THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
RABBIT, RUNNING IN PLACE
WILLIAM ANTHONY WELLOCK III
Spring 2010
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in English
Reviewed and approved* by the following:
Bernard Bell Liberal Arts Research Professor of English Thesis Supervisor
Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies Honors Adviser
Kathryn Hume Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English Faculty Reader
* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College.
Abstract
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is the protagonist of John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run and three subsequent novels. Critics sometimes explain him as a man on a mission.
However, an examination of Rabbit’s behavior and the way Updike describes it shows that he is, in fact, the very opposite. He is a man without a mission. Rabbit has no goals or ambition. This thesis offers a reading of Rabbit’s character that examines the ways in which he shows this trait throughout the series. It also explores how setting influences
Rabbit’s listless behavior. His behavior is not an attempt to return to his youth; it is a manifestation of the immaturity with which he already lives his life. Updike’s most famous protagonist is neither hero nor anti-hero, but simply a man without direction.
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Dedication
I owe thanks to Prof. Bell for his teaching, for helping me with this project and for working with me during the past year. Thank you to Prof. Lyon and Prof. Hume for their support and guidance. And of course, thanks Mom and Dad for everything you’ve done for me.
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Table of Contents
Abstract...... i
Dedication...... ii
Table of Contents...... iii
Introduction...... 1
A Man Without Ambition...... 5
Rabbit’s Provincial Identity...... 27
Works Cited...... 34
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Rabbit, Running in Place
Introduction
An attempt to analyze Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s motivation assumes that John
Updike’s protagonist has motivation. The term “motivation” implies that he has a goal for his life and believes his actions will lead to that goal. The problem with any reading that ascribes a goal to Rabbit is that such a reading overlooks his lack of ambition. Rabbit’s story charts this lack of ambition. Without a goal or the desire to achieve, Rabbit finds himself moving in circles, feeling the ennui of life and responding to instinct and impulse with little inhibition. A reader’s most pressing question becomes: Why does Rabbit act the way he does? The setting of Updike’s novels may offer one possible explanation.
Rabbit’s small-town background is one factor that contributes to his lack of ambition.
This essay demonstrates how Rabbit lacks motivation and goals and argues that his small-town upbringing is an important factor in his character.
The four novels — Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest
— that make up the Rabbit tetralogy were published between 1960 and 1990. Each book
was separated from the others by roughly a decade. Updike’s writing sparked a number of
literary critiques. Larry Taylor believes Rabbit has chosen an unwise goal for his life.
Taylor considers Updike’s Rabbit novels an example of pastoral satire. He writes that
“...[he] suggested that a work is anti-pastoral when it challenges, refutes, and exposes the
fallacies behind the dream of a return to nature … the concept of an elemental, simple life
in a state of nature is part of the American Dream and agrarian myth. Much of Rabbit
Angstrom’s failure can be attributed to his passionate pursuit of this ideal — an ideal
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which involves being in harmony with nature, rather than knowing one’s relationship to
nature” (7). Taylor’s idea that Rabbit is in “passionate pursuit” of a pastoral ideal
overlooks Rabbit’s tendency to avoid the prolonged pursuit of anything. His relationship
with Ruth, for example, is short-lived and ends as soon as Rabbit learns that she may be,
or may have been, pregnant. If he were to pursue the ideal of harmony with nature,
Rabbit might consider supporting the nature he has helped create or the woman with
whom he created it. Instead, he opts for the opposite of pursuit — escape — and leaves.
Is he pursuing a responsibility-free life by choosing to escape commitment? No; he
simply does not know what he wants. He will leave Ruth and return to Janice. Rabbit’s
fleeting desires do not create in him a sense of ambition.
Jack DeBellis also considers Updike’s prose to be a critique of some quest Rabbit
is undertaking. For example, when he goes to see “The Shaggy Dog” with Ruth in
Rabbit, Run, it is a parody of “Rabbit’s hero’s quest, his spiritual groping for the ‘it’ that
could make him first-rate again” (85). The dog in the movie “saves a missile site, rescues
a girl from drowning and a baby from a fire.” The Rabbit in the novels “cannot rescue his
drowning baby … nor in Rabbit Redux can he save Jill from burning nor direct the moon
rocket Apollo 11 away from the moon, the ‘big nothing.’ Only Disney makes modern
heroes.” However, Rabbit has no desire to be a modern hero. His flight from home is an
impulse and his meeting Ruth is an accident. Many of his failings as a husband and father
come from not taking action against things that happen to him. His flaw is not a failure to
achieve a goal, but his failure to define one. Rabbit cannot rescue his Rebecca from drowning or save Jill from the fire because he is not present to recognize the existence of
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those accidents; that is, to define them as problems that he should solve.
Edward Vargo writes that “Rabbit fits the pattern of modern literary quester, who
‘suffers temptations both of flesh and the spirit. He sins, and feels guilt, and strives
mightily for expiation. Unlike the holy man and knight, however, the modern quester has
no fixed order or system to guide him; all that he has is himself and his ability to live”
(55-56). Problems with this analysis center on the fact that Rabbit is foremost not a
quester. A quester would have ambition and an objective, and Rabbit does not. He has
impulses that he sometimes follows, but these do not lead him to any goal. Likewise,
after sinning, Rabbit does not “strive for expiation.” He does not strive for anything. He
stumbles upon sin, yields to it, and continues his life.
Another critic focusing on Rabbit Redux calls Rabbit’s story a quest. Gordon
Slethaug writes that in Rabbit Redux there are, in fact, “four quests for freedom —
Janice’s, Jill’s, Skeeter’s, and Rabbit’s” (246). Again, calling Rabbit’s behavior a quest misunderstands his lack of ambition. It is not his goal to house Jill and Skeeter in a communal living situation. These things happen to him, he does not resist, and he finds himself in trouble that he helped create. Slethaug is more on point when he writes about
Rabbit, Run and says that Rabbit’s “abortive journey and subsequent realization that he had neither a specific goal nor a road map function as appropriate metaphors for his own moral dilemma...” (242).
The image of Rabbit as the quintessential American man also presents him as a character with a goal. He is symptomatic of someone who places too much emphasis on the third of that American triumvirate — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That,
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writes Donald Greiner, is his problem: “The tension in much of [Updike’s] lifelong investigation of middle America comes from the fact that Rabbit and his counterparts in the stories believe — and believe fervently — in what Thomas Jefferson memorably called American’s right to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ Unfortunately, however, they mistake the grail for the quest. That is, they misread Jefferson’s words to promise happiness rather than the pursuit of it. Thus they are always running toward an ever- receding goal” (150). Yes, Rabbit, like everyone, wants to be happy. But his attempts to pursue happiness are ill-defined and unarticulated. It is more accurate to say that Rabbit follows fleeting impulses than pursues happiness. If the pursuit of happiness is a right,
Rabbit is not taking advantage of it. Updike shows us that Rabbit is a man without ambition. Rabbit’s essential characteristics, his behavior and the description Updike gives us show that he has neither goals nor ambition. This is his most salient weakness.
