Literary Analysis Of John Updike's Rabbit Run

John Updike occupies a unique position in the annals of American literature. He gave an extra-ordinary dimension to the banal and mundane aspects of life which delineated with feline accuracy. In his prodigious output encompassing varied genres, he relentlessly pursued the dialectics of discontentment, conflict, waste, sorrow, and fear juxtaposed by the antithetical elements of contentment, resolutions, economy, happiness and love, which invest his writings with a rare dynamism that accounts for his commercial popularity. The variety of his oeuvre is so diverse that it can be christened the literary Wall Mart. In long line of novelists who mirrored the society of their times, John Updike was one. Born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A in the year 1932,

Judge in the America of late 1950’s. Suddenly seized by angst born out of dissatisfaction in the conventional relationships of family, society and religion, he runs away from them as the title suggests. His only glory is his skill in the game of basketball. Married to Janice, an alcoholic and with a two-and-half year old son Nelson, Harry known well by his nick name Rabbit finds the domesticity irksome and in a fit of emotional strain deserts Janice even though she is pregnant. He enters into a live-in relationship with Ruth who is a prostitute. Rev. Eccles, and Tethro, his high school basketball coach, persuade him to return to his wife but without avail. Meanwhile, Janice gives birth to a baby girl Becky and goaded by Eccles, Rabbit makes peace with his wife, turning his back on Ruth who at this time becomes pregnant. But the reconciliation is short lived as Rabbit is at loggerheads with her this time over sex. A frustrated Janice finds refuge in alcohol and in a highly inebriated state, accidently drowns the baby in the bath tub. The novel ends with the guilt laden and bewildered Rabbit running away from the baby’s funeral, abandoning Janice and Nelson for the second time. Willis Wager succinctly captures the essence of the Novel when he opines: “Probably the best of his [Updike] novels so far is Rabbit Run its central character ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom (suggesting

The novel’s action which spans a brief period of four months between July and October 1969 is captured as a quartet, each named after an individual except for the first which has a seemingly incongruous addendum. The first chapter is named Pop, Mom, and Moon, and the other three after Jill, a flower child of the sixties, Skeeter, a black Vietnam war veteran and Mim, Rabbit’s sister and his only sibling, in the same order. The oddity of inclusion of the lunar sphere in the caption of the first quartet gets resolved by a skilfully contrived symbolic unity achieved by prefixing each of the four sections with epigraphs taken from the conversations of the astronauts of Apollo 11 and the Russian Cosmonauts. According to George Hunt, “If Rabbit , Run was Updike’s quintessential novel of the 1950’s, Rabbit Redux is search for the 1960’s” (165). In the first novel, Rabbit was overcome by angst which propels him to seek new frontiers whereas Rabbit Redux finds him in a state of stupor induced by external circumstances. The story line of the novel is linear unlike Rabbit, Run whose movement is set in a zigzag pattern. One finds here the protagonist whose personal life with his wife is at nadir. Janice has an affair with Charlie, a co-worker, but with the passion of the life youth being