1,96). Ruth also calls him Mr. Death as he “ wanders around with the kiss of death” (1,251). The decaying world causes fear and running. To echo Tony Tanner, “ it is death that Harry is really in flight from”(8,328). But the space of his quest for something is so barren that it leads to nowhere – to a dead end. At the close of the book Harry finds himself confronted by a “ dense pack of impossible alternatives”. Standing in the streets he imagines a road leading

21 back to society, back into the heart of the city and “ the other way… to where the city ends… he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen…”(1,254). It is death either way: the field of cinders or suburban net he is unwilling to accept the ancient truth that in the matter of man’s relation to death “ away from” or “ toward” are the same thing. He looks for guide lights away from the darkness. Trying to recapture his earlier faith, he looks at a church window, once a symbol of spiritual solace to him, but finds it “ unlit, a dark circle in a stone façade”. But in the next sentence J. Updike says that “ there is light… in the streetlights” (1,254). This implies that the meaning of human life comes not from the sky, but from man himself. Suddenly, he feels “ his inside as very real “, “a pure blank space” – he has avoided the nets of the various theories which would imprison him by defining who and what he is. Now he is free and “ impossible to capture”. The penalty, however, is that his hands are empty, he is a nobody. This painful paradox is what makes him run. Central to this paradox is the epigraph that J. Updike has chosen from Pascal1s Pensees: “ The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart ; external circumstances”. William Barrett , a philosopher, in his brilliant study of Existentialism, “ Irrational Man”, considers Pascal as the first real existentialist. Pascal sees man as “ a creature of contradictions and ambivalences such as pure logic can never grasp”, a creature with “ middle position in the universe…he is an All in relation to Nothingness, a Nothingness in relation to the All”. And W. Barrett quotes these lines as Pascal’s “ ultimate judgement of 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 will , and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and am astonished being here rather than there , why now rather than then”. (16,118). This is the concern of the passage in “ Rabbit , Run” which leads to the ultimate question, “ Why am I me ? “ The character of Rabbit illustrates Pascal’s paradox. Rabbit’s running, though motivated by fear and irresponsibility , is also a spiritual guest – “Motions of Grace”. They represent that within us which seeks the good, our non-material, non-external side. There is ample evidence of the hardness of Rabbit’s heart in his sexual demands upon Janice and Ruth and in his willingness to abandon them and his son Nelson, but there is softness in him too. And though the traps of external circumstances are everywhere Rabbit turns , he often escapes them but he never attains the state of grace. In America in 1950s it is an apathetic existence empty of spirituality and full of conformity.

22 J. Updike has said, that he wrote “ Rabbit, Run” just to say that there is no solution. It is a novel about the bouncing , the oscillating back and forth between two kinds of urgencies: individual primacy and the leveling influences of societal norms and conventions”(6,69). Thus, the result of the hero’s spiritual guest in” Rabbit, Run” could be illustrated by J. Hassan’s concluding sentence about some quests in his book “ Selves at Risk” that “ in certain journeys , the past seems to await us as the only destination we can reach, making every quest an elegy to its own hope “ (12,61).

3.2 “Rabbit Redux”- the hero’s spiritual lassitude and short- term regeneration in the end

In “Rabbit, Run” Harry Angstrom rebelled against the apathy and compromised environment of the 1950s in America. “Rabbit Redux”, published 11 years later, displays two phases of the hero’s evolutionary process. At the beginning of the novel we find a thirty-six-year-old Harry a spiritually tired person who has submitted to the compromised society , to the collective spiritual emptiness. He has settled for a humdrum existence that revolves around his job as a typesetter, his flimsy ranch house in a Brewer suburb and his wife and son. He has stopped running from mass society. He has understood that his rebellion against it is useless as his search for personal freedom has led to alienation. To retain individuality and spirituality in the spiritless consumer society is almost impossible. Thus, Harry has chosen to adapt to the boredom in the meaningless existence and has become a pale reflection of his former self. He says: Nobody ever calls me Rabbit.” (2,68). This remark implies his loss of anxiety. But against the background of specific historical events of the 1960s in America-the moon shots, the sexual revolution, the drug explosion, campus demonstrations, and the emergence of women’s self-determination and counterculture –Harry achieves regeneration at the end of the novel. In the 1960s –a decade of change-women and black people rebelled against discrimination based on sex and race, while the American youth protested against the compromised environment by emphasizing free lifestyle. The turbulent 1960s provide a context for Harry’s awakening from spiritual immobility.

23 To emphasize the hero’s passive existence at the beginning of “Rabbit Redux” specific images are used to create an atmosphere of passive immobility, of arrested and purposeless movement. “Rabbit Redux” is considered a highly symbolic work with complicated symbol patterns that function to reinforce the novel’s pervasive emphasis on lassitude and inertia. The images that run throughout the novel reter to coldness and frigidity. Critic Joyce Markle says that such images serve to convey the idea that in a “demoralized society, emptied of belief in anything, the characters are emotionally paralyzed-frozen.” (6,135). J. Updike introduces this motif at the outset of the novel, as Harry and his father leave work and pay their habitual visit to a nearby bar. The brightness of the day gives the neighborhood the appearance of “a frozen explosion” (2,3), the air-conditioned interior of the bar is uncomfortably cold, Harry orders frozen daiquiris, and his father figuratively suggests that Harry’s ailing mother “stays in bed… takes care of herself, put herself in deep freeze” (2,8) until a cure is developed for her Parkinson’s Disease. These repeated allusions function, as J. Markle suggests, to elicit a chilling aura of demoralization that is central to the entire scene. The novel’s opening pages also include other references of a similarly dispirited sort, which are related to the frigidity motif- allusions to promiscuity, artificiality, paleness, ghostliness and death. Harry observes Brewer as “a gappy imitation of the city” (2,14) with sad narrow places, empty, dusty windows and colourless sky. Harry is dissatisfied with everything: food, home Janice:” Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad…” (2,80). But this time he conforms to the environment and lives with “his spirit muffled in pulpy insulation” (2,35). Nobody and nothing surprises him anymore. He often emphasizes his tiredness and weakness, senses death in himself and calls himself a “weed” which has nothing to clutch to and trails upon the ground purposelessly. Harry notices “every day going out… No belief in an afterlife, no hope for it, too much more of the same thing … “(2,104). Others also notice his spiritual lassitude. Janice sees in him a “stiff ghost”: ”You were a beautiful brainless guy and I’ve had to watch that guy die day by day.” (2,74). Similarly, Harry is described by Buchanon, a black typesetter: “You’re just turning old, the way you’re going now. Old and fat and finicky…” (2,103). His loss of vital power is contrasted with the increase of energy, vision and authority in those around him-in women and black people. Affected by the women’s liberation movement, its ideas and mood, now Janice sets conditions, in a tidy reversal of

24 “Rabbit, Run”, takes a new partner and tries to define her own sexuality. It is hard for Harry to realize that the whole situation has changed. Harry feels that the whole country is doing what he did ten years earlier-it protests, rebels, fights and searches for higher meaning, for better conditions and truth. Though Harry’s response to the events around him is rather cold.

J. Updike chose Apollo moonshot-and the moon-as his central metaphor for tentativeness, duality and irresolution. On the one hand, the Apollo moonshot embodies the idea of human ingenuity and aspiration. The image of the thrusting rocket suggests an upward orientation and can also be seen as a symbol of regeneration, life and futurity. But the critics observe that the moon’s constant presence in the novel is often a reminder of the dark aspects of contemporary America. Although the moonshot represents a major technological breakthrough, in “Rabbit Redux” we are constantly reminded that the astronauts’ success has little or no bearing on the often distressing realities encountered in everyday life. J. Updike continually creates an almost humorous sense of disparity between the doings of the astronauts and those earthbound characters. In the opening barroom scene, for instance, the murmuring drinkers watch the televised lift-off but they “have not been lifted, they are left here.” (2,7). And Harry’s estimate of the Apollo mission is also negative:” these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing .” (2,22). This implies that even as America puts a man on the Moon, its spiritual landscape is as barren as that on the Moon. For the United States the space exploration programme was an important achievement and a world-wide fame but in people’s everyday life it brought little meaning. It is rather difficult for Rabbit to conceive not only the supposed glories of lunar exploration but also that he has to learn to live with others, Greeks or Polacks, or black people-a “strange race” to him. Even though Rabbit lives in American society with consumption and philistinism pervading almost the whole country, he loves his country and “can’t stand to have it knocked”. In the words of J. Updike himself, he is “a loyal citizen”. “God he can doubt, but not America” (10,73). Rabbit feels angry at those “others” who come over here to make a fat buck-“ (2,43). He does not like buses as they “stink of Negroes” and he also admits “ it is not quite easy, talking to a black.” (2,101). But his simplistic endorsement of a platitudinous pseudo patriotism does not awake his spirit, and as he has lost touch with God, he has become, to echo Markle, “one of the