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A Man Without Ambition
How does a rabbit run? It runs in bursts, moving first one way, then another. To an observer, it doesn’t look like it’s running anywhere. A human would not say a rabbit is running to a place in order to arrive there sooner. It appears more like motion than action.
Updike’s Rabbit is an analogue to real rabbits, running on instinct but without an ultimate destination.
Taylor portrays Rabbit’s story as a search for a lost idyll. He asks and answers the question of Rabbit’s motivation: “Where is Rabbit running to? To Olinger” (15). (Olinger is the name of another fictional Updike locale, a decidedly rural one.) The question, however, is not where Rabbit is running to, or even from where or what he is running from. While Rabbit may deal with his anxiety by leaving one place for another, the goal in his mind is not ‘find the lost idyll.’ He has no goals. He has no motivation for his motion. His behavior is a response to new challenges in his life. So, running on instinct, he looks for what he is familiar with and what comforted him earlier in his life. He remembers high school girls and basketball, but he is unsure where to now find happiness. Rabbit’s problem is not his lost youth. Rabbit’s problem is his inability to deal with problems effectively and his lack of a goal. He has already reached the height of his accomplishment in his small-town high school. He is not compelled to any greater action.
Instead of action, he has anxiety.
The first mention of Rabbit’s anxiety (and an example of his response to it) comes in the very beginning of the tetralogy. This anxiety seems to come from nowhere.
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Rabbit’s wife Janice asks him to pick up their son from Rabbit’s parents’ house and their
car from Janice’s parents’ house. As he’s leaving, she has another request: “Janice calls
from the kitchen, ‘And honey, pick up a pack of cigarettes, could you?’ in a normal voice...” Rabbit’s emotional response does not make sense. Janice’s request, which would
sound harmless to most readers, is interpreted as a warning. Suddenly, “Rabbit freezes,
standing at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and sense he
is in a trap. It seems certain. He goes out” (15). His “trapped” feeling is incongruous to
any emotions Updike writes for him before this scene. It seems to come suddenly and
from nowhere. After Rabbit leaves his house, Updike describes the town, not Rabbit’s
emotions. In these pages, we first see how Updike makes place an important part of
Rabbit’s character. The landscape, the same one Rabbit has lived in for almost his entire
life, recalls memories to Rabbit’s mind. He is connected to the town. The writing
provides mostly description, with a few phrases to make sure we remember Rabbit’s odd feeling. Rabbit is “pricked by an indefinite urgency” as he “stealthily approaches his old
home.” There, he watches his son being fed by his parents. All is well. When Rabbit
approaches the Springer’s house, the language about the feeling resurfaces. Updike writes that Rabbit’s “acts take on decisive haste” and that “everything depends, the whole pure
idea, on which way Janice was sloppy. Either she forgot to give him the key when he
went out or she never bothered to take it out of the ignition” (21). What idea? Rabbit
hasn’t expressed a plan or desire to leave. Because Rabbit has remarked that he doesn’t
want to see his mother-in-law, one could infer that the “idea” is his plan to get the car
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without Mrs. Springer seeing him. Earlier, Rabbit thought his problem was whether to go to his old house or to the Springer’s house first (15). Now, suddenly, he’s at his car. He gets in, still now wanting the Springers to hear. Up until the point when he drives away from Brewer, we can’t tell if he’s going back to get Nelson or not. He has only a vague idea of where he’s going or why he’s leaving. Rabbit’s drive away from Brewer is not the beginning of a quest, but an impulse that even he doesn’t understand.
His drive away from and back to his home underscores Rabbit’s lack of a goal. He keeps changing his mind about the land he’s driving through. He knows he wants to avoid
Philadelphia, it is the “dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals” (23). On the road he takes to avoid from the city, he “doesn’t drive five miles before his road begins to feel like part of the same trap” (24). Rabbit stops at a service garage, and a farmer working as a gas station attendant who is “patient” and
“fatherly and crafty and stupid” fills his tank. The contrasting adjectives, like “crafty” and
“stupid” show how Updike is choosing words to illustrate Rabbit’s indecision. Updike also writes about how the landscape imbues people with qualities, though Rabbit’s interpretation of that idea may be convoluted. The attendant is thrifty, he “squeezes every drop he can into the tank without letting it slosh over the lip insolently like a city garageman would” (25). This man, living in the country, is thrifty in a way that his foil in the city would not be. However, in the next paragraphs, Rabbit tells himself that the rural landscape imbues people with unfavorable qualities. Rabbit smells whisky on the attendant’s breath and begrudges him for the advice he tries to give Rabbit. Driving
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through Lancaster County, Rabbit passes an Amish buggy. He has mixed emotions: “He
tries to think of the good life these people lead... but in his head they stay devils...” By the
end of the paragraph, he only remembers unfavorable, supposed qualities of the Amish.
They are cruel, the beat their animals, have sex in strange ways, are “fanatics” who
“worship manure” (27). The country is portrayed unfavorably. Rabbit comes upon the
Baltimore-Washington urban area, but that is a “two-headed dog [guarding] the coastal route to the south” (29). Everywhere he goes, he doesn’t want to be there. Even opposite directions of the compass both create anxiety. Before reaching Maryland, Rabbit was traveling east, “the worst direction, into unhealth (even that invented word betrays
Rabbit’s unassailable anxiety), soot and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody” (24). After Frederick, he is traveling west, and “the animal in him swells its protest that he is going west” (31). Somewhere, maybe in West Virginia
(itself an in-between state, neither part of the South nor the North nor the Midwest), he rips apart his map and decides to sleep. In the very next sentence (that, significantly, starts a new paragraph, which shows the back-and-forth nature of Rabbit’s thinking), he feels car lights on his neck and decides to move. Rabbit drives to the highway and turns instinctively right, back toward the north and Brewer, the very place he intended to never see again when his circuit began. Without a destination, he has moved in a circle.
There is little dialogue in this opening section, but the dialogue that is included
contributes to establishing Rabbit’s lack of ambition. Two lines in particular highlight this
quality, and the way in which Updike presents them lets readers know that they are
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important. Both lines are different from other dialogue in the first section, making them
stand out for readers and urging us to consider those words more carefully. The first
highlighted piece of dialogue comes early in the novel. Rabbit has returned home from
work to find Janice watching the Disney Mousketeers. Rabbit and Janice speak in short,
sentence-length pieces of dialogue to each other, but one of the Mouseketeers gets a
soliloquy. Rabbit and Janice focus on the television and the Mouseketeer’s words. Updike
has italicized the most important parts: “‘Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said.
Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be who you are. …
God gives to each one of us a special talent. ...And He gives to each of us the special
talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys
and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop
them. That’s the way to be happy.’ He pinches his mouth together and winks.” Rabbit’s response is telling of his character. Updike starts the next paragraph with “That was good.” Is Rabbit appreciating this advice for the guidance it can give him? No. It’s the little smile he focuses on. “That was good” is followed by: “Rabbit tries it, pinching the
mouth together and then the wink, getting the audience out front with you against some
enemy behind.” Rabbit not only has no ambition, he also cannot recognize an ambitious
sentiment, even in a children’s television show.
The second piece of highlighted dialogue comes while Rabbit is on the first leg of
his nighttime circuit, when the gas station attendant also offers Rabbit a piece of
unheeded advice. In the beginning of their conversation, Rabbit asks how far he has
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traveled from Brewer and then asks about the road after this gas station. The attendant
replies, “Son, where do you want to go?” Rabbit’s response is both literal and figurative:
“Huh? I don’t know exactly.” Well, the attendant continues, “Where are you headed?”
Updike doesn’t let Rabbit answer this question (25). Rabbit keeps asking for vague directions, and the attendant keeps trying to help. Finally, he goes to look for a map.
When he returns, he offers a piece of unsolicited advice: “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you get there” (26).
Rabbit doubts this. “I don’t think so,” he says. Our protagonist has just revealed that he doesn’t know what he wants, and that he sees no problem with that. Updike shows us this bit of dialogue is important by having it haunt Rabbit when he’s lost. He is somewhere in
West Virginia and “he blames everything on the farmer with glasses and two shirts.
Funny how the man sticks in his throat. He can’t think past him... somewhere out of his
body he mocked the furtive wordless hopes that at moments give Harry a sensation of
arrival. Figure out where you’re going before you get there: it misses the whole point and yet there is always the chance that, little as it says, it says it” (33-34). This second piece of highlighted dialogue recalls the Mousekeeter’s command to “Know Thyself.” Rabbit does not know himself. Even if a platitude “misses the whole point,” he’ll still allow it the possibility of being as true as any other philosophy. The Mousketeer’s advice and the attendant’s words underline Rabbit’s problems: He won’t work, and he has no ambition or goals. We learn his character early, and as the novel continues, these qualities are brought up again and again.
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For example, consider how Rabbit meets Ruth, the prostitute with whom he lives.
The way the two meet continues Updike’s representation of Rabbit as a man without goals. Rabbit does not set out to live with another woman. Instead, he meets Ruth by chance, when his old basketball coach, Mr. Tothero, introduces them at a restaurant.
During the meal, Rabbit seems more interested in reminiscing with Tothero than in flirting with Ruth. By the time Tothero and his friend Margaret are ready to leave, Rabbit is ready to leave with them. He is not trying to sleep with Ruth. He gets up to go, but
Tothero “sets a rigid urgent hand on his shoulder, pushing him back down while he says
“No, no, Harry. You stay. One apiece” (59). Even though it may not be what Rabbit though he was getting into when he went out with Tothero, he doesn’t resist. Updike has made this climax a “not doing,” instead of a “doing.” Rabbit did not make it his goal to sleep with another woman, but helped by Tothero and Ruth, he finds himself doing so.
This is not to say that Rabbit does not have free choice; he certainly does. Updike does not need to stress his ability to choose for us to know it exists. It is his choice to leave his family and to sleep with Ruth. However, the way in which Updike has him make these choices indicate his lack of ambition or goals. These choices don’t build toward any goal.
He sometimes falls into situations that require a choice, and he elects what appears to him to be the easiest or most pleasurable option.
Rabbit falls into life with Ruth. He might have stayed with her forever as a live-in boyfriend, making no commitment, but never leaving. However, on a trip to his house to pick up toiletries and clothes, Reverend Eccles sees him and stops him. An intervention
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has begun. It takes an outside force for Rabbit to change his behavior. In this, a first,
chance, meeting with Eccles, Updike again includes symbolic dialogue. This dialogue is
reminiscent of the dialogue with the rural gas station attendant. Eccles asks, “Where are
you going?” “Huh? Nowhere,” replies Rabbit (88). In fact, this answer mirrors Rabbit’s
answer to the attendant. Both questions are taken literally by the characters but can be
read as figurative by readers. Both begin with a “Huh?,” followed by a short explanation
from Rabbit. At least by this point in the story, Rabbit has not grown emotionally, and his
now completed escape and new lifestyle do not offer him any insight into how to proceed
from here. Eccles gives Rabbit a ride and asks him why he left. Rabbit’s response
highlights his goalless, instinct-drive character: “She asked me to buy a pack of
cigarettes” (91). Rabbit goes further: “It’s the truth. 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.” Readers can see the disconnect between speaker and reality. Though Rabbit
may indeed feel ennui and dissatisfaction from his marriage, it is he who has just made the mess of his home. Any “fetching and hauling” Rabbit is doing is minimal. He perceives his grievances more sensitively than readers. The scene ends when the men set up a golf outing, showing that there is no hurry even now to arrive at a solution to
Rabbit’s infidelity.
Eccles uses his golf outing with Rabbit to try to convince him to return to Janice, and Updike uses it to further develop Rabbit’s character. One way he does this is by putting him in an alternate universe — a sports universe — and only there making him
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ambitious. Sports offer Rabbit an opportunity to chase an arbitrary goal, if only for a few
hours. In fact, in this alternate universe, Rabbit’s faults are reversed. Here, his flaw may
be too much ambition. He is playing poorly, and Eccles gives him some encouragement,
which only makes Rabbit try harder. Updike writes, “That does it; Harry sets himself and
in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the
ball completely.” Eccles antidote for this problem is to urge Rabbit to step outside his
desire for a moment. He tells him that “Your only mistake is trying too hard … you have
a beautiful natural swing” (112). Eccles is telling Rabbit to trust his instincts and let his
game come to him. This is something he is used to doing in the real world. In this
alternate universe, it is more difficult. Later in the round, Rabbit asks about Janice, and
Eccles presses Rabbit, asking why he left. “I told ja. There was this thing that wasn’t
there,” responds Rabbit. Eccles continues to press: “What thing? Have you ever seen it?
Are you sure it exists?” Rabbit cannot define “this thing.” He can only reply “I tell you, I know what it is.” Eccles doesn’t take this answer. He continues: “What is it? What is it?
Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” (Run 114-115).
Rabbit gives his answer to Eccles at the next tee, when he hits a beautiful shot: “‘That’s it!’ he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, ‘That’s it.’”
(Run 115-116).
