Rabbit, Run by John Updike is a novel about a young man named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who leaves his pregnant wife and young child and begins a journey to find happiness and freedom. He gets involved with a prostitute named Ruth and stays with her in an apartment. While he is away from his wife he is counseled by Reverend Eccles who tries to help Rabbit’s situation, although it does not do much good. After his wife has the baby, he leaves Ruth to be with his family. Rabbit eventually leaves his wife again to go back with Ruth. While he is away the second time, his wife drinks too much and accidentally drowns their newborn. In the end, Rabbit runs away from both his family and Ruth to continue his journey.
The article “Rabbit Angstrom as a Religious Sufferer” by Lewis Lawson details Rabbit’s search for a transcendent experience while also struggling with his identity. On the other hand, the article “Young Man Angstrom: Identity Crisis and the Work of Love in Rabbit, Run” by David Crowe explores Rabbit’s journey to find his true identity, the relevance of Christian faithfulness in the novel, and how ethical misconduct has an effect on both. These articles both investigate the effects Rabbit’s actions have on his spiritual journey as well as if he even has the ability to achieve his goal. These articles differ in that Crowe focuses more on ethics and its effect on spirituality while Lawson determines the connection of sexuality and spirituality within the novel.
In his article “Rabbit Angstrom as a Religious Sufferer” Lewis Lawson explores Rabbit’s journey and how it is relatable to religion and spirituality. The examples Lawson use illustrate Rabbit’s connection to and struggle with religion and his own identity. He hi...
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...ues his search by going to Eccles church one morning, only to find that he loses concentration and begins a sexual daydream while the service is going on. Rabbit explains that he became dissatisfied by the sermon because he “has no taste for the dark tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out.” Lawson explains that Rabbit lacks the will to become a truly religious person.
Works Cited
Crowe, David. “Young Man Angstrom: Identity Crisis and the Work of Love in Rabbit, Run.” Religion and Literature 43.1 (2011): 81-100. EBSCOhost. Web.
Lawson, Lewis A. “Rabbit Angstrom as a Religious Sufferer.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42.2 (1974): 232-46. JSTOR. Web.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. Print.
A deeply pious man, John considers the Bible a sublime source of moral code, guiding him through the challenges of his life. He proclaims to his kid son, for whom he has written this spiritual memoir, that the “Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you” (81). While John manages to stay strong in the faith and nurture a healthy relationship with his son, his relationship with his own father did not follow the same blueprint. John’s father, also named John Ames, was a preacher and had a powerful effect on John’s upbringing. When John was a child, Father was a man of faith. He executed his role of spiritual advisor and father to John for most of his upbringing, but a shift in perspective disrupted that short-lived harmony. Father was always a man who longed for equanimity and peace. This longing was displayed in his dealings with his other son, Edward: the Prodigal son of their family unit, a man who fell away from faith while at school in Germany. John always felt that he “was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house” (238). Father always watched over John, examining for any sign of heterodoxy. He argued with John as if John were Edward, as if he were trying to get Edward back into the community. Eventually, John’s father's faith begins to falter. He reads the scholarly books
William Peden once called John Updike’s “A&P” “deftly narrated nonsense...which contains nothing more significant than a checking clerk's interest in three girls in bathing suits” (Peden). While Peden’s criticism may be harsher than necessary, it is hard to find fault with his analysis. Sammy’s tale offers little more than insight into an egocentric and self-motivated mind, and while Updike may disagree with that conclusion, a close reading of the text offers significant evidence to support this theory. In “An Interview with John Updike”, Updike describes how Sammy quit as a “feminist protest” (153). However, I would argue that Sammy’s act of defiance was selfishly motivated and represents his inner struggle with his social class as demonstrated through his contempt for those around him and his self-motivated actions.
Two Works Cited In John Updike’s "A & P," Sammy is accused of quitting his job for childlike, immature reasons. Nathan Hatcher states, "In reality, Sammy quit his job not on a matter of ideals, but rather as a means of showing off and trying to impress the girls, specially Queenie" (37), but Sammy’s motive runs much deeper than that. He was searching for a sense of personal gain and satisfaction. By taking sides with the girls, he momentarily rises in class to meet their standards and the standards of the upper-class.
