Rabbit, Run (1960). Content and Description

Rabbit, Run, first published in 1960, along with its sequels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), constitute Updike’s best-known work. The novels chronicle the life of American literature’s iconic everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Rabbit, Run is Updike’s second novel and captures the transitional period between the 1950s and 1960s.

The story opens with Harry walking home after a day’s work. He is 26 and sells Magi-Peel kitchen gadgets. On the way home he joins some kids in a pick-up game of basketball, a sport at which Harry excelled in high school. He finds renewed energy from this game, tossing out his cigarettes and heading home with a lilt in his step. His newfound affirmation of life is quickly squashed when he arrives home to find his pregnant wife, Janice, drunk and watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV.

The scene immediately depresses Harry, and when Janice asks him to pick her up some cigarettes along with their car and son, Nelson, the reality of it all is too much, and Harry runs away. He starts to drive south, but by the time he reaches West Virginia, he has forgotten his motivation for leaving and returns to Brewer. Instead of returning to the house, however, he visits his high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who introduces him to a prostitute named Ruth Leonard.

He moves in with her, entering into an affair until his daughter, Rebecca, is born, and his family convinces him to return home. Shortly afterward he abandons Janice again, and in her grief she accidentally drowns their newborn baby. Harry returns for the funeral only to face the accusing stares of his family. After blaming Janice for the drowning, he returns to Ruth. She informs him that she is pregnant, and Harry, once again, runs away.

While Harry may seem indecisive and noncommittal, the novel reveals that he is a man of conviction who is on a spiritual quest. His values are not absent, just incongruous with the environment around him. This creates for Harry what Tony Tanner calls “a compromised environment” (Tanner 37). Rabbit, Run is a multifaceted work, and while the plot is thin, it is rich with Updike’s descriptive prose, diverse characters, and relevant themes. Many of the novel’s themes, such as religion, suburban adultery, and death, will appear in many more works to follow. The theme of entrapment is particularly prevalent here.

Updike acknowledged that the subtext for the novel is The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Indeed, the “flowerpot city” of Brewer provides the setting from which Harry finds himself unable to escape. The symbols of entrapment take many forms: In the early scenes, Harry’s brown suit, a symbol of adulthood, contrasts with his ability in basketball, the sport he mastered in high school. His age has slowed him down, and the brown suit is a symbol of those advancing years.

Likewise, his apartment, with the abandoned toy moldering under the steps, represents death and decay. Janice seems to be atrophying as she sits in the dim room drinking old-fashioneds and watching The Mickey Mouse Club. The juxtaposition is significant in that the more Janice clings to her childhood, the more paralyzing are the effects of adulthood. Throughout the novel she is inert: She gives birth to the baby but then drowns it when she is drunk. As a symbol of adulthood, the drinking is associated with death and decay.

Certainly marriage is presented as confining in the novel, but only because of the complacency that it fosters. As a subject that Updike will develop throughout his career, marriage is an institution that primarily gives comfort, but at the price of complacency. One no longer needs to try in a marriage. This is seen clearly in the marriage of Lucy and Jack Eccles, the Episcopalian minister who befriends Harry. Repeatedly Lucy begs Jack to care more about her and their family than he does Harry. Harry and Janice’s relationship demonstrates how a marriage requires constant attention. Ironically, Lucy Eccles calls Harry and Janice’s marriage a “bad marriage,” when it is the one that will endure for 30 years, while her own marriage will not.

Updike confronts the issues of religion and faith through the Reverend Jack Eccles. The young minister presents a modern, progressive faith by tending to the social problems of his parishioners. He gives Harry the soft sell and through their friendship (which Eccles enjoys as well) convinces Harry to return to Janice when the baby, Rebecca, is born. However, both his wife, Lucy, and the Angstrom’s Lutheran minister, Fritz Kruppenbach, challenge Eccles’s faith-through-ministry. Kruppenbach reprimands Eccles for becoming involved in social problems at the expense of his spiritual ministry. Kruppenbach admonishes Eccles to “make yourself an exemplar of faith” and tells him that comfort is gained from faith. He calls the busyness of meddling in lives “Devil’s work.” Lucy Eccles, who is interested in Freudian psychology, challenges Jack’s faith. In this relationship Updike shows that if one opens up religion to psychology, faith is destroyed, a topic Nathaniel Hawthorne dealt with in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835).

Since Eccles is a significant presence in the novel, the casual reader might see his theology as reflecting Updike’s. However, like Rabbit, Eccles is more representative of the changing culture than the author’s persona. While Eccles is a sincere and likable character, Lucy and Kruppenbach provide rational reasons for why he is wrong. For Harry to achieve the grace he desires, he needs the “hardness of heart” exemplified by Kruppenbach. Updike studied Karl Barth, upon whom Kruppenbach is based. Barth argues that “concrete action [is] more or less hopeless in producing any absolute result.” God is “wholly other” and exists only through the desire to know him. Thus, Harry’s desire to gain grace, to find “that thing that wants me to find it,” connects him with God.

A significant theme introduced in Rabbit, Run is that of adultery. Ruth, a part-time prostitute, is attracted to Rabbit’s energy and optimism, which counterbalance her own cynicism. But, Harry does not merely have an affair with Ruth; he moves in with her. This seems ironic in light of his desire to break free of the confinement of his marriage. Updike challenges the philosophy of contentment that he feels plagues the middle class.

