Rabbit, Run
1960
(Meet Harry Angstrom-- an inspired, optimistic, but frustrated, impulsive man who cannot seem to control his life).
All text except quotations is copyright 1999 by David Lahti, and represents his views alone. Please comment on this page in my guestbook.
CONTENTS:
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Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a basketball star in his youth but now a MagiPeel peeler salesman, is rejuvenated after playing a game of basketball with some local boys and discovering that he can still play well. Running home exuberantly, he finds a less lively situation, but the usual one: his pregnant wife Janice lazily drinking and smoking and watching a children's show on TV. Leaving to run errands for her, Rabbit finds himself driving away from the whole situation, seeking a new life. Eventually he becomes lost and turns around, but does not go home. He sleeps in the car in front of the home of his old coach, Mr. Tothero. The two of them have a talk; Tothero at first argues that they should find a way for him to patch things up with Janice (but Rabbit wants nothing to do with the "stupid" woman). Then Tothero and a friend bring Rabbit on a double date with a plump girl named Ruth, whom Rabbit eventually realizes is a prostitute. Rabbit and Tothero talk of old times when Rabbit was a star, and after dinner Rabbit goes to Ruth's apartment. But Rabbit wants more than a quick night with a prostitute: he tries to start a relationship with Ruth, treating her well and having her take off her thick makeup. Rabbit goes home the next day to get some things while he expects Janice will not be home. He fails to escape Janice's family's preacher Rev. Eccles, however, who convinces Rabbit to talk with him regularly over games of golf. Rabbit reveals his disillusionment with his marriage, and Eccles tries to get to know him but at the same time reminds him of his responsibilities in life-- to himself, and to God (in whom Rabbit does believe). Rabbit meets Eccles' wife Lucy, a flirtatious Freudian with whom he feels comfortable being bold. Rabbit takes his aggressions out with his golf swings, and so plays terribly. Eccles realizes that Rabbit is thoroughly selfish and basely instinctual, and tells him so. As if helped by this anchor to reality, Rabbit's next shot is perfect.
Eccles has found Rabbit a job, gardening for a widow. The job is good for Rabbit, and forces him to recognize life outside of himself. At the same time, however, Ruth begins to aggravate him because of her growing critical attitude towards him. She cannot see why he can continue living the way he does and never seeming to pay the price. "If you have the guts to be yourself", he answers, "other people'll pay your price." Eccles likes him, though, and hopes that he will be able to help him. But Eccles is disillusioned after visiting Rabbit's and Janice's two families-- "an afternoon in a bramble patch"-- for they do not share his concern or hope for Rabbit's rehabilitation. Eccles visits Rabbit's family's own minister, who shows no compassion or care for Rabbit, but in its place hurls harsh instruction and exhortation to be "on fire" for Christ. Meanwhile Rabbit sees something of Ruth's old occupation in her interaction with an acquaintance at a bar, and Rabbit decides to "humble" her sexually in reaction to this. Eccles surprises him with a call, to inform him that his wife is having the baby. Rabbit agrees to go to the hospital, but Ruth remains unresponsive when he tells her he has to go and that he'll be back. He sits in the waiting room for a while with Eccles, until the doctor tells him that he has a new baby girl. He goes in to see Janice and kisses her, knowing he's back with her for good. She forgives him, and he is honestly contrite, and tells her he loves her. He stays at the Eccles' house that night, and feels like he is finally on the right road, doing what he ought. He is emphasized in this position by short talks with Tothero (now very sick in the hospital), his son Nelson, and the widow Mrs. Smith. Rabbit even goes to church on Sunday morning at the request of Eccles. Eccles must stay at church after the service, so his wife Lucy walks home, accompanied by Rabbit. She propositions him. Rabbit is certainly attracted to Lucy, but he has changed in the last few days. He declines her invitation, albeit oafishly. Returning home, he is proud of himself and racing with passion all day, but Janice is not in the condition or the mood to make love. When she flatly refuses him that evening, Rabbit leaves again. In the morning Janice, in hopes that he will return, keeps his absence a secret from her parents. But she begins to drink heavily. Her mother senses something wrong and decides to come over, but in her drunkenness Janice has made the house a mess. She tries to hurriedly wash the baby in the bathtub, but loses her grip on her, and the baby drowns before the stupefied Janice can retrieve her.