25 burnt-out cynics-the washed out-dissipated American in need of a priest and life-giver.” (10,74). Harry achieves through his experiences a very real resurrection from the deadening torpor into which he has fallen during the ten years. His regeneration is indicated in the book’s title. The Latin adjective “redux” connotes “restoration”, and in medical usage indicates recuperation. The novel chronicles Harry’s revivification through a runaway hippie named Jill and an angry African-American Vietnam veteran named Skeeter. As Janice moves out to live with her lover Stavros, Rabbit and his son become hosts to Jill and Skeeter. Thus, Rabbit stumbles unexpectedly, but directly, “into the 1960s counter-culture. “Rabbit Redux” is called “the darkest of the Rabbit novels, it is also the most underrated, for in this novel J. Updike bravely confronts both the 1960s in general and his own diffident white-male response to the decade’s dominant movements…” (19) And J. Updike makes his character a passive listener-observer of the events around him, caught in a historical moment or by those powerful “ external circumstances”. First, Harry takes up Jill’ s attitude to life: “Let freedom ring” ( 2,127). Used to paying her way with sex – her only capital – Jill finds Harry resistant material at first. Harry sees in Jill one more victim of the times, tired of mental confusion. Jill’s life story suggests that she is the victim of her own lack of the ego strength necessary for survival. Rabbit says to Jill: ‘You’ re all sucked out and you’re just eighteen. You’ve tried everything and you’re not scared of nothing and you wonder why it’s all so dead… You have no juice, baby. “ (2,170). Harry does not like unripe bodies, but they slowly work it out in a brilliant demonstration of the latest style in sexual accommodation. Gradually, he gets involved in the sexual activity which serves as a source of spiritual fulfillment for him. Also, Jill’s cooking “has renewed his taste for life” (2,171). and her lessons and discussions concerning God, beauty, meaning and the universe excite him and awake him from dull TV watching every evening, So, Jill cooks and kisses away Harry’s hard conservative attitudes towards the country, life, sex, everything until Skeeter arrives and loosens around Harry’s head a whole boxful of contemporary horrors and challenges –drug addiction , racial violence and Vietnam and sets about insulting, educating and shocking Harry . At first Harry wonders: “Why has he invited this danger?… He is poison, he is

26 murder, he is black.” (2,212). But Harry is controlled by dual feelings towards the various blacks he encounters. J. Updike uses his interplay of positive and negative connotation. Harry is both attracted and repelled by the various blacks, and this duality of response is most strongly elicited by Skeeter. On the one hand, the black characters seem to represent to Harry the vital life force that he has lost, and the frigid ambiance of the Phoenix Bar contrasts sharply with the sensuous environment of the all-black Jimbo’s Launge, where the black singer Babe performs songs –“all the good ones” (2,123) –that conjure up the past. Babe’s singing “frightens Rabbit with its enormous black maw of truth yet makes him overjoyed that he is here with there black others, he wants to shout love.” (2,125). In the bar among black people Harry is coming to birth. J. Updike soon contrasts the atmosphere in the bar with Harry’s home: ”a strange dry place , dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of Penn Villas like a cast-off space capsule .”(2,132). Skeeter also, in a way, fascinates Rabbit:” The something so very finely turned and finished in the face , reflecting light… like a finely made electric toy…” (2,251). Harry stands opposite Skeeter the way weakness and tiredness stand opposite energy and power. Though Harry admires Skeeter’s vital force, Skeeter, of course, remains a satanic figure, who announces himself as “the Black Jesus” . Of God, Skeeter says that “Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains.” (2,275), and he preaches a secular gospel based on hatred and negation. Harry refers to Skeeter as “religious-crazy” (2,328). J. Updike introduced Skeeter’s character in an attempt to express the idea that as religious institutions have failed to provide a stable reference point for contemporary American society, its citizens have fallen prey to various embodiments of the Antichrist, a god of chaos, destruction, and despair. And Harry is made to respond somehow to the fanatical Skeeter. Together with his teenage son Nelson and the runaway Jell be participated in Skeeter’s nightly “seminars” on such topics as race, religion and morality, while they partake of marijuana, the “sacrament” of the “Church of Skeeter”. Rabbit feels “the marijuana clutch at him, drag at his knees like a tide… het Jesus come at him another way.” (2,253). And as critic G. J. Searles admits, here lies the central paradox of the novel’s treatment of Christianity. J. Updike seems to imply that “America has so lost sight of traditional Christian virtue that only through the agency of evil can Harry hope to recapture his lost spirituality,” (6,26) Only through Skeeter’s violent and shocking behaviour and his speeches full of hatred and hidden pain as well as his offered drugs, can Harry be awaken from his apathy. Moreover, there is much truth in what Skeeter

27 says: “The laws are written to protect a tiny elite..” (2,207). J. Updike indicates that America has created many of its own problems by permitting social injustice and inequality, in violation of the tenets of Christian brotherhood. Skeeter’s conception of “the American Dream” is quite accurate, in view of the nation’s treatment of racial minorities: “this place was newer such a place it was a dream , it was a state of mind from those poor fool pilgrims on, right?” (2,242). During Skeeter’s “seminars” Harry has glimpsed truth: “feels his world expand to admit new truths. I do believe.” (2,277). Harry seems to have achieved rebirth and an increased understanding of life, but only by having encountered evil. Skeeter and Jill, the representatives of the counterculture, used free sex and drugs as weapons of shock against the compromised environment. And Harry’s spiritual lassitude is thus turned info his regeneration. Also, through Skeeter’s preaching he has found out that America is not a perfect country with a lot of injustice toward other nationalities, races and even sexes. Harry’s house is burned, Jill dies inside, Harry helps Skeeter escape. The fire symbolizes a rite of purification for Harry. He experiences spiritual restoration, mends his recently broken marriage. The novel’s final pages are filled with references to the moonshot again to emphasize Harry’s uneasy resolution in his new recognition of life’s complexity. As Harry and Janice are reunited, they are compared to space vehicles, “slowly revolving… adjusting in space, slowly twirling… In a space of silence… he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married.” (2,405). Harry remarks that “confusion is just a local view of things working out in general.” (2,405). J. Updike seems to say that nothing is easy in life, and that reality must be confronted as it is. In “Rabbit Redux” Harry Angstrom lets the forces of the times and powerful circumstances” control his life but at the end of the novel he achieves a short- term rebirth.

3.3 “Rabbit is Rich”- the hero’s spiritual deterioration

“Rabbit is Rich”, the third installment of Rabbit saga, might be called the third phase of the hero’s degeneration. This is the saddest novel of the three “Rabbit” books as we watch Harry Angstrom completely lose his spirituality and immerse in the faceless mass society of the 1970s in America. The loss of spirituality in contemporary society

28 reflects itself in pragmatism and cultural vulgarity. As the title of the novel suggests, a forty-six-year-old Rabbit is financially solvent. He has inherited his father’s in-law automobile dealership and commands an adequate income. He has joined a country club and golf’s regularly. As the novel unfolds he vacations in the islands, invests in gold and silver, and moves to the suburbs with his wife Janice. Harry accentuates his new prosperity by calling himself “the man up front” or “the king of the lot” who “likes having money to float in…” (3,9). But “Rabbit is Rich” is facetiously titled. Though our hero is rich, the book is ultimately about poverty-a spiritual poverty that is both Harry’s and America’s. Spiritually Harry is much poorer than in the past. His wealth leaves him less fulfilled than he has ever been, for he has “sold out” and has lost all the anxiety and spontaneity that once set him apart. At last , Rabbit has become “mature” and reasonable. ”It was George Bernard Shaw who said the reasonable man looks at the world as it is and tries to adapt himself to suit the world.” (10,74). Rabbit has sold his soul for social success. As his son Nelson laments: “Dad doesn’t like to look bad anymore, that was one thing about him in the old days you could admire, that he didn’t care that much how he looked from the outside what the neighbours thought… he had this crazy dim faith in himself… That spark is gone, leaving a big deal man. (3,314). Harry’s feelings upon learning of Skeeter’s death in a shoot-out with the police are similar: “a certain light was withdrawn from the world, a daring, a promise that all will be overturned.... That part of him subject to Skeeter’s spell had shriveled and been overlaid.” (3,33). The implication is that Harry has been worn down by contending with contemporary life. J. Updike again attacks institutionalized religion for its failure to serve as a bulwark. The novel’s one clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Campbell is presented as too pragmatically secular, a shallow pretender. And Harry is an accomplice to Campbell’s imposture. Harry watches admiringly Nelson’s wedding, marvelling at Campbell “ gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that his ceremony might be a farce¨(3,243). As Benjamin Demott says: “ Everywhere on the contemporary scene the faithless lead the faithless...” (6,99). And Harry Angstrom becomes a true representative of a spiritually impoverished culture. He has lost any touch with God: “Sometimes he prays a few words at night but a stony truce seems to prevail between himself and God” (3,131). Harry’s God’s comparison “ to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat “(3,359) hides J. Updike’s great concern with the spiritual reduction of the whole country to a poorhouse”.

29 The loss of faith in God leads to the fear of death. Although death is present in the preceding “ Rabbit” books, in “ Rabbit is Rich” it becomes a central motif, along with economic inflation. Harry becomes obsessed with death. He starts counting the dead: “ They were multiplying. Pop, Mom, old man Springer, Jill, the baby...”(3,13). He sees how the world’s approaching its end. With President Carter’s administration lurching with good intentions from crisis to crisis and skylab falling and the whole country “ running out of gas “, the present governing sense is that of exhaustion. Harry admits that “ a lot of topics in private conversation and even on television... run dry, exhaust themselves.... In his inner life too Rabbit dodges among more blanks than there used to be “ (3,16). There is no gas, no ideals, no God, just gravity in present-day America. The wide- spread feelings of emptiness, decay and loss fill American people and leave them helpless and hopeless: “ People are going wild, their dollars are going rotten, they shell out like there’s no tomorrow” (3,7). Rabbit, being painfully aware of the reality and imminence of death, starts appreciating people around him- just their being together with him: “ Now the dead are so many he feels for the living around him the camaraderie of survivors. He loves the people with him...” (3,130). The reason for such love may be explained by the fact that people provide Rabbit with the feeling of safety against the emptying reality. This dread of the world decaying and death coming also produces what J, Updike once called “ a panicked hunger for things” ( 8,275 ) which would stabilize people. It seems that those who have inside their lives an empty space need to fill it with love and belief if they can and if they cannot, with things. It appears that Rabbit cannot fill the void with true love or strong belief and he chooses things for some footing among the sliding; he falls into self-stabilizing pragmatism. In “ Rabbit is Rich “ Rabbit represents the secularization of American life, the increasing concern with material values. While in “ Rabbit, Run” he tries to escape that “ trap of material clutter” as well as the societal obligations and responsibilities as he is so intent upon his metaphysical quest. In “ Rabbit Redux” Harry also remains quite modest about financial matters. He is relatively unmoved when his house is destroyed by arsonists. Here the destruction of the material symbolizes Harry’s transcendence. But in “ Rabbit is Rich”, he joins the ranks of the affluent, and in so doing forfeits his uniqueness. He is ensnared in the material entrapments of the upper middle class existence. The novel’s pages are filled with financial accounts about financial operations, the price of different things. Rabbit’s

