Rabbit Run
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This essay presents a critical analysis of John Updike's novel Rabbit, Run (1960). Updike writes mostly of the lives of common people in small-town Pennsylvania situations. Frank N. Magill suggests: "The quality distinguishing John Updike's fiction and putting him in the front rank of novelists at an unusually young age is his ability to 'get into' his characters, to experience their palpable worlds as they experience them, and to convey these experiences in prose that is at once rich and translucent. He is in that stream of post-realism that conceives life as it is broadly and inclusively, that finds in the ordinary enough of the extraordinary to excite the poetic imagination without forsaking thorough grounding in quotidian reality. Beyond this, faint but perceptible, is a tough intellectual and religious concern for values, appearing in his fiction not so much as the assertion of one given value system or the other but rather as a constant probing of conflicts of evaluation as these arise in tangible experience " (Magill 1042). This religious interest is observable in Jack Eccles, the Episcopal minister, used by Updike to place emphasis on spiritual and moral considerations. Although Eccles may often appear to be foolish and sometimes ridiculous, he does serve the purpose of pointing out the truth about Harry Angstrom, nicknamed 'Rabbit.' It is as if Eccles is a guide for Rabbit, who is suffering the age-old, but very modern problem of separation from
. . .
elson. When Rabbit stops to play basketball with a group of boys one afternoon, he recalls his previous basketball days. This brings to Rabbit a promise of life and an urge to run. At home, Rabbit finds his wife drinking and doing all sorts of irritating things. She has left Nelson at the residence of Rabbit's parents and their automobile at hers. Rabbit goes after these things. When he arrives at his parents' house, he has the sudden impulse to run away--and he does. When he picks up the car, Rabbit begins to drive aimlessly. Rabbit has begun his quest and follows his urge to leave his spiritually vacuous life with his family behind him: "He drives through a thickening night. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires . . . The land refuses to change. The more he drives the more the region resembles the country around Mt. Judge . . . The animal in him swells its protest that he is going west. His mind stubbornly resists. The only way to get somewhere is to decide where you're going and go " (Updike 32). It would not be appropriate to describe the plot in detail. The basic problem of the novel is
Rabbit'
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1287
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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