People often take their place in society for granted. They accept that position into which they are born, grow up in it, and pass that position on to their children. This cycle continues until someone is born who has enough vision to step out of his circle and investigate other ways of life in which he might thrive. One such person is embodied in the character of Sammy in A&P, by John Updike. Sammy is the narrator of the story and describes an incident in the store where he encounters a conflict between the members of two completely different worlds the world that he was born into and the world of a girl that captures his mind. Through his thoughts, attitudes, and actions, Sammy shows that he is caught between the two worlds of his customers at the A&P.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Religion often enlightens one with newfound reverence and respect. While caring for the wolf, the man finds both reverence and respect through a few spiritual encounters. As he is walking with the wolf, the man hears coyotes calling from the hills “above him where their cries [seem] to have no origin other than the night itself.” This represents the heavens calling out to the wolf to enter its gates. Once the man stops to build a fire, he seems to hold a ritual for the wolf. His shelter steamed “in the firelight like a burning scrim standing in a wilderness where celebrants of some sacred
Through her many allegories, Hurnard echoes God’s call for His children to joyfully love, trust, and obey Him. She encourages her readers through the call of the Shepherd to strive after true satisfying love by forsaking thei...
Writer and member of the 1920’s literary movement, Langston Hughes, in his autobiographical essay, Salvation, elucidates the loss of innocence and faith due to the pressure of accepting a concept that he has yet to acknowledge. Hughes’ purpose is to describe his childhood experience of the burden to be saved by Jesus, resulting in his loss of faith. He adopts a solemn, yet disappointing tone to convey his childhood event and argues the unqualified religious pressure.
Updike, John. "A & P" Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
As children, we are often told stories, some of which may have practical value in the sense of providing young minds with lessons and morals for the future, whereas some stories create a notion of creativity and imagination in the child. In Karen Armstrong’s piece, “Homo Religiosus”, a discussion of something similar to the topic of storytelling could translate to the realm of religion. Armstrong defines religion as a, “matter of doing rather than thinking” (17) which she describes using an example in which adolescent boys in ancient religions, who were not given the time to “find themselves” but rather forced into hunting animals which ultimately prepares these boys to be able to die for their people, were made into men by the process of doing.
While the direct job, has rules against the Bunnies and their customers having a relationship these rules are not regulated correctly. After all, Steinem actually remarks about a Bunny that was fired for turning down a customer on a date. While inside the business, the Bunnies are constantly harassed about coming to meet their customers in hotel rooms and about their appearance. The prostitution does not end once their shift ends though, while walking home one evening exhausted and belittled, a taxi driver waves $4 around as if a Bunny should sell herself to him. When Steinem shakes her head in disbelief at his behavior, he actually remarks, “You work here don’t you”, as if it is expected of the Bunnies to be open to
In drastic situations, human psychology uses coping mechanisms to help them through it. In the novel, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi’s coping mechanism is his religions and his projection of Richard Parker. Martel’s Life of Pi shows how the projection of Richard Parker played a greater role in keeping Pi alive in comparison to his beliefs in his religions. During the period in which Pi was stranded on the lifeboat, Richard Parker kept Pi aware, helped Pi make the right decisions, and was Pi’s sub-consciousness.
In the first two chapter of the book, Freud explores a possible source of religious feeling. He describes an “oceanic feeling of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity.” Freud himself is unable to experience such a feeling, but notes that there do indeed...
In the midst of his already successful career, Sigmund Freud decided to finally dedicate a book of his to religion, referring to the subject as a phenomena faced by the scientific community. This new work, Totem and Taboo, blew society off its feet, ultimately expanding the reaches of debates and intellectual studies. From the beginning, Freud argues that there exists a parallel between the archaic man and the contemporary compulsive. Both these types of people, he argues, exhibit neurotic behavior, and so the parallel between the two is sound. Freud argues that we should be able to determine the cause of religion the same way we determine the cause of neurosis. He believes, since all neuroses stem from childhood experiences, that the origins of this compulsive behavior we call religion should also be attributed to some childhood experiences of the human race, too. Freudian thought has been dominant since he became well known. In Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, religion becomes entirely evident as a major part of the novel, but the role it specifically plays is what we should question. Therefore, I argue that Freud’s approach to an inborn sense of religion and the role it plays exists in The Last of the Mohicans, in that the role religion plays in the wilderness manifests itself in the form of an untouchable truth, an innate sense of being, and most importantly, something that cannot and should not be tampered with.
On its surface, Martel’s Life of Pi proceeds as a far-fetched yet not completely unbelievable tale about a young Indian boy named Pi who survives after two hundred twenty-seven days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. It is an uplifting and entertaining story, with a few themes about companionship and survival sprinkled throughout. The ending, however, reveals a second story – a more realistic and dark account replacing the animals from the beginning with crude human counterparts. Suddenly, Life of Pi becomes more than an inspiring tale and transforms into a point to be made about rationality, faith, and how storytelling correlates the two. The point of the book is not for the reader to decide which story he or she thinks is true, but rather what story he or she thinks is the better story. In real life, this applies in a very similar way to common belief systems and religion. Whether or not God is real or a religion is true is not exactly the point, but rather whether someone chooses to believe so because it adds meaning and fulfillment to his or her life. Life of Pi is relevant to life in its demonstration of storytelling as a means of experiencing life through “the better story.”