“Ah: Runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Pradipta Sengupta M.U.C

Home , Philip Roth, Rabbit at Rest, The Road, The Same Door

“Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Pradipta Sengupta M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan West Bengal, India-713104 [email protected]/ [email protected]

Abstract: Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the ingenious American icon created by Updike has captured the American literary sensibility since his inception in Rabbit, Run(1960) till his death at the end of his Tetralogy in Rabbit at Rest (1990). The final enigmatic run of Rabbit at the end of Rabbit, Run, leading to the open-endedness of the book, has baffled readers and critics alike. This paper attempts to shed some light on this enigma, with particular focus on his seemingly inexplicable character, and tries to interpret his run as a typically American literary phenomenon subsuming him within the tradition of great runners in American Literature.

Keywords: Rabbit, American, icon, Updike, literary, sensibility, Rabbit, Run, enigmatic, character, open-endedness, tradition, literature.

A few characters in the entire gamut of American Literature have achieved the status of American icon: Natty Bumppo in Fennimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales”, Huckleberry Finn in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and recently, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom in John Updike’s “Rabbit Tetralogy” comprising Rabbit, Run(1960), Rabbit Redux(1971), Rabbit Is Rich(1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). While the list could be easily extended, it is worth considering the character of Rabbit who has acquired the rare status of being hailed as an ‘American Everyman’ by criticsi. Furthermore, Rabbit may also be subsumed under the broad category of the fugitive travelling American heroes: Natty Bumppo’s travels across the American frontiers, Huck Finn’s peregrinations on the raft on the Mississippi, Captain Ahab’s monomaniac whale- chase into the wilderness of the ocean, Santiago’s monomaniac frantic search for the great marlin fish in the sea, Sal Paradise’s journey across the American continent, Captain Yossarian’s final flight from the battlefield to avert the catch of ‘catch 22’ in Heller’s Catch 22, and Rabbit’s indefinite travel in his ford, and his final enigmatic run at the end of Rabbit, Run.. This paper attempts to explore the enigma embedded in the indefinite run of Rabbit, and to illustrate that Rabbit belongs to the paradigm of the great American running heroes.

Only a few American novels have been so widely discussed, read, criticized and reviewed as Updike’s Rabbit, Run(1960) which continues to stimulate the interest of the readers and critics alike even after five decades of its publication. Gerry Brenneri argues that in this book “Updike's philosophical conservatism conceives of the romantic dream of returning to nature, in its worst sense, as the ultimate extension of the loss of traditional values, ideals, laws. Set into a society that persists in adhering to some prescriptive mores, Rabbit, as a

[Article History: Received on 25.03.2015 , Accepted on 12.05.2015] [1]

Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Author: P. Sengupta

‘noble’ urban savage, images modern man's traditionless character and portends his concomitant problems. And the effectiveness of the novel resides in Updike's projection of this statement through the use of the tacky social setting and a line-up of only moderately sympathetic characters”. J.M.Edelsteinii conceives of Rabbit as a person possessed with a “bitter, almost vicious, hatred, and a humorless lack of pity”. Kyle A.Pasewarkiii, on the other hand, feels that the ‘religiocultural elements’ that bound him together comprise “a specific type of guilt, the need for social recognition, the identification of freedom and ecstasy with redemption, a growing ambivalence toward myths of labor, a desire to consume, and an assumption of the essential innocence of nature”(2). In his excellent study on Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogyiv, Marshall Boswell rightly argues that “the Rabbit novels serve as a fictionalized time line of the postwar American experience”(1). Having affirmed that Updike had his solace in John Barth’s dogmatic theology, Boswell tries to extend it to Rabbit’s own theological sensibility: “What’s more it serves as the bedrock for Rabbit’s own theological vision”(18).

In yet another interesting reading Edward Vargov argues that Rabbit does not fall under the stereotypes of heroes or antiheroes, and suggests that he is “basically an ambivalent middle- class American Christian in a similarly ambivalent world”(73). Vargo’s criticism, while providing some illuminating flashes into some of the theological scenes, is, after all, warped by his notions of theology and rituals, so much so that he interprets the fire set on Rabbit’s house in Rabbit Redux(1971) to be a handiwork of God or whom Vargo calls “a primitive, fierce, terrible God…”(84) Far from being tenable, this discussion takes us away from Updike’s sense of verisimilitude to his contemporary America in 1960s which did not certainly hold such numinous views for natural and social things.