30 thoughts are all about money, sales, profit, taxes and cars as if they are magical. His discussions, thoughts and actions show his obsession with the material needs. He is completely caught up in the dollar- obsessed scramble. His wife Janice tells him : “ Money... That’s all you ever think about .“ (3,44), while his son Nelson asks: “ Dad, how can you keep thinking about money all the time?” (3,345). It seems that Harry loves things and money more than people and is afraid to lose his property: “ I pretty much like what I have. The trouble with that is, then you get afraid somebody will take it from you.’ (3, 69). When man has already lost his soul, he has nothing else to lose – only material things. When Harry does not search for something transcendental in his life “ to feed” his soul, he becomes a material seeker. When Harry turns his money into gold he feels “ a dead man reborn” (3,201 ). Although he is now more self-assured, J. Updike clearly intends to show Harry as badly diminished. J. Updike compares the activities of a currency exchange to “ peddling smut” (3,210 ), and when Harry and Janice are shown struggling along a Brewer street with their $ 14,662. 50 in silver dollars, J. Updike’s description is absolutely contemptuous: “ He keeps having to wait for Janice to catch up, while his own burden, double hers, pulls at his arms... He is sweating across his back beneath his expensive overcoat and his shirt collar keeps drying to a clammy cold edge. During these waits he stares up Weiser toward the mauve and brown bulk of Mt. Judge; in his eyes as a child God had reposed on the slopes of that mountain, and now he can imagine how through God’s eyes from that vantage he and Janice might look below: two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin” ( 3, 342 ). J. Updike views material prosperity almost as a guarantee of moral dissolution. That strugging for money can be called a materialistic quest in contrast to Harry’s spiritual quest in “ Rabbit, Run”. The subject of the materialistic quest is a real slave to money being the only source of fullfilment, but the wrong one as money poisons Harry’s soul. Even in relations with people he calculates. His materialism is so great that he treats those around him as things. Nelson “ costs his father a bundle” (3,218) and Janice is termed as “his poor dumb moneybags” (3, 175). That he has lost all morality is clearly seen when Harry coaxes Nelson into not marrying Pru, his girlfriend, and offers Nelson money to just dissappear. Nothing sacred has remained in Harry’s attitudes to people and life. J. Updike mounts a straightforword attack against money as a source of evil. The critic Searles suggests that J. Updike’s suburbanities are, in a sense, freed by their wealth from

31 moral responsibility. Their constant posturing, partying, and profligacy is presented as a condition of their station. J. Updike has commented on this at some length: “ I think what’s happened to the American middle class is that it is trying to prove that they have open to it almost the whole range of freedom that had hitherto been enjoyed solely by the aristocracies of Europe and Asia. But the capacities of past and present societies to bear, psychologically, the consequences of this freedom are rather different. The aristocrats were never very numerous... But in America today, you have millions of people trying to live aristocratically. Inevitably this produces disjunctions” (6,84). Within a materialistic value system, J. Updike’s characters feel free and self-satisfied. Material excess makes Harry serene, slow and dangerously comfortable. He sees his life as sweet and “ just beginning,... the stifled terror that always made him restless has dulled down” ( 3, 92). Harry represents a self-satisfied mind of contemporary society in which physical comfort, pleasure seem to elevate its spirit. Spending a lot of time at the club among American “ aristocrats” Harry feels “ exercised, cleansed, cherished...” ( 3,60 ). In his new house Harry also feels “ the king of the castle.” The emphasis on the possessive pronoun when describing the house indicates Harry’s empty spiritless pride. J. Updike made a statement which is relevant for an understanding of all his novels: “ a person who has what he wants, a satisfied person, a content person, ceases to be a person... I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectal situation. A truly adjusted person is not a person at all.” ( 8,292). Harry Angstrom has allowed the self to be absorbed into the compromised environment and has lost his individuality and spirituality. Thus, “ Rabbit” trilogy is a good reflection of the spiritual condition of contemporary America. Through the main character, Harry Angstrom, in different stages of his development we have watched individual’s gradual moral degradation. J. Updike thinks that the loss of spiritual substance manifests itself in cultural vulgarity and an empty, materialistic value system. He repeatedly suggests that the breakdown of religious belief has occasioned a generalized malaise, and that America’s acceptance of the “ death of God” has led to the spiritual void. J. Updike’s concern with cultural disintegration in “Rabbit “ trilogy makes him a true moral guardian of American society.

32 4. The Decline of Traditional Values in America 4.1 The Crisis of Marriage Institution

John Updike is considered the premier American novelist of marriage. Nearly all of his fiction displays the mysterious as well as commonplace but ineluctable complexities and conflicts of marriage. It is one of J. Updike’s major concerns to explore the conditions of love in our time. J. Updike himself is convinced that the theme of love has always been one of the most popular ones in literature. He emphasizes that people are like conspirators who hide their ability to feel, and thus, the writer starts speaking openly about an individual’s emotional life. (24,112 ). The society in the second half of the twentieth century in America starts living in a different moral dimension. People love freedom and the possibility to choose in life. Marriage is an old institution which “ takes away individual’s freedom, and everyday routine in married life destroys individual’s dreams”. (24,113). Marriage is not a value anymore. Nobody wants to commit oneself to marital obligations; individual needs take that priority. J. Updike’s married protogonists always strive for self- realization, often disregarding all but their own needs. J. Updike seems to be suggesting that such behaviour reflects communal loss of moral sensitivity. But individual survival at any price may be appropriate and acceptable. J. Updike himself has commented on the complexities of marriage in his fiction: “ I see each book as a picturing of actual tensions, conflicts, and awkward spots in our private and social lives. My books feed, I suppose, on some kind of perverse relish in the fact that there are insolvable problems.... There is no way to reconcile...individual wants to the very real need of any society to set strict limits and to confine its members”. (6,66). In “Rabbit“ trilogy Harry Angstrom best embodies J. Updike’s theme of marriage and its complexities and conflicts. In “Rabbit, Run “ a twenty-six-year-old Harry is married to Janice who is expecting their second baby. Their son Nelson is three years old. They live in the apathetic 1950s, and the atmosphere of boredom and emptiness is felt in their house. Janice and Harry represent two opposing forces in the book. Janice conforms to that

33 apathy of the decade – she is indifferent, tired and untidy. All she does is drinking and watching television. Harry expresses his annoyance: “ The car’s at your mother’s and kid’s at my mother’s. Jesus. You’re a mess. “ (1,13).B contrast, Harry is called by one of the characters of the novel “ a big clean-living kid “ (1,57) who hates disorder and boredom in his house. In the affluent but alienated 1950s in America marriage lacks a spiritual component which would ensure mutual understanding and inner comfort between a husband and wife. At the very start of the book, the two opposing forces – Janice and Harry presuppose the crisis of marriage. Unlike Janice, Harry feels that something is missing in their relationship and that in this stifling routine he loses selfhood. Their marriage lacks harmony, and Harry’s feelings of disgust, fear, annoyance and fury about “ his home as the hole “ (1,110) make him choose freedom from apathy and boredom of his marriage. His decision to run, he later explains sincerely to Minister Eccles: “It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don’t know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.” (1,89).

J. Updike shows Harry as the only character in the novel who opposes the society and who is still spiritually alive in the “comfortable” 1950s in America. Harry does not hide his feelings, he follows his instincts and acts the way he feels. If he feels like running from the compromised environment and from boredom of his marriage, he runs. Throughout the novel, Harry’s impulsive physicality, of which running is but one expression, serves as an index of his inner strength. He is strong enough to assert the primacy of his individuality and set on his quest for higher meaning. “There was this thing that wasn’t there”, he says about his relationship with his wife. (1,11). Harry’s search for the spiritual is channeled mostly through the physical: running, sexuality and his sensory acuity. Yet, Harry’s motivations are essentially religious. More than anyone else in the novel he believes in God, and his every action is an attempt to discover it. As in his marriage there is no possibility of transcendence, he acts outside his home. This intuitive spirituality sets him apart and renders his irresponsible behavior meaningful.

34 J. Updike has said that in this novel there are two sides to every moral question. “My work says “yes, but”, J. Updike explains. (6,74). Harry says ‘yes’ to his inner whispers, but his marriage collapses murderously, as he abrogates practically all of his interpersonal responsibilities. He abandons his pregnant wife and young son, takes refuge with the part – time prostitute Ruth, returns to his wife after the baby’s birth only to leave her again after placing sexual demands on her. As a result, she accidentally drowns their newborn daughter. When Harry finds out that Ruth is pregnant now, he leaves her too. Judging by his actions, many critics have written Harry off as a heedless, uncaring, hard – hearted scoundrel. Harry is the only one who destroys his marriage, and who is not troubled by morality. Various other characters in the novel assail Harry’s selfish tendencies. His mother– in- law asserts that “he doesn’t care who he hurts or how much” (1,129), and Mr. Eccles at one point admonishes him: “You’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.” (1,112). In the 1950s most Americans accepted traditional roles in marriage – a husband is a breadwinner in the family. Thus, Harry is accused of abandoning his family. Such accusations can be justified when not only Harry’s actions, but also certain of his comments are considered. He often reveals a callous disregard for anyone but himself. When Janice suggests that he is incapable of understanding how she feels after the daughter’s birth, he replies: “I can. I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.” (1,207). “All I know is what’s inside me” (1,91), he announces once. Their marriage cannot be successful due to the lack of mutual understanding and respect. It seems Harry is not willing to help his wife with her alcohol addiction and he refuses to support his family: “Why should I? Her father’s rolling in it.” (1,122). As a husband, he is absolutely ignorant of his wife’s inner state, he is not interested in her as a personality: “He doesn’t know her that well.” (1,23). What Harry is able to do is to show disrespect towards his wife by repeatedly calling her dumb and dull, but he fails to accept responsibility for his marriage.

