11.

John Updike – Run, Rabbit

1. Context
Born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Updike was the only child of a
high school science teacher and a mother who aspired to be a writer. It was apparently she who
instilled in young John the passion to write and draw. While a huge fan of humorist books and
mysteries and prone to consuming them in mass quantities, Updike still managed to excel in
school, becoming co-valedictorian of Shillington High and receiving a scholarship to attend
Harvard. There he majored in English and wrote and drew for the Lampoon; his beginnings were
thus principally in the mode of humor writing.
Before graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Updike married Mary A. Pellington,
a student at Radcliffe, and in 1954, the year of his commencement, he sold a short story and a
poem to The New Yorker. Updike moved with his wife to England to study at Oxford's Ruskin
School of Drawing and Fine Art, during which time Mary gave birth to their first daughter.
When they returned to the States, they settled in New York City, where Updike landed a job as a
staff writer for The New Yorker. In 1957, after the birth of a son, the family moved to Ipswich,
Massachusetts, the state in which Updike still lives. Maintaining ties with The New Yorker but
resolving himself to write full-time, Updike began work on his first book of poetry, The
Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, which was published by Harper and Brothers in
1958.
Next came The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Updike's first novel, which was well-received
and widely regarded to show true promise. He fulfilled that promise with his second novel,
Rabbit, Run (1960), for which he turned to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., his publisher ever since.
Rabbit, Run was a huge success, and Updike added further laurels to his crown with The
Centaur, which won him the National Book Award in 1963. He was only thirty-one, and already
one of the country's leading literary voices.
In 1964, he was admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; he remains the
youngest person ever to have received this honor. His 1968 novel Couples inspired a Time cover
story on the novelist, and the seventies witnessed both the creation of a new recurring
protagonist, Henry Bech - in Bech: A Book (1970) - and the reappearance of Harry Angstrom in
Rabbit Redux (1971). In 1974, Updike, long an activist on causes involving the Soviet Union,
joined Arthur Miller, Richard Wilbur, and John Cheever in demanding that the Soviet
government stop persecuting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. He divorced his wife Mary in 1976, and married Martha Ruggles Bernhard the
following year.
Subsequent works include Rabbit is Rich (1981), for which Updike won the Pulitzer
Prize, Bech is Back (1982), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Rabbit at Rest (1991), for which he
received a second Pulitzer, and Gertrude and Claudius (2000), a prequel to Hamlet. His last
novel, Terrorist, was published in 2006. He passed away on January 27th, 2009.
Rabbit, Run was, to put it bluntly, the book that made John Updike - a mere twenty-eight
years old at the time - a star. When it was published in 1960, Rabbit, Run heralded a distinctly
new voice in American literature. The blending of precision and poetry in its language, its raw
and graphic sexuality, its amoral characters, and the careful attention it paid to the minutiae of
middle-class life were all more or less new to the public. Although it owed much of its vision
and many of its strategies to Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf, and the cinema, Updike combined these
elements in a way that was nothing less than startling. Indeed, Knopf feared that the sex in the
novel might lead to obscenity charges, and even legal action. Changes were made to the
American version of the text, but the omitted passages were restored for a British version, and all
subsequent publications of the book have presented the text intact. Though the novel did prove
highly controversial among critics, it sold like hotcakes: by the end of the first year, more than
twenty thousand copies had been purchased. The figure today is closer to 2.5 million.
In recent interviews, Updike has seemed to express regret that Rabbit, Run remains the
work for which he is best known. Nonetheless, it is a definitive piece of American fiction and a
troubling document of the Eisenhower era: Updike's prose seems to point to the simultaneous
revolutions in cinema (the films of Cassavetes, Rouch, Wiseman, and Chabrol) and music (the
jazz of Monk, Davis, and Coltrane). It is a work that both vividly reflects its time and is
unquestionably timeless.