Given a stimulus, Rabbit performs. That is manufactured motivation. Eccles makes him angry, so he stops thinking about how to hit the ball and, without much thinking, hits his best shot of the day. But we have to ask: A nice golf shot? That’s it?
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That’s the “thing” Rabbit has been looking for? Of course, this doesn’t answer any of
Eccles’ questions. The golf shot is fleeting. Rabbit cannot keep it. As a symbol, it could stand for any of a number of things. It could be victory over someone else, the way
Rabbit finally hits a better shot than the regular player Eccles. It could be a sensation of achievement that comes with success. It could be a memory of his basketball days. It could be the chance to be outside, playing golf without responsibilities. It could be what
Rabbit thinks will get him “out of [the] tangle” of the golf game and accompanying questions about his marriage. In any case, it is not defined, leaving Rabbit’s goals as ephemeral as before.
Eccles also helps find a job, one which Updike uses to show Rabbit’s lack of ambition. In this job, he needs no ambition to succeed; all he needs is to show up and move soil. He soon takes to the work. “He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him — nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias. He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his.” (117). Except for the physical planting, every part of the job is thought through or carried out by something else. Eccles finds the job for him; Mrs. Smith tells him what to plant; Even the earth takes over for him after he seals the seeds in the ground. This work requires no planning or goals; just till, sow and wait for the “brainless flowers” to grow. Each day his work is laid out for him, and each day, he goes home with no more work to think about.
He only works for Mrs. Smith for two months, but Rabbit might be happy doing this forever. In fact, it takes a crisis to bring him out of this lifestyle.
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Janice’s delivery of Rebecca June Angstrom is the first time she and Rabbit have
seen each other since she asked him to pick up cigarettes for her. Janice’s behavior — she
grabs and kisses Rabbit — agrees with Rabbit’s personality; she makes it easy for him to return to his family and old life. Even with the influence of the ether, this behavior makes it clear that Janice is ready to move forward. Is Rabbit? Comparing Rabbit’s goodbye to
Ruth to his goodbye to Janice shows how he is unwilling to set goals, especially if they are difficult goals. Though he might want to stay with Ruth, Rabbit will not make that his goal. A goal is a more defined desire that implies planning in order to achieve the goal.
Rabbit just has wants. When he leaves Ruth, he tells her, “My wife’s having a baby. I got to go see her through it. I’ll be back in a couple hours. I love you” (165). Compare that “I
love you” with the one Rabbit gives Janice. Before he leaves the hospital, Janice says she
loves Rabbit. “Listen. I love you,” he responds (176). Rabbit’s reply to Janice seems more
forced than the unbidden statement he makes to Ruth. When Eccles asks Rabbit if he’s
going to go back to Ruth’s apartment to sleep, he answers “No … for Heaven’s sake. I
can’t” (177). The “I can’t” is a revealing answer. He could, but leaving Janice now would
take ambition and would make him acknowledge life with Ruth as a goal instead of
simply a temporary arrangement. It would be too difficult to leave Janice and live with or
marry Ruth. He takes the easiest option.
Rabbit moves back into the Angstrom household. One night soon afterward, he
leaves Janice to wander through the night. When Janice wakes up the next day, she starts
drinking. Janice tries to wash Rebecca, but is drunk, and Rebecca drowns. This is the first
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of two female deaths in the series that share a set of circumstances (the second is Jill’s
death in Rabbit Redux). Rabbit is not directly responsible for either death, but is blamed
by other characters for being away when the deaths occurred. This shows how Rabbit’s
wandering, uninterested lifestyle leads to suffering for himself and his family. Updike
may be making a point here about such an approach to life. Updike himself was
ambitious — in Self-Consciousness he writes that his childhood goal was to write for The
New Yorker (3) — and dedicated — he held himself to a fixed writing schedule, trying to finish three pages every day (Cavett 235). Considering that Updike’s virtues (ambition
and dedication) finds their foil in Rabbit’s greatest flaw (lack of ambition), we can
consider the Rabbit series an examination of those flaws. Perhaps Updike is wondering
what kind of person he would have been without his talent and commitment.
At his daughter’s funeral, Rabbit makes a remark that shocks both families.
“Don’t look at me … I didn’t kill her,” he tells Janice (253). The onlookers are shocked,
and he runs again. He eventually goes to see Ruth. He has left his wife again, he tells her;
this time it’s really bad. Ruth, however, has news for Rabbit that knocks all pretense out
of him. She is pregnant. It was never Rabbit’s goal to leave Janice and Mt. Judge and live
with Ruth. To leave one family and raise another would take ambition, and Rabbit has
none. He will not accept responsibility. After leaving, he begins running. Updike
describes his thoughts: “I don’t know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do,
where to go, what will happen...” At the novel’s finale, we see the same man without
ambition, unsure of how to continue in his life because he has no direction for it. He
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continues to run, going nowhere.
In the rest of the tetralogy, Rabbit continues the same goalless existence. When we
meet him again, after a ten-year hiatus, he is leaving the printing plant where he now
works. Rabbit’s father also works at the printing plant. We can infer that some family
connection or referral helped Rabbit obtain his current job. In fact, almost every job
Rabbit has in the tetralogy comes through a referral — his gardening job, this job and the
position at Spring Motors he will occupy in Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit
never finds work for himself. He probably would not know where to begin if he had to do
so. He has no interests he could follow to lead him to employment. He has little ambition
as a printer, nor does he seem to have a desire to find a better job. For now, this is good
enough for him. His life remains good enough until Janice leaves him. Now, Rabbit is the
cuckold. Still, he doesn’t look for a woman to take his wife’s place. That opportunity
comes to him and only when it is clearly presented does he take it. It is as if Rabbit
cannot realize what he wants — what his goals are — before it is placed in front of him.
In Rabbit Redux, as in Rabbit, Run, Rabbit does not set out to replace Janice with another woman. In both novels, however, he begins domestic relationships with a woman who is introduced to him. Buchanan, another printer, invites Rabbit to visit him at a bar one night. Though he is initially ambivalent, Rabbit agrees. Rabbit meets Jill, a teenage runaway, in a scene that parallels the restaurant scene in Rabbit, Run in which Rabbit meets Ruth. When Rabbit meets Jill, he is in a restaurant booth with several people whom he has just met and the one person he knows, who serves as his connection to the group.
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In fact, Rabbit even asks for a daiquiri, the same drink he had in the Rabbit, Run scene.
By making these connections, Updike is showing us that Rabbit has not changed in significant ways since the first novel. He still moves through life without goals and finds himself committing adultery when given the chance.
Rabbit, Jill and Nelson live together until “one day in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house” (179). Again, Updike makes a force enter Rabbit’s life that he did not seek to bring into it. It is Skeeter, a Black Vietnam War veteran and fugitive. Skeeter antagonizes Rabbit until Rabbit attacks him. Despite
Rabbit’s feelings toward Skeeter, he does not throw him out, and he will never do so.