J. Updike appears to exonerate Harry by suggesting that his irresponsibility reflects a larger, national confusion. Harry lives in the milieu which is so compromised. His disaffiliation derives not only from his own anxieties, but from the failure of desacralised life to provide stable referents. To a great extent “external circumstances” have made him an irresponsible husband and father. He represents a civilization whose institutions and

35 values are disintegrating; and the loss is not just his own, but the whole civilization’s loss. Such is life, and J. Updike recognizes that it is difficult to label his character as good or bad. Harry’s situation seems absurd, it is impossible for him to remain true to himself while also satisfying his obligations to his wife and children. The state of marriage, thus, is very complicated. Harry himself is quite aware of the conflicts that beset him. Although he considers his intuitive longings valid, he is also attuned to the ambiguities of his situation. He tends to weigh the effects of his actions on others: “Ruth and Janice both have parents: with his thought he dissolves both of them”, but “guilt and responsibility slide together… inside his chest.” (1,254). When at the end of the novel Harry fails to formulate a viable response to life’s complexities, he starts running again. He refuses to be stifled by these complexities in his married life. But running creates a sense of irresolution. In “Rabbit, Run” Harry does not reconcile with the difficulties in his marriage. Critic Larry Taylor makes a remark on Harry’s complicated situation: “The reconciliation and knowledge… are by no means a definitive answer to human conflict. The wisdom attained is… a matter of melancholy and faltering reconciliation rather than triumphant affirmation, and a matter of subtle concession rather than dramatic capitulation.” (6,76).

L. Taylor’s remark quite clearly explains Harry’s position in his married life ten years later in “Rabbit Redux”. He is back to Janice and he is not running, unlike the rest of the society of the turbulent 1960s in America. Harry neither capitulates nor affirms a husband’s role. He simply exists in his marriage, obsessed by melancholia. As he has conformed to the existing system: He’s always reading the paper and watching the news”. (2,53). But Harry is out of step with the times: “He put his life into rules, nobody does that anymore”, Janice says. (2,53). In “Rabbit Redux”, J. Updike also describes Janice and Harry as two different individuals opposing each other. Harry is “a big pink pale man going shapeless” (2,77), meanwhile Janice’s face owns “the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerilla fighters… the dignity from the Sixties, which freed from the need to look fluffy. … now she is all circles in happiness…” (2,43). Janice of the Sixties is a different person compared to Janice of the Fifties when she was indifferent to life and vulnerable. In the new decade Janice displays the freedom and ability to make her own decisions in life, characteristic of the majority of women at that time in America. First of all, Janice strives for financial independence. To emphasize her freedom she says

36 “my money” and Harry thinks: “Her money: her father gave her stocks years ago. And she earns money now.” (2,32). Though she is not a good housewife, she is now a businesswoman whose self – confidence is revealed by means of repetition of possessive pronouns. Being busy at work, Janice feels useful and important. Another independent decision that Janice makes is taking a new partner, a car salesman Stavros, and she explains the reason for leaving her husband quite sincerely:

“I’m trying to look honesty into myself, to see who I am, and where I should be going. … It’s the year nineteen sixty–nine and there’s no reason for two mature people to smother each other simply out of inertia. I’m searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same.” (2,104).

Harry and Janice’s marriage is fruitless; it is an empty space in which two married people feel uncomfortable and unhappy and in which they cannot find themselves. They have become “locked rooms to each other, they could hear each other cry but couldn’t get in…” (2,54). Harry still calls his wife “dumb”, sometimes he sounds even cruel to her, blaming her for the death of their second baby ten years ago. A lack of warm communication, respect and mutual understanding between Harry and Janice inevitably leads to separation. Affected by the bold ideas of the women’s liberation movement in America in the 1960s most women start striving for personal freedom.

Having escaped the boredom of marriage, Janice finds rebirth with Stavros, her new partner who is contrasted with Harry. Stavros, unlike Harry, loves life. That is one of the reasons why Janice of the Sixties is attracted to him, as life always attracts life. What is more, Janice receives more respect from Stavros: “He never told me how dumb I am, every hour on the hour like you do”, Janice confesses to Harry. (2,75). Mim, Harry’s sister confirms Janice’s words about Harry’s inadequacy in his relationship with Janice. Mim considers Stavros intelligent, nice and very thoughtful about Janice, “He’s probably the first person in thirty years to give her some serious attention as a person. He sees a lot in her.” (2,366). With Stavros Janice also tries to define her female sexuality.. She loves Charlie, she says, for the way he searches out every nook and cranny in her body and soul and sells them to her as Rabbit never did. Janice acknowledges that she is happy about her love affair: “One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about

37 everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.” (2,53). Janice does not think that she should get her priorities right and spend more time with her family. One of the novel’s characters, Peggy tells Janice: “You’ve left your son at a point in his development when it’s immensely important to have a stable home setting.” (2,109). Nor does Janice think that if she is sexually involved with another man, she should marry him. Things have changed, and free love and sex are considered to be normal and tolerated in the 1960s in America. Janice does not want another marriage as “A gate she had always assumed gave onto a garden gave onto emptiness.” (2,66). Marriage metaphorically is a gate that should have led to a garden, a symbol of happy and long life. Unfortunately, the institution of marriage in America is degenerating, and nobody tries to stop that process. Harry tries to tolerate his wife’s infidelity, he does not resist, he is too deep in trouble himself, inside himself, to try to compete for her. Instead, Harry takes up new partners as well: “Janice has been doing some things up of the way, so I have to do things out of the way… to keep up with her.” (2,215). Life grows stale, it loses interest, Freud says, when we stop risking our lives – risking in the sense of staking them on something and holding nothing back, no hedge or insurance. This what Harry is doing now – climbing out on every limb he can find and swinging there. Feeling he has nothing else to lose after Janice has left him, he transforms his house into “a refugee camp” inviting Jill and Skeeter and lets himself go whenever the currents of contemporary life carry him. Thus, in “Rabbit Redux” Harry and Janice’s marriage becomes formal. Both of them have abandoned the traditional husband and wife’s roles, and have involved in love affairs with other partners. Janice finds herself with Charlie Starvos, while Harry is awoken from his melancholy by Jill and Skelter, the representatives of the counterculture of the Sixties. J. Updike has intended to show that marriage has already lost its meaning in people’s lives. People take chances. But soon they find themselves guilty, as they experience sad consequences of their freedom. The Angstroms’ house is burnt, their son Nelson is unhappy, Janice is worried. J. Updike chooses Harry’s sister to criticize the whole situation: “Why don’t you tend your own garden instead of hopping around..? To Harry’s statement that he has no garden she says: “Because you didn’t tend it at all. … You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout.” (2,370). These words sound like advice for Harry and Janice to return to their “garden” and start taking care of it.

38

At the end of the novel some vestige of conventionality makes Janice come back to her husband and mend their deteriorating marriage. They both make a conclusion about their relationship and life: “Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls. They were made for each other.” (2,395). Their conclusion achieved by mutual understanding sounds like a promise that their marriage has some future. J. Updike is unwilling to break their relationship, he just suggests that marriage is complicated and attitude to it is changing as the times are changing.

In “Rabbit is Rich” the married couple lives together in Ma Springer’s house. Harry is forty – six years old and is moderately well off. Nelson is away to college. Harry and Janice do not run from each other and spend a lot of time together. In America by the mid – 1970s, an era of consolidation began. Life seems to be quieter with less confusion and dissatisfaction. Harry and Janice live for themselves. Though physically they are together, spiritually they are apart from each other. Their evenings pass in the silence with a lot of words unsaid, “in a state crackle of television and suppressed resentment.” (3,48). There is a little communication. Janice is still drinking. Harry does not like uncoordination, “for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.” (3,48). What is more, there is little trust in their relationship. Harry does not want to share his feelings and secrets with his wife. They remain two alienated individuals with no spiritual connection. But there should be something that holds them together when “everywhere, it seems to Harry, families are breaking up and different pieces coming together like survivors in one great big lifeboat, while he and Janice keep sitting over there in Ma Springer’s shadow, behind the times. “ (3,206).

The first thing that ties Janice and Harry up is comfort. Harry “is rich because of her inheritance and his mutual knowledge rests adhesively between them like a form of sex, comfortable and sly.” (3,40). Their marriage has become practical and comfortable, and it’s the lot that holds Janice and Harry together.”(3,293). In the 1970s America is ruled by materialism, it becomes the basis for every sphere in life. It seems that everything that cannot be touched has to touch things around him and feel money in his pockets:

39 “Any man in this day and age carrying less than a hundred, a hundred fifty thousand dollars straight life just isn’t being realistic.” (3,274).

Janice and Harry fill the spiritual ”holes” in their marriage with money. They think they “have plenty of security.’ We told you about the gold and silver”, they tell Ma Springer. Their marriage is now based on new material values. Even people are looked upon as property. Harry defines his wife “his fortune” (3,354).

Such married couples like Janice and Harry waste money on pleasure, satisfaction and joy. They spend time in clubs where they are eating and drinking up the world, the characteristic activities of the consumer society. Nelson, their son observes and criticizes his parents: “Mom and dad are laughing about something, they’ve been high as kites lately, worse than kids, going out a lot more with that crummy crowd of theirs…” (3,294). The hedonistic middle – class society manages to survive on the basis of the material as the spiritual has vanished somehow from their lives. The church is of no use. J. Updike speaks through one of the characters of the novel: “The church is in trouble because it’s a monument to a lie, run by a bunch of antiquated chauvinists who don’t know anything.” (3,267). Thus, Janice and Harry’s marriage is still alive” due to practical reasons.