2. Rabbit, Run in its time

Rabbit, Run was written in 1959, and published in 1960. That same year, documentary
filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin released Chronique d'un été in France, thereby
coining the term cinéma verité and permanently altering the face of nonfiction film. Both
works suggest the culmination of a movement across different media intent on capturing the stuff
of everyday life, of locating meaning in the mundane and drama in the ordinary. Both are
likewise trenchant documents of their time: a time when rock music and the first full-fledged
youth movement were beginning, and middle-class society was as constricting as it had ever
been.
Suburbia was a new phenomenon in the United States, and Updike's descriptions of Mt.
Judge - characterized by blocks "of big homes, fortresses of cement and brick inset with
doorways of stained and beveled glass and windows of potted plants" - reek of a pervasive,
unshakable gloom. If the sky over Mt. Judge is ever blue, one wouldn't know it from Updike's
prose. It is worth noting that Mt. Judge is in fact based on the town of Reading, Pennsylvania -
Updike's birthplace. What provides the tempting promise of a new life for Rabbit is the road -
another '50s phenomenon, in that the postwar era was the time in which the highway first
achieved its current status as icon of Americana as well as everyday convenience.
Other cultural markers are peppered throughout the novel. Janice repeatedly watches
television, reminding us of the introduction of the "idiot box" into so many American households
- particularly middle-class ones - in the '50s. When Eccles pays a visit to the Springers, Janice
has gone out to the movies with her friend Peggy; they are off to see the 1959 smash hit Some
Like It Hot, starring that icon of the '50s, Marilyn Monroe (the eroticism of whose on-screen
persona both echoes and opposes Rabbit's own troubled sex life).
More than anything else, however, it is the chokehold of Rabbit's marriage that is
intended to reflect its time. Sex remained a taboo prior to the Sexual Revolution of the '60s and
'70s, and Rabbit's lust seems at times to drive him nearly to the brink of madness. The
expectations of his middle-class family, the values to which he is supposed to aspire, and the
difficulties that divorce poses for him are all trademarks of the era in which he lives. That said,
one should not make the mistake of reducing Rabbit, Run to a simplistic "time-capsule"
interpretation. It should go without saying that many of the troubles Updike identifies still afflict
American society today. Nearly a half-century after it was written, his landmark novel continues
to register as fresh, provocative, and decidedly "modern."
3. Short Summary
The novel opens, aptly enough, with a basketball game being played by a few children on
a street in Mt. Judge - the suburban home of our hero, Harry Angstrom. When Harry -
nicknamed "Rabbit" for his awkward looks - appears, he is wearing a business suit and is headed
home. He was once the star athlete of his high school, a great basketball player prized by his
team and his coach, Marty Tothero. Now he is twenty-six, stuck in an unhappy marriage and an
unfulfilling job selling kitchen gadgets. He joins the game for a bit, and then continues on his
way.
At home, his newly pregnant wife, Janice, irritates him so much that when she sends him
on an errand, Rabbit instinctively drives his car out of Mt. Judge and onto the interstate highway.
He doesn't know where he's headed - he is only aware that he needs to escape. He makes it as far
south as West Virginia before he finally turns around and heads home. Back in Mt. Judge, he
joins Marty Tothero - now just as "washed-up" and as much of a "has-been" as Rabbit, having
been fired years ago from his job at the high school due to a "scandal" - and hits the town with
his former coach. He meets Ruth Leonard on a double date with Marty, and winds up spending
the night with her in her apartment. He grows very affectionate of her, and, though Ruth's
opinion of Rabbit fluctuates, the two live together for a solid two months.
During that time, the young local minister, Jack Eccles, tries to do his part in saving
Rabbit's marriage. Originally set on his trail by Janice's angry parents, Jack ends up befriending
Rabbit and sincerely trying to help him become a better person. Rabbit more or less dismisses
Jack's efforts, but when Janice finally goes into labor he hastily leaves Ruth and goes to the
hospital. That night, after seeing Janice (and perhaps rediscovering his love for her), Rabbit feels
as if he has started a new life. He thanks Eccles, and puts the affair with Ruth behind him.
Things, however, rapidly go sour. The new baby girl - named Rebecca after Janice's
mother - cries nonstop, and Rabbit finds himself consumed with lust for his wife, who is now
more or less incapable of having sex. One night, after Rabbit tries to make love to Janice only to
have her snap at him - "I'm not your whore" - he walks out and wanders the town. Janice
becomes wracked with fear and despair, certain that Rabbit has left her again, maybe for good
this time. She drinks excessively throughout the ensuing day, and finally, in a drunken hysteria,
accidentally drowns Rebecca in the bathtub.