While Richard Fostervi considers Rabbit to be “the dangerous force of utter selfhood”, David Boroffvii compares Rabbit with Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. But while Caulfield’s search was for immaculate innocence in the tangle of experience, Rabbit’s search is for retaining his first- ratedness, a yearning for freedom from the morass of exasperating domesticity and the miasma of second-rate existence. Seen form this angle, Rabbit is more akin to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt than to Caulfield, for both Babbitt and Rabbit are possessed with ‘great expectations’, like Dickens’s Pip, aspiring to rise above their respective middle-class social moorings. In a thorough and penetrating analysis of Rabbit’s character Greienerviii rightly pinpoints the problems that most of the readers face in coping with this character’s actions. As Greiner so rightly points out:

In Rabbit, Run Updike poses a dilemma that results in the ambiguity

he aspires to: should Rabbit define himself by social convention, or

should he indulge his yearning toward individual belief?(50)

Greiner supports his argument with what Updikeix called the “yes-but” trait of his fiction: “Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric collapses murderously (33). In an interesting reading Gerry Brennerx argues that in Rabbit, Run “Updike’s philosophical conservatism conceives of the romantic dream of returning to ǮJASTǯ-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [2]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 nature, in its worst sense, as the ultimate extension of the loss of traditional ideals, values, laws. Set into a society that persists in adhering to some perspective mores, Rabbit, as a ‘noble’ urbane savage, images modern man’s traditionless character and portends his concomitant problems. And the effectiveness of the novel resides in Updike’s project of this statement through the use of the tacky social setting and a line-up of only moderately sympathetic characters”(103-104).

Originally subtitled “A Movie”, Rabbit, Run was meant to appropriate the “cinematic mode of narration.”xi The idea of resorting to the present tense also afforded him with greater flexibility to “move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense” (CU 41). Significantly, Updike’s use of the present tense in all the four Rabbit novels also reinforces the sense of contemporaneity in his Tetralogy. The novel is supposed to be an extension of Updike’s short story “An Ace in the Hole”xii which veers around the life of a basketball player Fred “Ace” Anderson who finds it difficult to reconcile between his past glory and his present grimness. One may also refer to Updike’s poem “Ex-basketball Player”xiii which dwells on the vacuity of a man (“Flick” Webb) working at a gas station. Furthermore, if a basketball player has to run to and fro throughout the court, Rabbit does the same in the court of his life, oscillating between two women, his wife Janice, and his mistress Ruth, and finally running away from both. If like a player again he dodges the problems of life, unlike a player, he does not have the sportsman-like mettle to reckon with these problems. Updike’s very choice of a basketball player as his hero may be traced to what he said to Malvyn Bragg in an interview: You write about characters often because you wish to be them, and as a high school boy I admired and really adored the good basketball players…I wanted Rabbit, Run to be about an American predicament, the predicament of the ex-high-school athlete. Basketball is very much a thing here, as it is in Indiana, and indeed throughout much of so-called Middle America(CU 222-223).

Jack de Bellisxiv similarly points out that “Updike makes the social fabric concrete through a vivid use of Americana—songs, films, jokes and, above all, basketball, which, as Updike remarked, embodied for him the meaning of what it is to be an American”(370). Thus, Rabbit as an ex-basketball champion perfectly fits into the American culture. Another genesis of the novel may be traced to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit xv, a story for children updated in the mould of an adult fiction in Rabbit, Run.

The name of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, too, is significant. As George Huntxvi so pertinently suggests that Harry is a ‘harried’ man, fraught with ‘angst’, and “[h]e is trapped like a marriage to a Springer”(41). Updike himselfxvii allies Harry with a rabbit because of his fear instinct and his fleeing nature. Further, metaphorically, he is akin to a rabbit hounded by a Springer spaniel. Like a rabbit again, he dances to the tune of his instinct rather than that of reason. The basic problem with Rabbit is that he is not satisfied with his present existence as a demonstrator of vacuum cleaner, and considers it as a second rate existence. His memory of the past glorious days as a basketball champion storms into his present, and aggravates his misery. As Thaddeus Muradianxviii rightly points out:

Part of Harry (Rabbit, Run) Angstrom's problem was his preoccupation with what had been. His difficulty in adjusting to the present was partly so since the present was not the "road of fame and prominence" that the past was. He was a star, a hero, almost a legend on the basketball court(577).