Through Nelson J. Updike shows another attitude to marriage. Among younger people who are over twenty marriage is not fashionable anymore. Nelson even feels foolish that he has married his pregnant girlfriend Pru: “Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.” (3,298). To contemporary young people marriage is not that necessary union in order to live and communicate. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s in America, more and more young unmarried people were living together. They considered sexual relationship before marriage as a normal phenomenon. J. Updike implies that “sex could be the elemental union leading to cohesion on a larger, social scale, but it has become detached from its function: pregnancies and births are always difficult, always getting in the way of the characters aspirations.” (4,650). Sex is a troubled focus in the novels and supplies fertile ground for J. Updike’s moralizing. Emphasizing married people’s concern with the body and instinct, J. Updike reveals

40 contemporary society’s declining standards of morality, lack of spirituality as well as its loneliness and fear of death.

In “Rabbit Redux”, J. Updike presented love triangles. The first consisted of Harry, Janice and Charlie, the second included Harry, Jill and Skeeter. All of them were not troubled by morality, they were affected by the new religion in America in the 1960s – human sexuality is liturgy of this religion. While in “Rabbit is Rich” J. Updike presents several married couples, among them Janice and Harry, who during their Carribean holiday constitute a circle of spouse swappers. Sexual activity is ritualized and incessant, as though there is nothing else to do in contemporary America. J. Updike suggests that “sex is the emergent religion, as necessary thing in marriage, while fidelity is already an old – fashioned value in contemporary life. One of the husbands during the holiday gives a comment:

“I must admit a little sharing among friends doesn’t seem to me so bad, if it’s done with affection and respect… Secret affairs, that’s what does a marriage in…” (3,375).

Sexual activity is the only avenue to spiritual rebirth for Harry during the holiday: “… he’s felt freer, more in love with the world again.” (3,396). When the couples fall asleep, “an entire married life of sanctioned intimacy stretches onto death before them.” (3,388). J. Updike’s implication here is plain: contemporary America has turned to false gods that are but a poor substitute for conventional belief and practice.

Thus, through Janice and Harry Angstroms J. Updike has shown marriage in various states of deterioration when marital obligations are displaced by individual needs, when true love becomes free love and free sex, when fidelity to one’s husband or wife is not valuable anymore and we observe adulterous triangles and wife – swapping escapades.

Marriage is formed for practical purposes and is based on the material more rather than the spiritual. Values are changing with time. J. Updike sees the fate of American civilization in the condition of love – its risks and dangers as well as its possibility for gracious transformation.

41 4.2 Family Relationships: Parents and children.

The British critic Tony Tanner considers J. Updike the writer whose main themes are “marriage, children, the relationship between generations and the difficulties…of familial continuity.” (8,274). All of J. Updike’s protagonists are locked into extremely complex, psychologically demanding interpersonal dealings, especially between parents and children. This subject has been of perennial concern to many novelists, but in J. Updike’s work it is central. J. Updike himself has said that “domestic fierceness within the middle class” (6, 42) is among his main topics. J. Updike believes that in all problematic relationships the individual ultimately stands alone. In his fiction, the traditional ideas of family solidarity and reinforcement of personal identity through strong familial bonds appear to have lost their viability. J. Updike’s seems to suggest that the problems his characters experience reflect a larger cultural phenomenon – cultural disintegration associated with the breakdown of Christian religion. In J. Updike’s fictional world, family relationships become all the more difficult because parents and children exist in a period of shifting values and changing assumptions and because of generation gap. Professor of History Tamara K. Hareven asserts that “over the past several decades American families have been experiencing an increasing emphasis on individual priorities and preferences over collective family needs.” (30,249). She explains that this individualization of family relations has contributed considerably to the liberation of individuals, but it has also eroded a family’s ability to withstand crises. Moreover, it has contributed to greater misunderstandings and alienation among family members. Though in a context of economic and technological stress, it is equally difficult for families to sustain continual assistance, support and harmonious relationships. The complicated relationship between parents and children is one of the main themes in J. Updike’s “Rabbit” novels. Problematic communication is seen between Harry and his son Nelson, between Harry and his parents, and between Janice and her mother. In the trilogy, the parents Harry and Janice are bringing up their only child Nelson. In “Rabbit, Run” Harry and Janice are young parents and their son is only three years old, thus, the parent – child relationship is still developing and is difficult to describe. A series of accidents and incidents between the parents presupposes problematic communication in the family in the next two novels of trilogy. From the very beginning Harry refuses to

42 take care of his family, abandoning his young son and giving priority to his individual needs and urges to find higher meaning in the emptying world. Seeking self-realization and personal freedom, Harry does not understand how important and necessary he is to his own family nor can he predict the future consequences of his irresponsibility. Surely the tumult and uproar that Nelson experiences as a small child will contribute heavily to the problems encountered in later life, especially with regard to his attitudes toward his parents and relationship with them. In “Rabbit, Run” Harry refuses to continue along with his unsatisfying existence for the sake of his young son. As a father, Harry is not a hero and will never be one in the eyes of his son as he has not sacrificed his personal happiness for the good of the family.

In “Rabbit Redux” the Angstroms family experiences further complications under the pressures of social change in America in the Sixties. According to Professor of History Tamara k. Hareven, “the major historical change in family values has been one from a collective view of the family to one of individualization…” (30,249) In the Angstroms family of the Sixties it is a thirteen-year-old Nelson’s mother Janice who refuses to sacrifice her personal expectations of fulfillment and self-realization in order to maintain her relationship with her son. The consequences of Janice’s decision to leave her family are well reflected in Nelson who is grieving, sad and very unhappy. A single-parent household is not a strong base for the teenager’s development. Though Harry tries to take care of Nelson, he feels uncertain about the ways of educating his son: “How can he get the kid interested in sports? Anything, just to put something there, some bliss, to live on later for a while. If he goes empty now he won’t last at all, because we get emptier.” (2,25). As Harry is becoming spiritually empty himself, there is little he can offer his son. He describes the evenings spent with his son as “a kind of nothing sort of evenings” (2,26) without intimacy and warmth. The only thing that seems to hold them is TV functioning as a new means of entertainment, education and communication. Endless TV watching becomes Nelson’s daily routine. Harry tries to joke about Nelson: “Can’t eat a TV dinner without TV.” (2,22). Later Harry acknowledges the blasting and self- destructive influence of TV and its effect on children: “Ought to smash it, poison, he read somewhere the reason kids today are so crazy they were brought on television, two minutes of this, two minutes of that.” (2,147). Television could not replace the two loving parents. Thus, in the family headed by Harry alone, the relationship between Harry and

43 Nelson shows the lack of close communication and warmth. Nelson’s school is a TV set, and what he learns about his parents is that marriage can break up and children can feel lonely and unhappy in a single - parent household. A single – parent family in the Sixties was not a rare phenomenon; nobody was willing to sacrifice personal expectations of fulfillment for the sake of a family. However, the ones who suffered were children. We watch a real family breakdown In “Rabbit Redux” when Jill and Skeeter, representatives of the counter-culture of the Sixties, join Harry-headed household. The traditional family idea disappears. Harry becomes a symbol of moral disorder: he uses drugs, tolerates Skeeter’s vulgar behaviour in his own house, listens to Skeeter’s seminars and lets his son observe “the lost world of blameless activity” (2,345). Harry feels that “he’s letting the kid see too much”(2,230) and sometimes he feels sorry that Nelson has “to live in the mess they all make” (2,293). The family institution has always been considered the basis for order and stable governance, but in this period of life with Jill and Skeeter, Nelson is no longer “in the arms of order, of laws and limits” (2,326). But Harry once more reveals his irresponsibility for his son’s security by saying: “…life is life, God invented it, not him.” (2,230). As Harry’s family does not serve as a school, church and welfare agency to his son, Nelson learns from outsiders. He is fascinated with Jill who seems to understand Nelson and respect him: “I treat him like a human being instead of a failed little athlete… Nelson is a very sensitive child who is very upset by his mother leaving.” (2,191). Nelson sees in Jill his sister whom he lost in his childhood. They spend a lot of time together discussing, playing and listening to music. Jill fills a familial void in which Nelson has experienced. Furthermore, the only church that is available in the Angstrom’s family in this period of their life is Skeeter’s church, Skeeter being the Christ of the new Dark age.” (2,276). Nelson is listening, observing and learning from Skeeter’s teachings and “sometimes it makes him feel sick.” (2,230). Nelson experiences great shock after Jill’s death when their house is destroyed by fire and he blames his father for all the disaster in his life. After the fire the father-son relationship becomes impossible and estranged. Nelson is described as “sullen, grieving, strangely large and loutish sprawled on the comeback davenport, his face glazed by some television of remembrance: none of them quite know that to do about him… he skips meals without explaining or apologizing… His father can’t reach him…” (2,350). Nelson is suffering the consequences of the family turbulence: he has no mother and has lost Jill, while Harry

44 appears to be too weak and unable to provide a stable and secure basis for his son’s development. In “Rabbit Redux” Harry has failed to preserve moral values and instill them in his son: “Luck and God are both up there and Nelson has not been raised to believe in anything higher than his father’s head. Blame stops for him in the human world, it has nowhere else to go”, these were the thoughts that J. Updike read in Harry’s mind. (2,325). Nelson’s sad childhood experience has obviously left certain “scars”, the reflection of which is already seen in the father-son relationship based on silent blame and silent quilt at the end of “Rabbit Redux” and will be openly expressed in the third novel of the trilogy. In “Rabbit is Rich” complications between the parents and son end up in an open conflict between the two generations. At the end of the “Me Decade” Harry and Janice enjoy their new affluent life and satisfy their all individual preferences, having forgotten their collective family “plans”. In the 1970s American society did not pay much attention to political or social affairs. There was a common preoccupation with personal interests. Thus, there was also less attention paid to family obligations. The chief reminder of the sins and mistakes of the Angstrom’s past is their son Nelson who returns home from college and interferes in his parents’ comfortable life. Nelson causes accidents, from carwrecks to the pregnancy of his girlfriend, then flees from the responsibilities of fatherhood. J. Updike seems to suggest that Nelson is beset by confusions that have resulted from earlier disruptions. (6,44). In view of his childhood and teenage years, it is no wonder that Nelson’s adulthood is a disappointment. His teenage years were burdened by an entirely disproportionate measure of responsibility, and Harry and Janice failed to provide adequate role models. As a consequence, the relationship between the parents and Nelson is described as full of distracting tension, mutual hostility, frustration and blaming. Nelson blames his father for the bad luck: “He is bad… he doesn’t care… He is so fucking happy… all the misery he’s caused. My little sister dead because of him and then Jill he let die… Everything’s his fault, it’s his fault I’m so fucked up and he enjoys it.” (3,126). In return, Harry also criticizes his son for his failure in life: “Twenty-three, and no sense.” (3,79). Sometimes Harry “can’t figure what the kid wants” (3,120). Communication between father and son is really complicated, as it always ends in a series of curse words or Nelson’s announcing: “Let’s cool this conversation” (3,111). Their relationship becomes even more problematic when Harry refuses to help his son get