When Rabbit hears the news, he goes to the home of Janice's parents, where she is
staying. He tells her it was his fault, and the two finally seem united in a true bond. After the
funeral, however, Rabbit becomes filled with the sense that he finally understands everything - a
sort of skewed religious awakening - and lashes out inexplicably at his wife: "Don't look at me...I
didn't kill her." He then runs away, finally winding up back at Ruth's apartment. She is pregnant,
and the father, it seems, is Rabbit. He is overjoyed that she has not aborted the baby, and insists
that he would love to marry her. She delivers an ultimatum: divorce Janice, or she and the baby
are "dead" to him. He agrees to these terms, and runs out to grab some food. Once outside the
apartment, however, doubts immediately start to plague him. How can he divorce Janice? What
is to become of their son - a two year-old boy named Nelson? It all proves too much for Rabbit.
With "a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter," he does what he has
always done: he runs away.
4. Character List
Harry Angstrom
Nicknamed "Rabbit" for his appearance, Harry is twenty-six years old when we meet him, a
faded high school basketball star who now works as a kitchen gadget salesman. Unhappy with
his marriage and occupation, and plagued with an ever-wandering eye, Rabbit searches
throughout the novel for love, God, meaning - anything to fill the emptiness at his core.
Janice Angstrom
Rabbit's wife. Their hasty marriage resulted from her pregnancy when Rabbit was only twenty-
one. When the novel opens, she is pregnant with a second child. She is prone to drinking, and has
a knack for angering her husband, although Updike suggests that she may truly love him.
Jack Eccles
A young minister suffering a crisis of faith, Jack Eccles makes "saving" Rabbit his mission. He is
well-liked by his parishioners - a sociable and caring man, he is given to spending hours chatting
with teenagers about their problems. He rejects the more traditional and archaic demands of his
profession, favoring interacting with people over devoting entire days to solitary prayer.
Ruth Leonard
A woman with a sordid past who once worked, at least unofficially, as a prostitute, Ruth Leonard
lives alone in a two-person apartment before Rabbit settles in with her. Her life has been
dominated by her encounters and relationships with men. She is very conscious of her weight,
considering herself plump, but at one moment, to Rabbit's eyes, she becomes "beauty's home
image." By turns cruel and affectionate, she lives with Rabbit for two months, during which time
he impregnates her. The novel does not reveal what ultimately becomes of the baby.
Nelson Angstrom
Rabbit's two year-old son with Janice.
Rebecca June Angstrom
Rabbit and Janice's baby daughter, whom Janice accidentally drowns in a bathtub.
Lucy Eccles
The unhappy wife of Jack Eccles. Lucy is filled with bitterness at what religion has done to her
marriage: to her, Jack is unloving, reserving his "gaiety" for his parishioners rather than for his
family. Though at first she seems attracted to Rabbit, who playfully slaps her bottom during their
first encounter, his refusal of what he perceives as an advance from her prompts her to dismiss
him as a "worthless heel."
Mrs. Smith
One of Jack's parishioners. The seventy-three-year-old Mrs. Smith employs Rabbit to tend her
late husband's garden. A farmer's daughter and quite a chatterbox, she reminisces about the war,
the Depression, and her life on a farm. She seems very fond of Rabbit - perhaps she is even, in
some unsaid way, in love with him.
Marty Tothero
Rabbit's former basketball coach. Marty was quite popular at the high school, but was ousted due
to a "scandal." He ceaselessly cheats on his wife, Harriet Tothero, but still tries to give Rabbit
advice concerning his own situation. Referring to our hero as his "finest boy", Marty dotes on
Rabbit as if he were his father until two successive strokes cripple him.
Ronnie Harrison
A former teammate of Rabbit's. Ronnie does not seem much better off in life than his friend:
when we meet him, he is out with Margaret Kosko at the Club Castanet, and he tells a story
about a drive he and Ruth Leonard made to Atlantic City. The tale fills Rabbit with jealousy, and
a verbal battle ensues between the two.
Margaret Kosko
A friend of Ruth Leonard's. Margaret is the apple of Tothero's eye when we first meet her, but
unfortunately she treats him with nothing but contempt.
Miriam Angstrom
Rabbit's beautiful sister, of whom he remains extremely protective.
Fritz Kruppenbach
The old Lutheran minister of Mt. Judge. He is strict and harshly conservative in comparison to
Eccles.
Mr. and Mrs. Springer
Janice's parents. Mr. Springer works as a used-car salesman. His wife is harshly critical of
Rabbit, though after our hero returns to Janice she seems to be on the verge of warming up to
him.
Mr. and Mrs. Angstrom
Rabbit's parents. Both were once terribly proud of their son, but both are now deeply
disappointed in what he has become. Mrs. Angstrom dislikes Janice, and views the marriage as
nothing more than her successful manipulation of Rabbit. Mr. Angstrom is more critical of
Rabbit himself, labeling him "the worst kind of Brewer bum" when he is living with Ruth.