Even this intrusion into his life, into the world he and Jill and Nelson have created, cannot stir him to ambition or resolve. Later that same day, he will joke about keeping on
Skeeter’s good side (187). Any desire Rabbit had to make changes in his life vanishes almost as quickly as it came to him.
Comparing how Rabbit responds to accusations against America (the only place besides Mount Judge to which he feels a strong connection) in different situations reveals him to be mutable regarding his opinions as well as his desires. We first get a picture of
Rabbit as the staunchly, somewhat rabid, American defending his country when he and his family visit Stavros’s restaurant. We can’t say that Rabbit has any goal or ambition to make the United States a great country. After all, he has no civic involvement and no ambition in his job. What he has is a feeling. The United States is wonderful, or, as he says later in the novel, “I think … about America, it’s still the only place” (71). During
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his talk with Stavros, Rabbit notes that he likes the fact that America is powerful without him having to do anything or think about the implications of how it uses that power.
Defiantly, he states “I don’t think about politics … That’s one of my Goddam precious
American rights, not to think about politics” (38). If Rabbit is indeed the quintessential
American he is sometimes considered, then his thoughts about America should tell us a lot about him. He makes a similar statement about America and a citizen’s role in it during a discussion with Jill and Nelson. Nelson overhears the discussion, is upset and asks his father why he disagrees with everyone. Rabbit says he disagrees “because [he loves his] country and can’t stand to have it knocked.” Jill jumps in, telling him “If you loved it you’d want it better.” Rabbit has a telling response to that: “‘If it was better I’d have to be better,’ he says seriously, and they all laugh, he last” (146). As with the
Mouseketeer speech, Updike has again provided his own italics for the part to focus on.
Rabbit is unwilling to set goals, even to improve an institution that he admits he supports and loves. He has no ambition and he does not want to have ambition.
Despite his admonition to Stavros that one of his “Goddam precious American rights” is to not have to think about politics, Skeeter brings with him a philosophy about the United States’ role in history, and Rabbit acquiesces to discussing it with him. We might expect Rabbit to challenge and completely reject Skeeter’s ideas. Instead, he passively listens to, then participates in, Skeeter’s readings and lectures about the ugliness of America history. This participation, however, is short-lived. This is another piece of evidence that shows us a Rabbit who goes along with what is happening. Earlier,
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we could possibly consider defending the reputation of the United States as one of his goals, but these situations show this goal to be subject to context. Skeeter does not make
Rabbit re-evaluate his thoughts about America. He offers a different perspective on history, and in his presence, Rabbit goes along with it. Later, when Rabbit’s sister Mim is visiting, he regresses to his old political stances. Updike is showing us Rabbit’s lack of conviction and continuity.
The character Skeeter helps show how Rabbit’s instinct is to avoid action. Rabbit may not understand his thoughts about Skeeter, or what he wants from him. After the first night, Rabbit lets him stay, thinking it will be temporary. When Skeeter doesn’t leave,
Rabbit says something (“I thought three days ago you said you were getting out in three days”), but takes no action. He becomes accustomed to Skeeter’s presence, then friendly to it. Even when Skeeter and Jill begin using heroin, something we know he disapproves of and doesn’t want Nelson to see, Rabbit takes no action. Again, it takes a crisis to compel Rabbit to action. Even then, his solution is an attempt to make his problems vanish and avoid confrontation. The crisis comes when Rabbit’s house is burned down.
He suspects two neighbors who told him to kick Skeeter out. After the investigation of the arson, Rabbit finds Skeeter hiding. His solution to the question of what to do with
Skeeter is a decidedly non-confrontational one. He takes Skeeter a few miles outside of
Brewer, gives him $30 and never sees him again. If Rabbit’s goal was to help Skeeter, he could do more. If his goal was to find who burned down his house, he could do more.
Even if his goal or desire was to hurt Skeeter for coming into his life, he could do more.
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However, as we have seen before, Rabbit cannot define his goals.
Edward Vargo notes that the word “O.K.” is used more than 55 times in Rabbit
Redux, including the novel’s final word (149). The word “generally expresses a cautious acceptance, a noncommittal yes, a qualified yes that looks with yearning to no. It can be an assurance or an evasion, especially of disagreement and anger, or a sign of capitulation, of a willingness to settle for less than the truth. It is a term that expresses concern as well as a laissez-faire attitude.” It does not require the speaker to articulate his thoughts beyond the idea that he has no stake in the matter at hand. In short, it is a useful term for someone like Rabbit, who does not have or express ambition. The novel’s final
“O.K.” comes when Janice and Rabbit reunite in a motel room, a symbol of transience.
Another chapter in Rabbit’s life has moved in a circle. Our protagonist still has no life goals.
Rabbit is still living the same way in Rabbit is Rich. In this novel, he is especially content. He is back as a salesman at the Springer dealership, an easy job that highlights his lack of ambition. In this novel, Rabbit’s attitudes about work and money especially work to convey his listless nature. As with the other jobs he works, this job is given to him. Janice’s father arranges for Rabbit to have a salesman position after he is fired from the printing press in Rabbit Redux (2). Now, he has risen to co-own part of Springer
Motors with Janice, though “Rabbit feels as though he owns it all, showing up at the showroom day after day, riding herd on the paperwork and the payroll, swinging in his clean suit in and out of Service and Parts where the men work filmed with oil and look up
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white-eyed from the bulb-lit engines as in a kind of underworld while he makes contact with the public...” From this description, we can see that Rabbit’s job barely qualifies as work. The verbs Updike uses to describe his job carry only a modicum of the idea of work with them. He ‘shows up’ and ‘rides herd,’ neither of which require Rabbit to create or complete anything. Comparing his responsibility to the mechanic’s work shows how little is required of him. He only needs to ‘swing in and out’ — he is not even supervising. Rabbit’s official responsibility — the area in which we might expect him to make a contribution to the agency — is glossed over. He doesn’t, for example ‘create business partnerships’ or even ‘network.’ He only ‘makes contact’ with the public, implying only a cursory piece of work that can be easily and quickly fulfilled. These words — like the word “O.K.” in Rabbit Redux — stylistically illustrate Rabbit’s character. He has no drive to add to his world; he is content keeping it as it is.
If one had to ascribe a goal to Rabbit, it would be to maintain a status quo. When
Nelson’s ambition at the dealership threatens to destabilize the comfortable rut into which
Rabbit has put himself, he becomes upset. Nelson buys used convertibles, asks the mechanics to fix them up and plans to resell them for a profit. He has a goal and ambition. Rabbit doesn’t like what he sees. When Nelson explains the idea, Rabbit remains sets against it and confronts Nelson until, angry and humiliated, drives one car into another, ruining them. In the next scene, Rabbit is with friends telling them about the story, and he remarks that “What makes me really feel rotten, he was right” (153).