[3] Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Author: P. Sengupta

That he cannot retain the success of basketball in his life in general and his family in particular, irks him, leading him to further despondency. Neither can he keep the past and the present in separate spheres, nor can he strike a balance among the different roles he has to play in his society: as a demonstrator of kitchen gadget, as a father, as a husband, and so on. Further his very notion of first-ratedness eludes him and outgrows him. When Rev.Eccles asks him about his being “exceptional”, he harps on the grim contrast between his past and present:

I once did something right. I played first rate basketball. 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. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate(92).

Even the help offered by Eccles does not come to his rescue, and like many of his contemporary Americans, Rabbit is reduced to a muddled existence devoid of value and meaning. Thus, Rabbit represents the basic problem of an existentialist modern man. Rabbit’s inability to take a decision may be akin to what Kierkegaardxix called “dread” or “anxieties” induced by precarious possibilities. Critics have not failed to notice this. Howard M. Harper, Jr.xx, for example, feels that “The protagonist, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, is Updike’s Augie March, a young man obsessed by the need for a good-enough fate and capable, like Camus’s absurd man, of saying no”(166). Following in the same line, David Gallowayxxi equates Rabbit with a Sissyphusian hero who “rebels against the wasteland into which he is born. In consistently opposing the reality which he encounters, rabbit becomes an absurd hero, and because of the high spiritual devotion of this gesture against the world, he becomes a saint”(27-28 ). Robert Detweilerxxii, on the other hand considers Rabbit “the quintessence of the nonhero”(38). Edward Vargo rightly points out that such a complex character as Rabbit cannot be put into any stereotyped category, and argues that “the attempt to categorize Rabbit as a hero or an antihero is, as the controversy suggests a futile exercise. He is neither and he is both. Rabbit is basically an ambivalent middle-class American Christian living in a similarly ambivalent world”( Rainstorms and Fire 73). But neither a saint, nor a true absurd hero, nor even an antihero, Rabbit is very much a common human being, an American Everymanxxiii, one who is neither invested with the larger-than-life dimension, nor with an Aristotlean spoudaious nature. Jack de Bellis rightly points out:

Rabbit is no saint, but his inner strivings cannot be ignored(Encyclopedia371).

Almost a common middle-class, like his multiple middle-class American counterparts, Rabbit is close to what Burchardxxiv so caustically calls “the moral derelict”(42-43). Reflecting on the moral dilemma in Updike’s novels, Bernard Scophenxxv argues:

In Updike's novels the dilemma created by this dual morality is often embodied in the women between whom the protagonists must choose. In Rabbit, Run Rabbit Angstrom vacillates between his wife and his mistress. The external and codified morality, of which Jack Eccles is the chief instrument, demands that Rabbit return to Janice;

ǮJASTǯ-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [4]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 but Rabbit's inner apprehension of what is "right" for him directs him to Ruth (527).

One may refer to Updike’s own commentxxvi regarding the problem of arriving at solution to his novels:

My books feed, I suppose, on some kind of perverse relish in the fact that there are insolvable problems. There is no reconciliation between the inner, intimate appetites and the external consolations of life .... There is no way to reconcile these individual wants to the very real need of any society to set strict limits and to confine its members. Rabbit, Run ... I wrote just to say there is no solution. It is a novel about the bouncing, the oscillating back and forth between these two kinds of urgencies until, eventually, one just gets tired and wears out and dies, and that's the end of the problem.

He finds his remedy, first in a directionless, meaningless drive towards the south unless he meets his former coach Tothero who, he supposes might provide him with the right instruction. One may not fail to notice how Rabbit finds his succour for his present misery only in the past. What he fails to realize is that the rules of game do not apply to the rules of life, and that they should operate on disparate parameters and in different spheres. In other words, Rabbit’s self of a basketball champion makes unnecessary and undesirable inroads into his domestic self, inducing in him a sort of identity crisis:

His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There’s no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater , caught in chains of transparent slime…(170)xxvii

Rabbit finds the remedy to his malady in having sex with Ruth, a liaison which liberates him, temporarily from the morass of his platitudinous vapid ‘second rate’ existence. But paradoxically, what is seen as a mode of escape at the outset, entangles him under the net of responsibility, and puts his sense of morality under scanner. When he learns that he has impregnated Ruth and that she wishes to kill the baby in her womb if Rabbit does not marry her after abandoning his wife Janice, he is immured in a state of dilemma which he can neither solve nor avoid. There are two options for Rabbit: to fight or to flight. He chooses the latter, and runs again. In his exhaustive study Frederick Karlxxviii claims, “In Rabbit, Run John Updike has written a moral fable for our times”(347), and considers this running as an American syndrome:

This is a very significant American theme: fleeing a static or enclosed life, form of suffocation. From it derived all the elements novelist mock: gray flannel suited man, loveless marriage, importuning children, sexual frustration, boredom. The 1950s are located here. Rabbit foreshadows 1960“opening up”, the tryings-out which characterized the decade, even the solipsism and narcissism which demanded voices(349).