5. Major Themes
Faith
The church that stands outside Ruth's window captures Rabbit's attention that night as much as
her body; immediately, Updike suggests a connection between the thrusting act of sexual intercourse
and the steeple of the church piercing the sky. What exactly forms that sky, in spiritual terms - i.e. what
lies above Rabbit, beyond his day-to-day encounters and tribulations - is a question that animates the
hero's conscience. Updike contrasts his grittily precise depiction of the mundane with allusions to God,
Heaven, and Hell. These allusions are more pervasive and extend deeper than the conversations on the
subject between Rabbit and Eccles. Indeed, what seems to link these two men is a shared crisis of faith:
Jack fears he has forsaken the true calling of a minister, while Rabbit is distressed by the notion that his
actions may have no meaning whatsoever. Though they chat about the "inner darkness" in men, Updike
suggests that what troubles his characters most is that which cannot be described in words: the
ineffable, which lies both within and beyond the dull middle-class milieu that forms Rabbit's earthly
environment.

Love
Does Rabbit love? Is he capable of loving? We never know for sure, but Updike certainly links
the amorous with the fearful: it is when Rabbit worries that his wife may die in childbirth that we feel his
love for her most strongly, just as it is the memory of Rabbit's protectiveness of Miriam that suggests
the depth of his connection to her. However, the question of love is not solely Rabbit's. The first time we
adopt Ruth's perspective, Updike constructs an extended, almost stream-of-consciousness passage
detailing the romantic and sexual encounters of her past. There seems little evidence of any true love in
that past, and yet in her wistful recollections of the shame of boys regarding their genitalia we can sense
a genuine affection that has not yet eroded.

Sex
Rabbit, Run stirred a great deal of controversy when it was first published due to its graphic
descriptions of sex. The two most extended passages of this nature describe Rabbit making love to Ruth
for the first time and, later, his failed attempt to do the same to Janice. On both occasions, the prime
motif is that of a need to connect on both a physical and a spiritual level. Sex becomes more than simply
an act of lust, though it is never quite associated with love; instead, it emerges as an almost religious
process, through which two humans strive to seek or create an invisible bond. Updike's writing has
greatly influenced attempts in film to present sex as a beautiful but essentially tragic act, be it
Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris or, more recently, Bruno Dumont's L'humanité. When once asked
what fascinated him about the attempt to record or describe sex, Dumont responded, "I'm filming the
impossible" - a formulation that has much in common with Updike's suggestion of two bodies becoming
one, a state to which sex aspires but which it can never reach.

Sports
Rabbit's need to continually "run" certainly reflects, among other things, his past as a star
athlete. It is perhaps the end of his reign as a basketball champ that prompts him to search for meaning
elsewhere - in sex, in religion. One gets the impression, especially during Rabbit's recollection of a game
at Oriole High, that basketball once served the same role for Rabbit as the church does for so many of
his peers: a way of instilling his life and his actions with meaning. He tries to communicate what was so
special about this game - and the sport itself - to Ruth and Margaret in the Chinese eatery: "I get this
funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sudden I know, you see,
I know I can do anything." Updike writes: "It puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can't
make the others feel what was so special." The novel begins with Rabbit joining a kids' basketball game
and ends with him running: the sheer physicality of sports seems to represent a lost age for Rabbit
(though he is only twenty-six years old), an age when he could "do anything."