45 started in the world. Having gained no support and understanding in his own family, Nelson is left alone. J. Updike seems to be suggesting that “in fragmented modern world we are left almost entirely to our own devices, cut off from even the most basic sources of communion.” (6,32). The family is no longer a refuge from the outside world. According to Professor Hareven, nowadays as children grow up, many of family functions are transferred to agencies and institutions outside the family. (30,245). One of the parents in “Rabbit is Rich” illustrates this change:

“When those kids turned twenty-one, boy or girl, I told each one of them,“It’s been nice knowing you, but you’re on your own now.” And not one has ever sent me a letter asking for money, or advice, or anything. I get a Christmas card at Christmastime if I’m lucky. One once said to me…,“Dad, thanks for being such a bastard. It’s made me fit for life.” (3,164)

This also illustrates a greater alienation among family members. Parents have performed the vital functions of the family such as childbearing and child rearing and refuse to fulfill further responsibility for their children. But for all parents’ disappointment, children do come back. Janice understands Nelson’s problem and announces it to Harry: “Harry, you shouldn’t be so hard on the boy… It’s a hard age… Some of the girls at the club, their children have come home too and don’t know what to do with themselves. It even has a name now, the back-to-the-nest something.’ (3,117). Janice’s words suggest that despite complications within family life, there exist other causes of young people’s confusion. Nelson himself admits one: “It’s the times I guess a lot of the kids I got to know at Kent they had horror stories worse than any of mine.” (3,190). A friend of the Angstroms expresses the same thought: “Children are hard. They’re disillusioned… They’ve seen the world go crazy since they were age two, from JFK’s assassination right through Vietnam to the oil mess now.” (3,164). American children grew during the most disturbing decades of American history. They have seen too much change in the political, economic and social life. They have experienced the effect of new technological advances, the sexual revolution and drug culture as well as complications in their families. They have become too mature for their age and now live with the

46 feeling of exhaustion. Harry Angstrom sees in his own son “a piece of dead weight… so much wasted energy” on drugs, alcohol, purposeless existence. (3,243). College life has failed to provide a stable referent point to Nelson, so he has tried “to put himself in phase with reality” (3,141) within his family. Unfortunately, at the end of the novel he repeats the same action that he has learned from his father in his early childhood – he simply runs away from everybody and everything, since he has found his family as a lost “spring” of solace, security and strength. In a moment of crisis an individual is left alone; as he does not receive support from his family, he has to follow his own way. J. Updike seems to be suggesting the same that “in the fragmented contemporary world an individual is left almost entirely to his own devices, cut off from even the most basic sources of communion.” (6, 32).

In “Rabbit, Run” Harry Angstrom experiences complications in the relationship with his parents. These complications arise due to Harry’s irresponsible behavior in his own family when he abandons his son and wife and starts searching for higher meaning in life. J. Updike presents two opposing attitudes toward a family institution. A traditional outlook on family life is represented by Harry’s parents. An older American generation follows traditional roles of a husband and wife. A husband has his duty to support his wife and children by earning money. J. Updike’s father, according to critic G J. Searles, is typically a long-suffering, self-deprecating altruist (6,43) who has sacrificed his personal happiness for what he believes to be the good of the family. J. Updike’s description of Harry’s father proves this: “… his fingernails ringed in black; he’s a printer. His mouth works self-deprecatorily over badly fitted false teeth… Color has washed from his hair and eyes like cheap ink. A straight man, who has measured his life with the pica-stick and locked the forms tight…” (1,136). Earl Angstrom hopes his son to be a father who works and lives for the sake of the family. Unfortunately, traditional assumptions are shifting in America due to social, technological and economic changes in the country. Thus, there appears a generation gap together with a conflict between two opposing attitudes toward roles in a family. Earl Angstrom feels terrible and unhappy about his son’s irresponsibility: “I just don’t see how Harry could make such a mess,… all he cares about is chasing ass.” (1,137). Harry’s father refers to the younger generation as “human garbage” (1,138) suggesting that young Americans are losing old moral values and are twining to false ones – personal freedom, egoism, sex and infidelity.

47

J. Updike’s mother in his fiction “is always a formidable figure, melodramatic and strong-willed, at once supportive and emasculating.” (6,43). Unlike her husband, she loves her son a lot and seems to understand him: …poor Hassy…all the world jumped on him for trying to get out.” (1,135). Harry knows “that in all this rolling – on world his mother is the only person who knows him” (2,166) and feels the trouble he is in – his wish to be free and his sense of guilt when he runs away from his family. Being a dominant figure, Mrs. Angstrom wants to have a hold over Harry, and he is quite vulnerable to his mother’s judgments, demands and expectations: “Don’t say no to life, Hassy. Bitterness never helps. I’d rather have a postcard from you happy than see you sitting there like a lump.” (2,197). Harry’s wife dislikes Mrs. Angstrom as she “has done nothing but try to poison their marriage.” (2, 61). Harry’s ambivalent feelings toward his parents make him avoid their company. He respects his parents, but he feels tired of listening to their advice, accusations or urges. In a way, his running in “Rabbit, Run” is caused by this generation gap. It seems that in the contemporary world a younger generation neither can live according to the old traditions their parents keep to nor can they understand the new ways of life brought by new technology, new economic possibilities and stronger inner urges to set free. Later, in “Rabbit, Redux”, Earl Angstrom becomes milder to his son and expresses understanding about Harry’s confused way of life: “Young people nowadays have more tensions and psychological pressures… If I’d of had the atomic bomb and these rich – kid revolutionaries to worry about, I’d no doubt just have put a shotgun to my head and let the world roll on without me.” (2,166). J. Updike seems to suggest that to sustain harmonious relationship between parents and children in the disintegrating contemporary America is becoming harder and harder. Young people find it difficult to cope with their own problematic life and start searching for self-fulfillment. At the same time, they forget their parents and there appears alienation and complications. Parents who live in a new age of technology and mass society feel lonely and demand attention to their personal needs and cannot give support or attention to their lonely parents. Harry and his parents experience complications due to the shift of traditional assumptions about family life and because of turbulent events in America since the 1950s.

48 In “Rabbit is Rich”, alienation between younger and older generations is observed in Mrs. Springer’s house where Harry and Janice live together. Harry watches Janice and her mother’s relationship and comments: “Crazy the way they flog at each other.” (3,45). They live at a high emotional pitch. Janice keeps fighting with her mother about everything. The reason for their argument seems to be the same they live during the decades of change in America. A wife in the 1970s no longer stays at home and looks after her husband and children. A woman became an independent person who searches for other ways of self-realization after the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s in America. Older women cannot accept such freedom, they used to be housewives and traditionally were good mothers. Janice tells her mother: “You know nothing about life period… You have no idea.” (3,44). Meanwhile, Janice’s mum responds to her daughter: “As if playing games at a country club with the nickel rich and coming home tiddled every night is enough to make you wise.” (3,44). There is a great difference in Janice and her mother’s value system. To Mrs. Springer responsibility, devotion and sacrifice are great values, while Janice concentrates on individual priorities and preferences. Their different value system causes problematic relationship.

Professor T. K. Hareven sees another problem in contemporary families: “The number of households containing only one member has been spreading steadily… now a major portion of the population resides alone. The disquieting aspect of this pattern is the high percentage of aging widows living by themselves.” (32,243). In “Rabbit is Rich”, this problem arises in Mrs. Springer’s house. After her husband’s death, Harry and Janice were staying together with her. But at the end of the novel the couple buys their own house: “Every couple we know owns their own house… Property’s the only place to put money if you have any, what with inflation and all.” (3,354). In the 1970s Americans suffer from the oil crisis and inflation and many people buy property as an investment and retreat into their own private household leaving their parents alone. For a major portion of population living alone is not a matter of free choice, but rather a painful experience. Mrs. Springer’s reaction to the news reveals her pain: “Why didn’t you and Harry tell me my presence was such a burden? I tried to stay in my room as much as I could…” (3,355). The rise of values of privacy in family life in America has led to a greater alienation among parents and children and especially to the isolation of older

49 people. According to T. K. Hareven, individualization of family relations has caused complications and misunderstandings in family life.

J. Updike relates the complications and conflicts within a family institution to the loss of spiritual substance in contemporary American life. People have almost abandoned their faith in God, and this has caused generalized despair and failure. J. Updike considers God as “our rescuer and appreciator, … a confidant in our moments of crisis. The alleged disappearance of God would be a blow to our essential humanity.” (31).

4.3 The Loss of Vocation

Critic G. J. Searles considers the theme of vocation and work as one of J. Updike’s subsidiary concerns in his fiction, but an important one to which J. Updike returns again and again in his explorations of American life since the 1950s (6,77). When handling the question of vocation and work J. Updike employs a sociologically oriented perspective. He views in contemporary America a cynically indifferent or even hostile outlook with regard to work. And J. Updike’s belief is that individuals experience difficulty at work largely because of being caught up in the overpowering currents of swift cultural change.