Jack Eccles gets a hold of Rabbit, who has been wandering the city all night, and tells him the news. Rabbit comes to his wife's family home, where she is asleep. He plays with his son for a while. When his wife wakes he goes up to her, and apologizes. They hold each other. The old coach Tothero arrives for a brief visit and tells Rabbit that right and wrong are for our own good. Rabbit wonders what he must do for forgiveness, and to see God's providence behind the events of his life. Eccles admits his ignorance on the second matter, but tells him that this event may have brought Rabbit and Janice closer together. Rabbit goes back to the apartment with Janice the next day. At the funeral Rabbit listens to the service and finds forgiveness and strength in the admonishment to "cast every care" on God. But this strength emboldens him at the burial site to make clumsy statements about not being at fault for the child's death, which understandably shock the others. He realizes too late that he is not the only victim in this situation, or in life, but the realization is short-lived. The family's horror at his statements enrages him, and he runs away into the woods, followed ineffectually by Eccles. He calls Eccles, but the wife Lucy answers and hangs up the phone on him. He stops at Ruth's apartment, but she is ambivalent towards him, and pregnant with his baby. He tries to balance Janice, his son Nelson, Ruth, but ultimately banishes these from his mind and turns inward. "Goodness lies inside", he decides, "there is nothing outside, those things he was trying to balance have no weight." He begins down the street, and in a "kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter", breaks into a run.
To top of Updike's Rabbit, Run
Rabbit cannot control his feelings. He is angry, he is lustful, he is proud, he is apathetic, he is inspired, he is optimistic, he is indecisive, or he is frustrated. These attitudes, together with his spontaneous senses of what he wants to do, just move in and out of his head without his bidding. He cannot control his feelings-- but can any of us? Furthermore, skipping from feelings to actions, most readers will judge Rabbit harshly for what he does, but many (most?) of us do not object in general to "Follow your instincts" or "Do what feels right" or other similar ubiquitous statements that reflect exactly what Rabbit does in his life. He is true to his passions and senses, always following their lead. So we certainly cannot blame Rabbit for having a façade or being hypocritical, nor for ignoring his instincts. So why doesn't life seem to work for him?
The assumption so many people have is that our instincts and feelings will always be the right ones. But this is doubtful, since they often contradict each other and leave us confused. Like Rabbit says, "All I know is what feels right. You feel right to me. Sometimes Janice used to. Sometimes nothing does." Do we really think, then, given this variability in our feelings, that we can live properly and successfully by the simple rule "do what feels right"? Rabbit, Run illustrates where this can take us. Updike's book shows us a picture of a man who spends his days attempting to live by this rule, and ultimately getting nowhere for it. Rabbit wants everything to be easy and simple and instinctual. "He wants to believe in the sky as the source of all things." But this leaves him running endlessly, without an anchor to something objective or outside of himself, without a direction, and without an end in sight. Rabbit will never stop running, because like the gas station attendant said in the beginning of the book, "The only way to get somewhere... is to figure out where you're going before you go there."
In the middle part of the book Updike fools us into believing (at least he fooled me into believing) that Rabbit is changing in such a way that he will cease to run, cease to be so selfish, and instead drive that "straight road ahead of me". But all along we should have seen the signs. Even in this very celebration of his rehabilitation, he says "I got this feeling of a straight road ahead of me". But the feeling can change, can disappear, as it in fact does for Rabbit. When he is wandering the streets after having left his wife the second time, we can be sure he no longer feels that straight road ahead of him. He probably feels more like he did the first time he left-- the feeling "like I was in the bushes and it didn't matter which way I went." The problem is not that Rabbit's instincts need improving; it is doubtful that we'd ever be able to hope for a permanent change in someone's natural instincts. Rather, the problem is precisely in the fact that Rabbit follows his instincts, follows them blindly as if he had no other choice. We can see this plainly in the couple of boorish statements he makes which in the end have such dramatic effects. Something comes into his mind, and he says it, because he is instinctual and spontaneous. Or, if one prefers a negative term, he is unprincipled; that is, not governed by principle. And as long as he is this way, he can learn as many lessons as he may from Mrs. Smith the widow, from growing things in a garden, from Reverend Eccles the compassionate friend, from his old coach Tothero, from his forgiving father-in-law, from his son's simple love, and even from Ruth's critical comments. He can be changed by these as much as he might, but when the emotional memory wears, and the excitement at having done rightly fades, and when the vision of the straight road blurs, he will be the same unprincipled selfish Rabbit, and will go his own way regardless.