Despite the success of Nelson’s plan, Rabbit makes no indication that he will try again.
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He is more than content with more of the same at the dealership. Why take financial
risks? Rabbit’s relationship with money is an important part of Rabbit is Rich. Rabbit sees the good things money brings to him. It buys him a country club membership and a suburban house, but he doesn’t seem to work for that money. He expects money to naturally flow to him. He especially likes investing in gold (189) because his investment does the work for him. When he tries to do some work himself and switch his investment to silver, his plan backfires. The value of silver drops. Perhaps he should have continued his pattern of not attempting to work. This interest in making money off an investment is
counter to a sentiment Rabbit expresses during the novel. When considering sums smaller
than the multi-thousand dollar investment he makes in precious metals, Rabbit has an
anti-wealth sentiment. Complaining about the family car Nelson scratched, Updike has
him think that “the great sad lie told to children that is Christmas stains Weiser end to
end, and through the murk he glimpses the truth that to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich
is to be poor” (339). Earlier, when deciding what snacks to purchase, Rabbit flinches at a
thirty cent raise in the price of cashews. He buys them anyway, thinking “what the hell’s
the point of being rich” (84). When Nelson buys convertibles, Rabbit is willing to eat the
loss and “chalk it up to experience” (149). To Rabbit, making money only works when
someone or something does it for you, as he hopes will happen with the gold. When
confronted with something more tangible, such as his personal purchases and purchases
at the dealership, it is not worth it to try to become wealthier.
The fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, shows a Rabbit who cannot bring himself
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to try to save his life or his family. Rabbit at Rest begins with Rabbit and Janice vacationing in Florida. Nelson is now married to Pru from Rabbit is Rich, and they visit
Florida with their two children. Soon we learn that Nelson has been stealing money from
Springer Toyota to finance a drug addiction. Janice has a plan. Nelson will go to a rehabilitation center in Philadelphia and she and Rabbit will sell their Penn Park house to help pay off the debt Nelson has incurred. Rabbit, however, can only complain about
Janice’s plan. He tell her that “We didn’t roll up that debt — Nelson did it, Nelson and his faggy boyfriends.” Janice acknowledges that Nelson created the debt, but says that doesn’t change the fact that they need to make it their goal to help Nelson: “Well, you can
say that, but he can’t pay it back, and he was acting as part of the company” (427).
Janice’s solution — to sell their house to help pay the debt — is designed to solve the
problem. It will bring in two-thirds of the money they need and let them keep the car lot,
which will help them pay off the rest of the money. Rabbit’s proposal — to sell the car lot
and keep the house — is not a plan that helps solve the problem. He has not established
helping Nelson as a goal. Instead, Rabbit’s plan lets him keep a house he likes. He does
not have the ambition to solve a problem; he only wants to keep his comforts around him.
Rabbit’s inability to solve problems makes him begrudge his family’s attempts to solve
their problems. He criticizes Janice’s plan for removing the debt because of what it takes
from him, and he mocks Nelson attempts to control his drug addiction. During a
conversation with his son, Rabbit is “irritating the kid, he knows [it], with his amiability”
(403). Nelson tells his father how he feels, saying “They tell you at the center that there’ll
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be people who mock you for going straight, but they don’t say one of them will be your
own father.” Rabbit replies that he’s not mocking Nelson. There is a disconnect between
the character’s word and reader’s knowledge. We know he is mocking Nelson because
Rabbit has acknowledged that his tone irritates his son. As for Rabbit’s claim that he is all
for “sanity,” we can see how his actions negate that. While Nelson was away, Rabbit slept
with Pru, sabotaging Nelson’s goal of getting his life back together. This makes Rabbit’s
claims for desiring sanity and a calm, healthy family life seem hypocritical. When the
affair is exposed, Rabbit flees.
The end of Rabbit at Rest has several similarities with the beginning of Rabbit,
Run. The Rabbit of Rabbit, Run drove in a circle. Updike has written in one. His familial sex with Pru exposed, Rabbit once again gets in a car and drives south. This time — finally with a destination, perhaps for one of the first times in his literary life — he gets there. While in Florida, he sees a doctor, who asks him what hobbies he has. He replies that he likes to “read a lot of history” (476). We know this is an exaggeration. Rabbit has not yet finished the history book he was reading at the beginning of the novel. His stated goal is a non-goal. The doctor’s advice recalls the advice the gas station attendant gave
Rabbit in Rabbit, Run: Have a goal. After Rabbit’s response about his history reading, the doctor tells him “You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you” (476). In other words: Do something with your life! This is advice Rabbit has been ignoring for decades.
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Updike acknowledges Rabbit’s disinclination to take his doctor’s advice when in the very
next sentence he writes, “The smell of good advice always make Rabbit want to run the
other way.” Updike knows it, readers know it, Rabbit does not — without a goal, he will
flounder. Rabbit suffers another heart attack while playing basketball with local youth,
the penultimate scene of the tetralogy mirroring the first scene. Rabbit’s problems with
his heart have finally overtaken him. Though it is only in the final book that he has
medical problems with his heart, the problems associated with a figurative lack of heart
are what trouble Rabbit throughout his saga. “Do what the heart commands... the heart is our only guide,” his old coach Tothero tells him in Rabbit, Run (47). Rabbit has no guide.
He has never had a guide. He has been without a goal or ambition since graduating high school. With his behavior throughout his life and his death at 56, Updike shows that this has always been Rabbit’s greatest flaw.
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Rabbit’s Provincial Identity
Rabbit’s most essential characteristics are that he is juvenile, sensual and
provincial. These qualities are symptoms of Rabbit’s central problem: his lack of ambition. They emphasize present satisfaction over long-term ambition, and they devalue responsibility. Rabbit’s lack of ambition may stem partly from the locale in which Updike locates the stories and Rabbit’s connection to that locale. For Updike, place was very
important. In fact, he wrote that the first two mysteries that confront us are “Why me?”
and “Why here?” (Self 6). Updike attempted to control his answer to the second question
by deciding where he would live. Rabbit is shaped by his setting without pushing back in
return.
In Rabbit at Rest, Updike shows us Rabbit’s character through Rabbit’s
relationship with his son, his fixation with snacks and his flight to Florida. Since Nelson’s
youth, Rabbit has had a difficult relationship with his son. Nelson blames Rabbit for the
death of his baby sister Rebecca in Rabbit, Run. In Rabbit Redux, Nelson blames his
father for Jill’s death, which acts as a catalyst in creating the strained relationship
between Nelson and Rabbit. Jill has died because Rabbit was too juvenile to learn from
his earlier mistakes. The relationship between Nelson and Rabbit now shows Rabbit to be
even more juvenile. Rabbit is not a good father. With Jill and at Springer Motors, he feels
as if he is competing with Nelson, which could be part of a relationship between peers,
but is not part of a healthy father-son relationship. Rabbit is too juvenile and immature to
be a good father.