During the 1950s a sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity was common, as young and old alike followed group norms. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during World War II laboring in war industry, once the war was over traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men expected to be the breadwinners, the majority of women assumed their proper place at home. Stability and apathy was seen in every sphere of life, in work as well. However, in the 1960s and 1970s – the decades of change – increasing numbers of married women entered the labor force, seeking new roles and responsibilities. Work for women meant self – realization and fulfillment. But great technological achievements caused unemployment during these decades as well, as machines were gradually replacing people in workplaces. This fact may have caused general disappointment with work. During the 1970s emphasis was on matters directly affecting the individual; on personal physical, spiritual and psychic health. Many now turned inward, paying less attention to social affairs or responsibility for family, marriage or work.

50

In his fiction, J. Updike repeatedly asserts that much of what passes for “work” in the contemporary world is really a bogus imitation. He implies, though, that this is not the fault of his characters; rather, it is presented as evidence of a generalized cultural and moral shoddiness. The writer frequently returns to the ideas of a lost American past in which one’s work was truly integral to the person’s life and defined his self:

“My novels are all about the search for useful work… .So many people these days have to sell things they don’t believe in, and have jobs that defy describing. It’s so different from the time when men even took their names from the work they did – Carpenter, Farmer, Fisher. A man has to build his life outward from a job he can do.” (6,88).

In “Rabbit” trilogy, J. Updike’s theme of the loss of vocation is best embodied in Harry Angstrom, though some other characters of the novels also reveal alienated attitudes toward their jobs.

In “Rabbit, Run”, J. Updike presents Harry Angstrom as a young man who has already lost his vocation. He was a professional basketball player. Basketball for him was a sort of calling. To emphasize the loss of vocation and fame J. Updike uses past tense and the word “remember”. Harry’s former coach Tothero introduces him to his friends: “… this is my finest boy, a wonderful basketball player, Harry Angstrom, you probably remember his name from the papers, the twice set a county record, in 1950 and then he broke it in 1951, a wonderful accomplishment.” (1,46).

In J. Updike’s fiction, “work takes on an almost religious dimension.} (6,89). J. Updike views in true vocation a spiritual component when people work with fulfillment, when achievement at work gives the possibility of “transcendence”. Basketball is certainly an apt metaphor for Harry’s “upperdirectedness”. That is why he detests the game of golf for its downward orientation. In basketball Harry experiences transcendent glory, “that nice lifty feeling” (1,57) which “gives his arms wings… His arms lift of their own and the rubber ball floats toward the basket from the top oh his head. It feels so right…” (1,8). Harry’s coach, describing his work, also accentuates the spiritual component: “Work the boys into condition… Give the boys the will to achieve. …Make them fell the, yes, I think

51 the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best. “ (1,54). And Harry made his life meaningful as it was based on purpose and direction in his work. Harry was building his life outward from his vocation.

Sport can be viewed as an index of Harry’s positive qualities. For an illustration, Harry’s mother’s words can be used: “When you’d be proud of his basketball in high school, people would say, ‘ Yes well but he’s so tall, it’s easy for him’. But they didn’t know how he had worked at that. Out back every evening banging the ball way past dark; you wondered how he could see.” (1,136). His strong will, diligence and dedication led him to great success and fame. Commitment to his vocation was an indispensable condition for not losing his spirituality and individuality.

At the beginning of “Rabbit, Run” J. Updike shows Harry’s pick – up basketball game with boys in an attempt to reveal his character’s longing to recapture the sense of purpose and direction that he once enjoyed. Harry ruefully tells the Reverend Mr. Eccles: “I once played a game real well. I really did. And after you’re first – rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second – rate.” (1,105). The suggestion is that Harry yearns to be back in high school and be the best at something.

J. Updike employs a contrast between Harry’s present job and his past vocation: “Well I’m not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I uh, it’s kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler.” (1,55). Harry’s comment shows that his present job lacks meaning, and the absence of aims creates Harry’s description of his new job ironically calling it “a noble calling”. J. Updike further mocks at Harry’s new “calling” through his coach: “I’m sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting, and ask themselves ‘Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?’ the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list.” (1,55). The implication is that the quantity takes priority over the quality at work, as in the 1950s the affluent mass society consumes things in large quantities and buys goods, especially new home appliances, in large numbers. Harry’s present job is monotonous and unstimulating, it is absolutely irrelevant to Harry’s most deeply felt needs. Thus, J. Updike sets his hero on quest for higher meaning, suggesting partly that the disappearance of meaningful work takes away

52 individual’s sense of harmony and creates confusion and anxiety. The fact that J. Updike does not mention Harry’s work throughout the rest of the book after discussing it in the opening pages, may indicate that his character has lost any interest in any activity in life giving priority to his individual needs.

In “Rabbit Redux”, J. Updike further develops his idea that contemporary work is somehow a pale distortion, a counterfeit, of what once was. Repeatedly, therefore, those who practice crafts are exalted, as J. Updike’s other characters voice doleful admiration for this vanishing breed, who are conspicuous precisely because they are anomalous. Such is old Kurt Schrack, the foreign language typesetter: “Schrack would concentrate down into his work so hard he would lock up at lunchtime and talk in German to Pajasek the Polish foreman, or to one of the two shop Negroes, or to one of the Angstroms. Schrack had been likeable in that he had done something scrupulously that others could not do at all.” (2,28). J. Updike’s idea is that the skilled craft “among our most enduring stays against mutability and flux – and hence against mortality.” (6,90).

Harry Angstrom also learns typesetting – a more worthy skill. He feels quite cosy and secure in his workplace: “The machine stands tall and warm above him, mothering, muttering. …And Harry loves the light here. It is cream to his eyes, … light so calm and fine… It contrasts to the light in his house… that looks like dirt over the dishes… In the big room of Verity Press… men move around as spirits, without shadows.” (2.30). It seems Harry has got a job from which he gains satisfaction, self – confidence and safety. But due to the technological advancements of the Sixties in America work undergoes changes, and like many employees in reality, Harry is made redundant. His employer tries to explain the whole situation of the decade: “That’s part of the technical picture, that’s where the economy comes.” (2,341). Harry realizes that “a future belongs to cool processes, to photo – offset and beyond that to photo – composition, computerized television that throws thousands of letters a second onto film…” (2,28). When machines can do anything, man has to learn only abstract operations, little creativity and effort is required. Man does not have to use all his energy to fulfill his or her tasks. When machines have become contemporary priorities over human energy and skill, alienated attitudes toward work have formed.

53 In “Rabbit Redux” J. Updike illustrates another change in the Sixties with regard to work. Women began articulating a pervasive sense of discontent about their traditional roles on a family: pleasing a husband and taking care of children. Thus, they were seeking their own personal and professional identities.

Janice Angstrom limited herself to traditional domestic roles in the home during the 1950s in “Rabbit, Run”. But in “Rabbit Redux” J. Updike employs Harry’s wife. Work means rebirth for Janice. Harry sees a change in his wife when she starts working at her father’s lot: “… blooming and talkative; he’s never known her to be so full of herself, in a way it does his heart good.” (2,10). Janice earns her own money and feels useful. Work brings her financial independence and spiritual liberation.

In “Rabbit is Rich” J. Updike relates indifferent attitude to work to the broader issue of pernicious materialism. Harry Angstrom has inherited the Springer car leadership. During the 1970s in America he has dropped to slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle – aged affluence. He defines himself “a center of sorts, where he had been a forward. There is an airness to it for Harry, standing there in his own skin… The cars sell themselves, is his philosophy… He likes being part of all that; he likes the nod he gets from the community…” (3,9). Harry of the Seventies is more concerned about the surface image that he has created in his business rather than the work done in the lot. Harry’s empty pride in himself and his workplace reveals his alienation from work itself. Work is no longer a means of self – fulfillment. Harry’s activity at work is contrasted with old Springer’s effort to work: “He kept long hours, … was always grinding away in that little high – pitched grinder of a voice about performance guidelines,… and whether or not a mechanic had left a thumbprint on some heap’s steering wheel. When he was around the lot it was like they all were trying to fill some big skin… When he died that skin became Harry’s own, to stand around in loosely.” (3,9). Harry expresses his concern over profit. He feels safe enough if money “keeps floating”. But he knows that this inglorious occupation has already lost whatever challenges it may once have held. As chief salesman Charlie Stavros puts it: “This isn’t selling. It’s like supermarkets now: it’s shelf – stacking, and ringing it out at the register. When it was all used, we used to try to fit a car to every customer. Now it’s take it or leave it. With this seller’s market there’s no room to improvise.” (3,207).

54

J. Updike’s idea is that the spiritual component has been negated, producing a culture in which people labor without fulfillment. They do not really work but “perform impersonations of working men”. (6,89). Though J. Updike’s protagonist has achieved a degree of material stability and has convinced himself that his life is satisfactory, he has allowed the spark of his individuality to be extinguished. His present diminished self is in sharp contrast to his former identity, and the disparity is heigntened by the yellowing newspaper clippings on the leadership wall, which accounts for Harry’s past exports on the basketball court and his complete loss of vocation. The Harry Angstrom of “Rabbit is Rich” works for material gain alone. Money “opens the door” to public acknowledgement and supports his fleeting pleasures. In the “Me–Decade” individualism takes priority over any responsibilities for society. Thus, professional obligations are viewed as barriers and impediments to the development of individual needs.