The wild peregrinations of Rabbit in his ford in Rabbit, Run conforms to the verisimilitude of space and time, of geography and history. Updike’s faithfulness to the spatio-temporal parameters strikes our wonder. The places through which Rabbit drives towards the south are dealt with in punctilious attention and precision, a fact which attests to Updike’s thorough familiarity with Pennsylvanian landscape since his childhoodxxix. Even today one

[5] Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Author: P. Sengupta

can still find those very places, and roads as Mt. Judge, Potter Avenue, Wilbur Street, Pottstown, 422 Philadelphia, Morgantown, Warren Avenue, etc. as described in the novel. Even in his journey the sense of America haunts Rabbit:

He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America

was the same. He wonders, is it just these people I’m outside or is

it all America? (31)

If Rabbit is ensconced in the Brewer, in Shillington, one may safely claim, following Updike’s own wordsxxx that Shillingon was synonymous with his very being. Thus the story of Rabbit is set in both objective physical geography, and more importantly, in the “subjective geography” of Updike (Assorted Prose 186).

With a rare logical research Ristoffxxxi comes to the conclusion that Rabbit departs from Mt. Judge on March 20, 1959 which happened to be a Friday (40). One is amazed to find the historical details furnished by Ristoff in his wonderful research. In a frantic effort to connect Rabbit’s flight with that of Dalai Lama, Ristoffxxxii claims that “Rabbit’s flight and Dalai Lama’s flight are similar in many ways” and that the “political attitudes in America, are in many respects very closely related to the ones Updike chose for Rabbit”(41). But this does not hold much water in it, inasmuch as the political conditions of America and China were totally different. Further, while Rabbit’s run is actuated by the music of his inner instinct, the Dalai Lama’s fleeing was occasioned by a political and religious necessity. While Rabbit’s flight was prompted by an individual cause, the Dalai Lama’s flight was wrought by political situation for the cause of a community. Other topical aspects include a passing reference to the “middle of the Depression”, the Second World War and the Korean War, etc (120).

Returning to his house--a veritable bleak house for him--Rabbit finds his wife Janice drinking and watching “a group of children called Mousekeeters perform a musical number” (9), a show that Rabbit also joins. Impressed by the Mousekeeter advice, “Know Thyself”, he feels that Walt Disney is as much a fraud as the MagiPeel Peeler Company where he works, and realizes, “Fraud makes the world go round”(10). The T.V. news about President Eisenhower and Prime Minister’s meeting in Gettysburg, the clash between the Tibetans and Chinese Communists in Lhasa, “the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama”, the sports news about the match between the Yanks and the Braves in Miami, etc. are some of the topical information the novel is equipped with(28).

The ambivalent open-ending of the book with Rabbit’s final run has caused great discomfiture and dissatisfaction, both to the readers, as well as to the critics. Does his run attest to his dereliction of duty as a husband? Or, does it subscribe to the fulfilment of the yearning of his heart for freedom and liberty from the asphyxia of his domestic disharmony? Or does it mean a quest for achieving his coveted first-ratedness? We cannot be very much sure, for Rabbit’s run embraces the possibility of each of these. Neither rejecting marriage fully, nor accepting the dictates of his heart fully, he is dangling, as it were, in a vacuum, in a moral dilemma. Neither does he wish to destroy the baby growing in Ruth’s womb, nor does to wish to sever his marital ties with Janice. Consequently, he stands in a void, or what Marshall Boswellxxxiii calls “an empty space”. Updike deliberately creates this dilemma as ǮJASTǯ-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [6]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 much in his character, as also in his readers. As Updike had admitted to the Japanese critic Iwao Iwamato regarding the ending of Rabbit, Run:

Well, that is how I do think of endings. That’s how life is, and how a book should be…My endings are not accidents. I think always of the ending (CU 118).