An element in Rabbit at Rest that shows us Rabbit’s immaturity is his fixation
with salty snacks and candy. This obsession is first mentioned early in the novel when
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Rabbit buys a candy bar in the airport and is mentioned throughout the novel until its
conclusion. In between, Updike gives us numerous images of Rabbit enjoying junk food,
despite medical instruction not to do so. Rabbit’s fixation on this food, even when he knows it is helping kill him, illustrates his juvenile nature in two ways. First, it is an example of an oral fixation. As described by Sigmund Freud, an oral fixation occurs when emotional development is disrupted in individuals who are less than one year old.
We do not need to consider whether Freud’s theories are valid. What is important is that the idea of oral fixation is a recognized trope that signifies retarded development. Second, this behavior shows that Rabbit has little self-discipline, another juvenile characteristic.
Even after his heart attack, Rabbit cannot stop himself from eating unhealthy food. The inability to delay instant pleasure for more lasting satisfaction, such as a healthy family life or even personal health, is a juvenile characteristic, and one Rabbit displays prominently.
Another important element of Rabbit’s character is his sensuality. Throughout the series, readers are given examples of Rabbit’s sensual nature. His affinity for sex and sports mark him as a sensual being. The fact that Ruth is a prostitute illustrates the responsibility-free kind of life Rabbit is looking for. In Rabbit Redux, the dramatic climax of the novel comes when Rabbit is away from his home, sleeping with Mrs. Fosnacht. He probably wouldn’t be there if Janet had not left home to live with Charlie Stavros. In both cases, sex has diminished Rabbit’s family. Rabbit at Rest gives us several examples of the importance of sex in Rabbit’s psyche. Rabbit’s comments to Ronnie Harrison and
Rabbit’s sexual behavior show us how he fixates on the sexual act. After Thelma’s funeral, Ronnie confronts Rabbit about Rabbit’s affair with Thelma. Ronnie is angry at
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Rabbit, but, he says, not as much for having sex with Thelma as for not caring about it.
Rabbit denies this. “I did appreciate her,” he insists. “I did. She was a fantastic lay” (379).
When confronted with his apathy, the first thing Rabbit turns to in order to prove his
emotion is sex. “A fantastic lay” is a very high compliment for him, though readers can see the irony: Rabbit’s explanation shows that his appreciation of Thelma extended only
as far as her ability in bed.
Rabbit’s sensuality is also manifested by a love of sports. Updike describes the pleasure Rabbit derives from sports many times during the course of the series. His favorite sport, of course, is basketball. In Updike’s descriptions of the game, Rabbit is
often described as above the world, floating, moving in effortless grace on a different
plane of being. The basketball passages have the language of a religious experience. He
loves a perfect golf shot, a basketball dropping through the net. These things cannot be
defined by Rabbit and seem to only be found in the world of sports. The contrast between
that world and the real world emphasize Rabbit’s lack of a goal in his real life.
Rabbit’s sensuality is part of what leads to his lack of ambition. Because he is
living in the present, focused on his feelings at that moment, he is not motivated to
develop goals for the future. However, this affinity for life as it exists now may be the
quality that most endears him to readers. Hermione Lee writes that “What redeems
Rabbit is that, inside his brutish exterior, he is tender, feminine and empathetic... Lying in the hospital. He ‘thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street. … these men of another century up on their scaffold.’ Sometimes, eating meat, he can even imagine how it felt to be that animal before it was killed, can apprehend ‘the stupid monotony of a cow’s life’ in the taste of
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beef” (170). He is clearly a character who feels, rather than thinks or does work. Updike himself may consider this a redeeming, or at least positive, quality. The ability to appreciate a kind of beauty or transcendent feeling in the minutiae of life is important to
Updike. In his autobiography, he writes “The self’s responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let’s say, the walk back from the mailbox” (257). Rabbit appreciates his own version of “the walk back from the mailbox,” when he notices brickwork or imagines the life of a cow in the taste of his meat. Perhaps for Updike, that excuses him from setting goals. Goal-setting is an important idea in the novels. One question Updike is asking his readers with Rabbit is:
Are large goals necessary? Is it adequate for man to move through life without impressive goals, simply admiring the view? For Rabbit, that view is not merely a static object, acted upon by him. The view — the setting — act upon Rabbit.
The small-town setting is an important aspect of the Rabbit series. Mount Judge is described as a special town. Other places are described negatively. Updike is illustrating the way in which small towns can affect the character of their inhabitants. If Rabbit knows an area and it is not Mount Judge, he generally does not appreciate that place. For example, as Rabbit drives away from Mount Judge, he has the feeling that “he is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals” (Run 23). We know that Rabbit does not want to find a more exciting, more urban center because of the negative way in which those places are described. We also know he isn’t seeking a rural idyll because of the negative descriptions of rural places, especially in the beginning of Rabbit, Run. He only really enjoys Mount Judge. Even other nearby places, like Brewer, cannot replace his
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very specific small hometown. For example, on Rabbit’s return drive, he sees Brewer,
which is described as “a gradual multiplication of houses among the trees beside the road
and then as a treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company
parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronic parts and elephantine gas tanks
lifting above trash-filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from
whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick” (Run 35).
This is an unflattering description. The area represents an undistinguished place. A shoe
factory looks the same as a bottling plant and a converted knitting mill. Even the most
positive description “a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick,” does not
describe a very livable place. “A warm carpet” sounds cozy at best, and more likely
strange and off-putting. “A single shade of brick” spells out the monotony. Updike
describes other parts of the county that are not Mount Judge in negative terms.
Describing one suburb, he writes: “In Brewer County, but for a few baronial estates ringed by iron fences and moated by miles of lawn, there is nowhere higher to go that these houses; the most successful dentists may get to buy one, the pushiest insurance salesmen, the slickest ophthalmologists” (Redux 12). This description highlights two important parts of Rabbit’s character: his lack of ambition and his connection to Mount
Judge. Ambition is embodied in “the pushiest insurance salesmen, the slickest ophthalmologists.” Goals make one pushy or slick; it is better not to have one. The description of ambition as a negative quality contributes to a reading of Rabbit as an apathetic character. The fact that this description is connected to an area that Rabbit finds himself at odds with underscores this aspect of his character.