Among J. Updike’s major themes of marriage, family life, ethnic identity that he addresses in his fiction, that loss of vocation remains one of his most pressing concerns. His characters’ alienated attitudes toward work develop, according to J. Updike, due to a break – down of the established order and cultural disintegration in contemporary America. Unable to achieve personal satisfaction, J. Updike’s characters feel dislocated in every area of their lives; hence their jobs fail to provide a sense of purpose or accomplishment. Instead, they seem empty and devoid of meaning. J. Updike’s perspective is that of one who has seen better and who longs for “the good old days” of a simpler and presumably purer Americ

55 5. Conclusion

In mid-twentieth century American life and value were changing due to a number of factors. In post-war America the economic system was far in advance of any other country in the world. For Americans it was an epoch of unprecedented prosperity and power. Modernization and technology allowed the development of mass media of communication and mass production of automobiles, houses, franchises food and domestic appliances. Due to economic possibilities, people enjoyed spending money on new things and consuming them. On the basis of wealth and comfort, mass society formed, which meant that all American shared a common lifestyle. Thus, most people lost their individuality and formed a society of conformists, consumers and mediocrities. In the value system of mass society the priority was given to material prosperity and satisfaction over spirituality and individuality. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, sexual revolution and drug culture resulted in the changes of family life, marriage institution, the youth life, and employment. Due to the changing social and economic conditions and emphasis on personal happiness and fulfillment, especially among women, led to a greater divorce rate and the appearance of single households and fewer children in a family. Sexual liberation showed the declining standards of morality, especially among American youth in the 1960s and 1970s. Preoccupation with body and instinct was normal and common while family obligations and faithfulness became almost unfashionable. Furthermore, the attitude toward work and vocation changed due to the fact that American people paid more attention to their personal needs rather than social obligations and that the hedonistic society, especially during the “Me Decade” of the Seventies, laboured for material gain rather than spiritual fulfillment. The changes in American life and values since the 1950s are reflected in J. Updike’s “Rabbit” trilogy : “Rabbit Run”, “Rabbit Redux”, Rabbit is Rich”. The three “Rabbit” novels mirror the gradual formation of mass society through the main character Harry Angstrom. In the first novel “Rabbit, Run”, he tries to rebel and runs from a trivial life centered on TV, movies, his apathetic wife and a meaningless job. But finally, being tired of alienation and a sense of guilt caused by his irresponsible behaviour he returns to mass society and becomes a faceless conformist and consumer. J. Updike’s hero loses his

56 individuality and spirituality. He has acquired a materialistic value system giving priority to money, cars, houses, and sex. Harry is an example of a materially rich but spiritually poor American man from a powerful mass culture.

Through Harry Angstrom J. Updike reveals the decline of such traditional values as family, marriage, and vocation in American society due to the social and cultural events since the 1950s. Following their individual needs the Angstroms’ family lacks mutual understanding, spiritual warmth and respect. J Updike’s characters demonstrate that a family institution does not provide enough security and safety to younger generations and it is no longer a shelter from difficulties encountered outside it. There is more alienation between parents and children than love. Family as on important institution has lost its value in people’s lives.

Janice and Harry Angstroms in J. Updike’s trilogy also display changing attitude toward marriage. Fidelity, respect and mutual understanding as values have been replaced by infidelity, lack of respect and interest in each other. Love in contemporary marriage is equated to sex. Marriage based on comfort and materialistic values is only a formal institution empty of spiritual ties between two married people. Among younger generations, for instance among Nelson Angstrom friends in “Rabbit is Rich”, marriage institution is considered no longer fashionable and necessary as sexual relationship is normal without being married in contemporary world.

J. Updike’s characters show their changed outlook on work as well. In the materialistic value system work is no longer a source of spiritual fulfillment for Harry and other characters. To earn money and spend it on leisure time activities and various new products has become much more important and interesting in the consumer society.

Thus, in J. Updike’s contemporary middle-class America, we have observed the appearance of mass society and the disappearance of individuality and originality as well as the dissolution of marriage and family life and the loss of vocation. The abandoning of spiritual values in American society is J. Updike’s greatest concern in the three “Rabbit” novels.

57 6. Summary

The aim of the paper was to describe social, economic and cultural processes in American society in the second half of the twentieth century and reveal the shift in traditional American values such as family, marriage institutions, and vocation as well as to explore the formation of mass society in American writer’s John Updike’s “Rabbit” trilogy: “ Rabbit, Run”, “ Rabbit Redux”, “Rabbit is Rich”. J. Updike’s characters experience the complications within a family and marriage institutions due to the loss of spiritual substance in contemporary society. Harmonious relationship and strong familial bonds between parents and children have become only a myth. Individual priorities over collective plans and inability to love sincerely has led to the crisis of marriage institution. Materialistic value system has formed an indifferent attitude to work and vocation. In “Rabbit” trilogy J. Updike has expressed his great concern with the loss of spiritual values and the disappearance of individuality in the contemporary mass society in America.

Santrauka

Šio darbo tikslas buvo aprašyti 20-amžiaus antros pusės Amerikos socialinius, ekonominius, kultūrinius procesus bei atskleisti tradicinių Amerikos vertybių kaitą, išryškinti masinės visuomenės susiformavimą amerikiečių rašytojo Johno Updike’o trilogijoje apie Triušių: “ Triuši,bėk”, “ Triušis grįžta”, “Triušis turtingas”. J. Updike’o veikėjai, praradę dvasingumą šiuolaikiniame pasaulyje, susiduria su sudėtingais santykiais šeimoje bei santuokoje. Stiprūs, harmoningi ryšiai tarp tėvų ir vaikų tapo tik mitu. O individualių poreikių tenkinimas, atsisakant bendrų tikslų , ir nesugebėjimas nuoširdžiai mylėti sukėlė krizę tarp sutuoktinių. Materiali vertybių sistema suformavo abejingą žmogaus požiūrį į darbą ir pašaukimą. Trilogijoje J. Updike’as atskleidė savo didelį susirūpinimą dėl dvasinių vertybių praradimo ir individualumo išnykimo šiuolaikinėje masinėje Amerikos visuomenėje.

58 1. Abstract

The present paper is an attempt to describe American life and shifting values in the second half of the twentieth century against the background of social, economic and cultural processes of American history. The paper shows their reflection in American writer’s John Updike’s trilogy: “ Rabbit, Run”, “ Rabbit Redux”, “ Rabbit is Rich”. The three novels mirror the appearance of a new American society, philistines, consumers, mediocrities, and the loss of individualism as well as the disappearance of the spiritual component in family life, marriage institution and vocation.

59 Bibliography

1. Updike J Rabbit, Run. –London: Penguin Books. 1961 2. Updike J Rabbit, Redux. –NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 3. Updike J Rabbit is Rich. –London: Penguin Books, 1982 4. A Reader’s guide to the Twentieth Century Novel. –NY: Oxford University Press, 1995. 5. Roth J. K. American Diversity, American Identity. –NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. 6. Searles G. J. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. –Carbbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. 7. World Authors 1950-1970. –NY: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1975. 8. Tanner I. City of Words. American Fiction 1950-1970. –New York, 1971. 9. Scholl I. 50 žymiausių amžiaus romanų. –Vilnius: Mūsų knyga , 2002. 10. Ulvydienė L. John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom a Tetralogy: Beyond Historical meanings and assumptions. –Vilnius, 2004. 11. Outline of American Literature. –NY: United State Information Agency, 1994. 12. Hassan I. Selves at Risk. Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters. – Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. 13. Išganytas blogietis. \ 7 Meno Dienos. – 1998- Balandžio 17. 14. Hassan J. Selves at Risk. Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Novel.- Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1961. 15. Filosofijos atlasas. – Vilnius: alma littera, 1998. 16. Barrett W. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. – NY: Doubleday, 1958. 17. Jonušys L. Ir kaip kasdienis laiškanešio žygis... : Mintys verčiant Johną Updike’ą. \\ Šiaurės Atėnai. – Nr. 33 – Rugsėjo 6 – 2003. 18. Hasper H. Jr. Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, Updike. – The University of North Carolina Press, 1967. 19. An Outline of American History. – NY: United States Information Agency. 1994. 20. Bradbury M., Temperley H. Introduction to American Studies. – London: Longman, 1989. 21. Vaughan Ph. H. John Updike’s Images if America. – NY : Reseda , 1981.

60 22. Pavilionienė A. M. Džono Apdaiko Praeitis ir Dabartis \\ XX amžiaus visuotinė literatūra. – Kaunas: Šviesa, 1992. 23. Pavilionienė A. M. Teksto Interpretacija Vėlyvuosiuose Džono Apdaiko Romanuose //Antikinė ir užsienio literatūra. Literatūros teorija ir kritika, Literatūra //Mokslas. – 32 ( 3 ), 1990. 24. Pavilioniėnė A. M. Džonas Apdaikas // XXa. Vakarų literatūra. Antra dalis 1945- 1985. Vadovėlis. –Vilnius: VU, 1995. 25. Webster’s American Biographies. –Springfield: Merriam –Webster Inc., Publishers, 1983. 26. Финкельстайн С. Экзистенциализм в американской литературе. –Москва, 1983. 27. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. –Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. 28. Писатели США о литературе. –Москва, 1982. 29. Bode C. American Perspectives: The United States in the Modern Age.- Washington : United Sates Information Agency, 1992. 30. Luedtke L. S. Making America: The Society and Culture of the United States. – Washington: United States Information Agency, 1995. 31. Stone N. The Times Atlas of World History. –France: Partenaires, 1988. 32. Lifton R. I. Protean Man // Review. –No. 1, 716, 1968. 33. www.uni-siegen.de/~fb3amlit/nobelpr.htm 34. www.findarticles.com/cf_o/m2278/2_23/543098/print.jhtml 35. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/authors 36. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06lifetimes/updike.html 37. www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4502

61 Contents

1. Abstract……………………………………………………………………...... 2 2. Introduction…………………………………………………………………...... 3 3. The hero’s gradual loss of his individuality and spirituality:…………………...... 3.1 “Rabbit, Run” –the hero’s spiritual quest…………………………………...... 14 3.2 “Rabbit’s Redux” –the hero’s spiritual lassitude and short-term regeneration in the end…………………………………………………...... 25 3.3 “Rabbit’s is Rich” –the hero’s spiritual deterioration……………………...... 30 4. The Decline of Traditional Values in America:...... 4.1 The Crisis of Marriage Institution…………………………………………...... 35 4.2 Family Relationships: Parents and Children………………………………...... 44 4.3 The Loss of Vocation………………………………………………………...... 52 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...... 58 6. Summary……………………………………………………………………...... 60 7. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...... 61

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