In his own explanation to the ending of the novel Updike harps on the same note of a moral dilemma in his interview with Eric Rhode in 1969:

Take Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run. There is a case to be made for running away from your wife. In the late fifties beatniks were preaching transcontinental travelling as the answer to man’s disquiet. And I was just trying to say: “Yes, there is certainly that, but then there are all these other people who seem to get hurt”. That distinction is made to be a moral dilemma (CU 50).

It is also interesting to note that the elusive run of Rabbit is also the greatest paradox of Updike. The typical Updikean heroes are essentially located in the center of middle-class domesticity delineated with punctilious details, with all its attitudes and platitudes, its warts and all. The typical Updikean hero is at once different from a Jake Barnes or a Yossarian who delights in the smell of gunpowder in the battlefield; nor is he driven to the lure of fishing into the sea like a Santiago; nor is he fascinated in a self-destructive whale chase like Captain Ahab: he is rather ensconced in the cosiness of domestic center of middle-class American suburbia. And an attempt to situtate such a seminal Updike hero as Rabbit into this center of domesticity, poses us with a problem and a leery feeling as to whether Rabbit, at least of Rabbit, Run, may be exactly subsumed into this paradigm. Our problem accentuates when we consider the indefinite nature of his run which is certainly invested with a sort of je ne sais quoi. Rabbit prefers being unleashed towards the lure of American territory to being tied to the apron strings of domestic responsibilities. Guided by the music of his instinct rather than that of reason, he tries to disentangle himself from social responsibilities which bind him to what he deems his “ second-rate” existence.

One may be tempted to say that Rabbit’s final elusive run may be situated in the very history of his American predecessors who had virtually run away from the troubles and unrest of a turbulent Europe to immigrate to this new land which had invested them with the “American dream” of liberty and opportunity. A neo-frontier hero of the twentieth century, Rabbit ‘Harry’ Angstrom, runs both to retain his true identity, and to cater to his love for freedom. The very idea of rediscovering oneself and retaining one’s identity through running may also be found in such works as Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 where Yossarian flees at the end, Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Bernard Malamud’s A New Life, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Kerouac’s On the Road, among other novels. Little wonder then, this run becomes a typical American phenomenon embedded in the American literary sensibility. Rabbit becomes just another member to join the long fray of American literary runners.

i Gerry Brenner, ‘Rabbit, Run: John Updike’s Criticism of the "Return to Nature"’, in Twentieth Century Literature( vol.2.No.1.,April 1966),p.14 ii J.M. Edelstein, “Down with the Poor in Spirit”, New Republic, 21 November 1960, p.18. iii Kyle A. Pasewark, “The Troubles with Harry: Freedom, America, and God in John Updike's Rabbit Novels”, in