Friendship
Two friendships figure prominently in the novel, and both end more or less in failure. The
beginning of Rabbit and Jack's friendship fills both with excitement, but by the end of the narrative
Rabbit is running away from Eccles just as he has run away from his wife and family. Rabbit's
relationship with Marty Tothero seems healthy at first, with Tothero playing at being a father figure and
both scolding and advising his former star athlete. The old man truly seems to care for Rabbit and his
well being. Soon enough, however, the less agreeable aspects of Tothero's character emerge: he takes
Rabbit out with two girls, refers to Janice as a "mutt", and does nothing to try to set our hero on the
right track. Likewise, Eccles is not exactly a spotless savior: Updike repeatedly suggests, and Rabbit
senses, that the minister uses him for his own purposes, to renew his faith in both God and himself.
Neither friendship gives much cause for hope. One can contrast Updike's method to the use of Platonic
friendship as the one unstained window into the goodness of humanity in Hamlet - a work to which
Updike later wrote a prequel, Gertrude and Claudius.
Voyeurism and the Gaze
Rabbit is a perpetual voyeur. His eyes scan over every detail of women's bodies, even though his
heart allegedly belongs to another. While watching Ruth swim at the public pool, his eyes drift over to
"the lighter figures" of two sixteen year-old girls: "The one in a white strapless peeks up at him from her
straw with a brown glance." While waiting for Janice in the hospital the day after the birth, Rabbit
notices the "beautiful gray hair and somehow silver, finely wrinkled skin" of Marty Tothero's wife. These
are but two examples - one clearly laced with eroticism, the other less obviously so. Rabbit's gaze is not
confined to potential sexual adventures; it suggests his eternal restlessness, a need to look, to move, to
run, and to do that permeates his everyday life.

Death
Though Tothero seems close to death in one scene, only one character dies in Rabbit, Run: the
newly born Rebecca. That Updike reserves the great void for a character that has only just been brought
to life, so to speak, is worth considering. It heightens the death itself; it is not so much a life, full of the
past triumphs and scars of Rabbit Angstrom's, that has been extinguished as the blossoming of a life -
life's very possibility. Thus, Rabbit's resolve to start his own life anew is in effect answered by the baby's
drowning. The theme of death also provides, like sex, a reflection some kind of spirituality or lack
thereof in Rabbit, Run. When Rebecca is buried near the end of the novel, Rabbit is filled with a sense of
renewed faith - which later leads him to wound Janice with words so unspeakably cruel that they set
him on the run yet again. Updike writes, "Rabbit's chest vibrates with excitement and strength: he is
sure his girl has ascended to Heaven." Perhaps, in the loss of his child, Rabbit seeks to find some form of
redemption for his own sins. That search only lands him on the road, running from both life and death.

The Car and the Road

We often associate the '50s with the inception of the road and the highway as American myths.
Indeed, it was the era of Jack Kerouac and On the Road; of the development of the Interstate Highway
System; of the coupled boom in suburban construction and family car production and ownership.
America has since been inextricably linked to the automobile, and though Updike does not set his novel
out West, he uses the promise of the endless road as a tempting one for his protagonist. Ironically, when
Rabbit drives all the way to West Virginia near the novel's beginning, he is dismayed to find that the
country around him does not seem to have changed much at all; he still feels trapped in Mt. Judge. The
car and the road are thus false promises: Rabbit's cage is spiritual and moral, not geographical. He can
run and drive all he wants, but he'll never be able to escape.

Marriage
In a sense, Rabbit, Run is a tale of four marriages and four families: the Springers, the
Angstroms, the Eccleses, and Rabbit and Janice. We learn of other marriages, however: Mrs. Smith
reminisces about her late husband and how much he loved his garden; Marty Tothero cheats ceaselessly
on his wife, until a stroke cripples him. Marriage is presented more often that not as a constricting
institution, one which chokes love more than it fosters it. Lucy Eccles muses on how sour her marriage
to Jack has grown, Mrs. Angstrom refers to her son and husband as "soft", only later to be brought to
tears by Mr. Angstrom...and yet Jack continues to believe in marriage as sacred. When Lucy finally
explodes at him, decrying his persistence in helping Rabbit, who she refers to as a "worthless heel", she
suggests that it was Jack's bringing Janice and Rabbit back together that caused the death of the baby.
"Why were you so anxious to get them back together?" she demands. "Marriage is a sacrament," he
responds. "Even a bad marriage?" she asks. "Yes," he replies.