When Rabbit does move from Mount Judge with Janice, he finds his new
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neighborhood a poor replacement for his old one. In Rabbit Redux, he is approached by
two men who ask, then demand, that Rabbit kick Skeeter out of his house. During the
introductions (itself a sign that this is not like Mount Judge, where Rabbit would need no
introduction), one mentions an addition on his house. You must have noticed, he says.
Rabbit does not; “he recalls distant hammering but had not noticed; he only really looks
at Penn Villas enough to see that it isn’t Mt. Judge: that is, it is nowhere” (248). Of all the
places in the world, for Rabbit, the only somewhere is Mount Judge. Updike is making
setting a central part of Rabbit’s character. He is making a point to connect Rabbit to the
places he is from. He is the favored son of his small town. He is Uncle Sam, the
embodiment of the United States (Rest 361-371). He is an embodiment of Brewer and “if he lived any more in Brewer he’d be a walking advertisement. He’d be the Owl Pretzel owl” (Redux 109). Updike connects Rabbit to place and the place he most connects him
to is Mount Judge. In contrast to the negative language used to describe other areas,
Updike uses positive language to describe Mount Judge. Readers are supposed to see it as
an example of a place in which Rabbit feels at home. In Rabbit, Run, the short walk from
his house to where his car is parked elicits numerous memories. Updike makes a more
explicit connection between Mount Judge and Rabbit, when looking across the town,
Rabbit “thinks, My valley. My home.” (Run 189). Updike is showing us how much Mount
Judge has impressed itself upon his protagonist and how connected Rabbit feels to that
very specific place.
What are the implications of this connection? For Rabbit, the implications may be
his lack of ambition and goals. By staying in an area where he knows people and is
known, he gives up the opportunity to grow beyond his identity in high school. Updike’s
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youth gave him motivation to leave his hometown; Rabbit’s youth did the opposite.
Updike wanted to “avenge all the slights and abasements” his father suffered because he
was a lower-middle class schoolteacher. Therefore, “leaving Pennsylvania, where [his]
father had been pinned by necessity, was another such reversal on [Updike’s part], a spurning on [his father’s] behalf” (Self 33). Likewise, the young Updike believed that
“the perfect girl for me would take me away from Shillington, not pull me down into it”
(37). The town is an example of a closed-in, common world that is to be avoided, which is exactly the world Rabbit wants. Updike writes that “Shillington in my mother’s vision was small-town — small minds, small concerns, small hopes” (Self 37). Consider
Rabbit’s mind: He is not renowned for his mental ability or any philosophy. Consider
Rabbit’s concerns: He is concerned with old basketball games and his own creature comforts. Consider Rabbit’s hopes: He doesn’t have many, if any, significant hopes in the series. Rabbit embodies Updike’s mother’s portrayal of small-town life. His negative
qualities are the negative qualities she saw in her town, and the qualities that Updike tried
to shun by leaving his hometown and becoming a writer.
The irony comes from the fact that Updike eventually re-settled in a small town,
albeit in Massachusetts. He sees both the negative qualities that come from small-town
life, which are embodied by Rabbit, and appreciates the positive aspects of such a setting.
Updike draws out the contrast in a line from his biography when he writes: “If we keep
utterly still” — if we live an apathetic life like Rabbit, remaining in the same place
geographically and personally — “we will never die” (35). Updike must know this is a
fantasy. But even if it were true, who wants to keep utterly still? Updike did not; Rabbit
did. Rabbit is not trying to go home again. He has never left.
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Works Cited
Cavett, Dick. “A Conversation With John Updike.” Conversations with John Updike. Ed.
James Plath. Originally broadcast on “The Dick Cavett Show,” 9 November
1992. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 229-236.
DeBellis, Jack. “‘The Awful Power’: John Updike’s Use of Kubrick’s ‘2001’ in Rabbit
Redux.” The Critical Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga. Ed. Jack DeBellis.
Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005. 83-94.
Greiner, Donald J. “Updike, Rabbit, and the myth of American exceptionalism”. The
Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Ed. Stacey Olster. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Lee, Hermione. “The Trouble With Harry.” The Critical Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga.
Ed. Jack De Bellis. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005. 167-173.
Slethaug, Gordon E. “Rabbit Redux: Freedom is Made of Brambles.” Critical Essays on
John Updike. Ed. William R. McNaughton. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982.
237-253.
Taylor, Larry. “Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in the Works of John Updike.” The Critical
Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga. Ed. Jack De Bellis. Westport, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 2005. 4-16.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York City: Random House, 1960.
—. Rabbit Redux. New York City: Random House, 1971.
—. Rabbit is Rich. New York City: Random House, 1981.
—. Rabbit at Rest. New York City: Alfred A Knopf, 1990.
—. Self-Consciousness. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
Vargo, Edward P. Rainstorms and Fire. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973.
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Academic Vita of William Wellock
CONTACT INFORMATION Address: 17 Hummingbird Road E-mail: [email protected] Wyomissing, PA 19610
EDUCATION The Pennsylvania State University State College, PA ● Fall 2006 – Spring 2010 Bachelor of Arts in English
THESIS “Rabbit, Running in Place;” Supervisor: Professor Bernard Bell
EXPERIENCE The Daily Collegian State College, PA ● Fall 2006 – Spring 2010 Columnist • Wrote a weekly column • Participated in Board of Opinion meetings, discussing issues in the newspaper with other board members and arguing for the support of a particular editorial stance • Wrote a weekly editorial based on Board of Opinion notes, synthesizing various opinions into a single editorial
Visual Editor • Managed a staff of eighteen students responsible for layout and graphics • Part of the senior team responsible for selecting news stories for the next day’s paper, discussing ideas for front page layout and pitching ideas for graphics with stories • Coordinated design for special features, including: football magazines for Penn State home football games, weekly football previews, personality pieces and Arts In Review coverage and for magazines published once a semester • Interviewed 14 applicants and selected a staff of 7 page design and graphics candidates • Trained candidates in Abode Photoshop, Abode Illustrator and QuarkXPress
Venues Editor • Managed a staff of thirty students to produce a weekly, 28-page magazine • Edited stories with reporters and worked with page designers to create magazine covers • Led weekly meetings, working with reporters to develop an angle on story ideas • Wrote a weekly column and created a weekly cartoon for the magazine
Reporter • Covered a range of topics, including university administration, financial allocations from state government, university-wide curriculum changes and local cuisine
TradeChile Santiago, Chile ● January - July 2009 Intern • Created industry overviews for American companies interested in business opportunities in Chile by synthesizing information from news sources, businesses and trade data • Created reports on Chilean businesses who might be good matches for American companies by speaking directly with Chilean business owners and analyzing their needs and the needs of American clients • Translated business correspondence and technical documents for American clients
The Pennsylvania Center for the Book State College, PA ● Fall 2008 Intern • Created educational reports on Pennsylvanian authors and Pennsylvanian culture