[7] Ah: runs. Runs.”: Rabbit Angstrom, the American Runner Author: P. Sengupta

Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 6, No. 1, Special Issue: Religion and Twentieth-Century American Novels (Winter, 1996), pp. 1-33. Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1123971 .Accessed: 20/09/2013, 02:53 . iv Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion( Colombia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001). v Edward P.Vargo, Rainstorms and Fire: Rituals in the Novels of John Updike(Port Washington, New York : Kennikat Press,1973). vi Richard Foster, “What is Fiction For?”, Hudson Review, 14(Spring 1961),p.149. vii David Boroff, “You Cannot Really Flee”, New York Times Book Review, 6 November 1960. viii Donald J.Greiner, John Updike’s Novels(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984),50. ix Charles Thomas Samuels, “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike”, in James Plath, ed. Conversations with John Updike(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994)pp.22-45. All further references to this book will be cited as CU. This interview was originally published in The Paris Review 45 (Winter 1968), 84-117. x Gerry Brenner, “Rabbit, Run : John Updike’s Criticism of the “Return to Nature” ”in Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. Willam R. Macnaughton(Boston,Mass.: G.K.Hall & Co.,1982).,pp.91-104; originally in Twentieth Century Literature, 12(1966),3-14 . xi As Updike puts it in his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in 1968: “Rabbit, Run was subtitled originally, “A Movie”. The present tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration”(40). From “The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike”, in CU,pp.22-45. xii From Updike, The Same Door(New York : Knopf, 1959). xiii From Updike, The Carpenter Hen(New York : Knopf, 1957). xiv Jack de Bellis, The John Updike Encyclopedia ( Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000). xv Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit(London: Frederick Warne,c1902,1989). xvi George Hunt, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eedermans,1980). xvii In the same interview with Melvyn Bragg, in CU,pp.221-228, Updike admits: “ “Angstrom”—he is a man of angst, and he is afraid. When you’re doing something you tend to be less afraid; there’s this “fight or flight” impulse, or reaction, or adrenalin rush, that we all have. One thing to do with your human angst is to run with it. The running associates for him, with running back and forth on the basketball court, and there’s a sense of emotion as joy. That was what I was trying to close the book on, that sort of open-ended “Ah, runs”. It feels good to run—some rejoining of his animal self. Animals run without thinking, and he is for the moment free of all these bothersome moral worries that human beings have to carry” (224). xviii Thaddeus Muradian, “The World of Updike”, The English Journal, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Oct., 1965), pp. 577- 584.Published by: National Council of Teachers of English. URL:< http://www.jstor.org/stable/811260> .Accessed: 20/09/2013 02:08 xix Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). xx Howard M.Harper, Jr., Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Sallinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike(Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967). xxi David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow and Salinger( Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) xxii Robert Detweiler, John Updike(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984). xxiii Updike himself does not subscribe to the idea of Rabbit being a saint, and calls him an Everyman in his interview with Jeff Campbell(1976), in CU,pp.84-104: “Rabbit I would not call a saint. I meant him to be a kind of you and me, or a sort of Everyman”(93). James A. Schiff John Updike Revisited (New York: Tawyne Publishers, 1998) and Jack De Bellis in The John Updike Encyclopedia ( Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000) corroborates idea of Rabbit as an American Everyman. All further references to this book by Prof. Bellis will be cited as Encyclopedia. xxiv Rachael C. Burchard, John Updike: Yea Sayings(Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1971). xxv Bernard A. Schopen, “Faith, Morality, and the Novels of John Updike”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 4 (W, 1978), pp. 523-535. ǮJASTǯ-2015, Vol.-01, Issue-01 [8]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-01, Issue-01 xxvi Frank Gado, ed., First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing (Schenectady: Union College Press, 1973), p. 92. xxvii All citations from the text are from John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom( New York: Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 1995). xxviii Frederick Karl, American Fiction:1940-1980(New York: Harper & Row, 1983). xxix For a more detailed account of Updike’s familiarity with these places one may go through his memoir, “A Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood”, in Assorted Prose( New York: Knopf, 1965)pp.151-187; and the more recent memoir, Self-Consciousness(New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks,1989). xxx Updike records in his memoir Self-Consciousness: “I loved Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one’s own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. It was exciting for me to be in Shillington, as if my life, like the expanding universe, when projected backwards gained heat and intensity. If there was a meaning to existence, I was closest to it here”(30). xxxi See Dilvo I.Ristoff, “The Domestic Rabbit” in Updike’s America, pp.39-74. xxxii Ristoff puts it: “The record also shows that Prime Minister Macmillan and President Eisenhower met from March 21 to 24 and that the young Dalai Lama was being forced out of Tibet by the invading communist Chinese forces during those very same days. Since March 13, the forces loyal to the Dalai Lama had been fighting the Chinese and on March 23, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appeals to the Chinese authorities to protect the life and sanctity of the spiritual leader”(Ibid., 40-41). xxxiii Marshall Boswell, John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion(Colombia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001) 75.

Works Cited Boroff, David. “You Cannot Really Flee”, New York Times Book Review, 6 November 1960. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Colombia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Brenner, Gerry. ‘Rabbit, Run: John Updike’s Criticism of the "Return to Nature"’, Twentieth Century Literature. Vol.2.No.1.,April 1966. Burchard, Rachael C. John Updike: Yea Sayings. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1971. De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia .Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Edelstein, J.M. “Down with the Poor in Spirit”, New Republic, 21 November 1960, p.18. Foster, Richard. “What is Fiction For?”, Hudson Review, 14(Spring 1961),p.149. Galloway, David. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow and Assistant Professor of EnglishSalinger. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Greiner, Donald J. John Updike’s Novels. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984. Harper, Jr., Howard M. Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Sallinger, Mailer, Baldwin, andUpdike. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967. Hunt, George John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eedermans, 1980. Karl, Frederick American Fiction:1940-1980.New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Macnaughton , William R. ed. Critical Essays on John Updike. Boston,Mass.: G.K.Hall & Co., 1982.

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