The rise in affluence of the middle class in the 1950s hides a darker undercurrent: As people gained material wealth, Updike implies, they lost spiritual wealth. Harry does not reject marriage, just the empty symbol of success. Thus, he seeks fulfillment within the context of the domestic relationship. This is seen in his sexually fulfilling relationship with Ruth, and his desire for sex with Janice after she returns from the hospital. Throughout the Rabbit tetralogy, sex is a ritual act for Rabbit, representing his search for fulfillment.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Discuss differences in social class between the Angstroms and Janice’s parents, the Springers. Is one family’s fortune rising while the other’s is in decline? How do their religions, symbolized by their pastors, reflect their place in the middle class?

2. Examine the scene in which Harry goes to work as a gardener for Mrs. Smith. How does this scene function in the novel? What does Smith say to Harry that contradicts what Ruth says about him?

3. At the end of the novel, Harry imagines the world as “an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook into a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.” In what ways is this image reflective of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)?

A&P (1961). Content and Description

“A&P,” first published in the New Yorker in 1961 and collected in Pigeon Feathers in 1962, is Updike’s most anthologized short story. Set in the mid-1950s, “A&P” tells the story of the events leading up to Sammy’s decision to quit his job as a checker at the A&P grocery store. In the story, three girls walk into the store dressed in only their bathing suits.

They stroll through the store as three young men, including Sammy, stare at them. After selecting only a jar of herring snacks in cream sauce, they proceed to Sammy’s lane. While they are making their purchase, the manager, Lengle, admonishes them for their attire, ordering them to be properly dressed the next time they enter the store. In a hasty moment of futile heroism, Sammy quits his job, hoping to gain the admiration of the girls. However, when he walks out of the store, the girls are long gone, and Sammy realizes his decision to quit will have consequences.

The story begins quickly: “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I didn’t see them until they’re over by the bread.” Updike dispenses with establishing the scene and protagonist and jumps right into the action. Implicit is the idea that the story and Sammy’s fateful act begin when the girls walk into the store. In this way the urgency with which the story begins parallels the urgency with which Sammy quits. This emphasizes that his decision to quit is rash and unpremeditated.

It would seem that Sammy is standing up for the girls—for their freedom and their right to respect, although early in the story he objectifies them. The confusion is normal in a boy of his age: His actions are more mimicry and reaction than anything motivated by established personal values. This represents the key theme in the story: the shift of American culture and the emergence of the “generation gap.” While the values that govern Lengle, Sammy, the girls, and their parents are inherent in their culture, in practice we see youthful rebellion.

The girls are rejecting their parents’ values (their mothers would not walk into the grocery store dressed only in their bathing suits), until they are challenged by Lengle, at which point they cling to the privilege of their social class by saying, “But we are decent.” Yet, the girls, dressed as they are, are behaving in a way that is counter to their upbringing. They are dressed provocatively and are, by strolling in the grocery, selling themselves.

They are flirting with prostitution. This is not to say that they would follow through, but they are associating themselves with the working classes and rejecting their own conventional upbringing. They are rebelling against convention, which dictates a more conservative dress code in public. This rebellion is underscored by their reaction to Lengle when he strictly admonishes them about their behavior. By referring to her parents, Queenie reminds us and Lengle of her upper-middle-class upbringing, one, presumably, better than his. Yet, his admonishment reminds them that their behavior is not in accord with their class and in excess of what society will accept. The indifference of their display foretells the cultural shift that is occurring: Women are starting to assert control of their own bodies and the commodification of them is on their own terms.

This feminist theme can also be seen in Sammy’s behavior. When the girls first enter the store, Sammy describes them in physical terms. He studies their appearance and assesses their characters on the basis of their physical qualities: “This clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.”

This simile is a faint allusion to Jake Barnes’s description of Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) as having a body “built like a racing yacht.” It is an interesting blend of feminine and mechanical beauty, consistent with his age and hormonal rush. Yet, Sammy’s simile reflects his unrefined upbringing. Instead of an upscale yacht, he compares her to an unrefined, though flashy object. While reflective of Sammy’s perspective, it is important to note that his—and the reader’s— view of the girls is affected by his own background: The shock that infuses his tone at the beginning originates in his humble circumstances. This shock changes into objectification and then pity for the girls, ultimately leading to his chivalric gesture.

Another theme evident in “A&P” is the emergence of modern consumerism. The A&P sits in the center of town, historically a place occupied by a church. Nevertheless, the existence of the A&P in such a central place represents society’s shift from a religious culture to a consumption- oriented one. The A&P helps us satisfy our wants and needs. The herring snacks are not a staple, but a luxury, representative of the girls’ upper middle class.

However, the reactions by Sammy, Stoeskie, and McMahon indicate that the girls are objects of desire, much like the herring snacks. While it is acceptable to be dressed in bathing suits at the beach, where the glare is so strong that “nobody can look at each other much anyway,” the lighting in the grocery store is designed to enhance and encourage the buying experience. By association, the girls are selling themselves—they are becoming part of the consumer culture, but as a commodity. They are objectifying themselves, for they present themselves, in a way that competes for the shopper’s attention. Because of this, they are commodities, too.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare “A&P” to James Joyce’s “Araby” in the collection Dubliners (1914). How do both protagonists suffer from the same romantic idealism? How is the epiphany Sammy experiences at the end of “A&P” similar to that experienced by the narrator of “Araby”?

2. Sammy’s comment that the woman who watches his register would have burned “over in Salem,” combined with the reference to the church across the street, connects this story to the early Puritan settlers in Massachusetts. The Puritans’ values were hard and fast. In contrast, the values implied by Sammy and the girls are in transition. Who in the story represents these Puritan values? In terms of the events in the story, does the author side with the old values or the new ones?

3. Upon reading the manuscript, Updike’s wife, Mary, remarked that “A&P” reminded her too much of J. D. Salinger. Looking closely at the language and tone, how is Sammy similar to Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye (1951)?