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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. i 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. ii 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 iii 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 1 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 2 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, 3 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. 4 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.