If, on the other hand, he had decided to live differently, to place his immediate passions a little lower than they had been on the ladder of his priorities, and to entertain the possibility that perhaps others are "victims of life" as well, with feelings and instincts that are sometimes painful and sometimes conflicting and sometimes confusing, things might have turned out differently. He might have realized that others are like him, and so deserve consideration in and of themselves; so he should think and feel from their perspectives before he makes decisions. He might have realized (as he seems to have been on the brink of realizing all along) that his instincts are not to be trusted, that he must live for something more certain and steadfast. But his only association with that kind of living, perhaps besides Eccles, is in boring church services, in people with upturned noses full of disapproval, and in the dry admonishments of the clergy. And even Eccles seems to go into a robotic, unfeeling mode when he steps up into the pulpit. Rabbit believes in God, and prays when he is at his most needful points; but "living for God" doesn't seem to change people much for the better. In the end Rabbit can keep his sanity only by withdrawal into himself, the rule by which and the end for which he has always lived. And unless someone can show him (that is, not just tell him) some reason not to live this way, a small part of me says, "How can we blame him?". But that is a small part of me. The rest of me says, "He can stand to try a bit harder."
Something should be said of Updike as a writer. The frankness with which he portrays the thoughts, feelings, and actions of Rabbit are wholly in line with the themes and emphases in the book. We are shown the good with the bad, a mosaic of a real person. Such is a difficult task for a writer, for he must be able to verbalize what a man feels or thinks in snatches and half-grasped concepts. Updike succeeds at this, writing in the uninhibited, unstructured, loose-grammar style of his day but frequently extending thoughts and ideas into well-written and aesthetic paragraphs. The view is sometimes disturbing, may be sometimes (perhaps embarrassingly) reminiscent of ourselves, but it is always forthright. Only because Updike has the boldness to paint such a vivid and comprehensive picture do we understand Rabbit enough to understand the novel. It may also be said that Updike has an incisive understanding of male sexuality (or should we say, male sexual instincts), which is likewise necessary in order for us to understand those forces which, as if by default, often take the reins of Rabbit's life.
To top of Updike's Rabbit, Run
Tidbits of Significance (the only divisions are 3 unlabeled parts):
"'The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.'
"Rabbit catches a whiff of whisky. He says in a level way, 'I don't think so.'"
-Gas station attendant and Harry, during his first run, part I.
"'And I guarantee you'll like my friend. She is a remarkable girl, Harry, with seven strikes against her from birth, but she's done a remarkable thing.'
"'What?'
"'She's come to grips. Isn't that the whole secret, Harry; to come to grips?'"
-Tothero and Harry, on the way to their double date, part I.
"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto."
-Harry, during his first date with Ruth, part I.
"Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little price leaves you with nothing."
-during Harry and Ruth's first night together, part I.
"Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way."
-Harry's prayer, the morning after his and Ruth's first night together, part I.
"In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature."
-the morning after Harry and Ruth's first night together, part I.
"O.K. He brought them up here. To see what? The city stretches from dollhouse rows at the base of the part through a broad blurred belly of flowerpot red patched with tar roofs and twinkling cars and ends as a rose tint in the mist that hangs above the distant river. Gas tanks glimmer in this smoke. Suburbs lie like scarves in it. But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste. Air dries his mouth."
-Harry, having climbed Mount Judge with Ruth, part I.
"'Do you [believe in hell]?'
"'Yes, I think so. Hell as Jesus described it. As separation from God.'
"'Well then we're all more or less in it.'
"'I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call'—he looks at Harry and laughs—'inner darkness.'"
-Harry and Reverend Eccles, at Eccles' house, near the end of part I.
"'Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.'"
-Eccles to Harry, during their first golf game, near the end of part I.
"'…you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.'"
-Eccles to Harry, during their first golf game, near the end of part I.
"…like the funny faces made by a thirteen-year-old girl in constant confession of the fact that she is not beautiful."
-while Mrs. Smith walks the garden with Harry, near the beginning of part II.
"With his white collar he forges God's name on every word he speaks."
-Eccles' thoughts of himself as he talks to Mrs. Springer, part II.
"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
-during Eccles' talk with Mrs. Angstrom, part II.
"'It's what they keep telling you in church. Men are all heart and women are all body. I don't know who's supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.'"
-Mrs. Angstrom, during Eccles' talk with her, part II.
"Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps—overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath."
-Eccles' thoughts during his talk with Mrs. Angstrom, part II.
"He's seen half a dozen people and a dog and nowhere did an opinion tally with his own, that Harry Angstrom was worth saving and could be saved. Instead down there between the brambles there seemed to be no Harry at all: nothing but stale air and last year's dead stalks."
-Eccles' thoughts after his talk with Harry's family, part II.
"'Last night driving home I got this feeling of a straight road ahead of me; before that it was like I was in the bushes and it didn't matter which way I went.'"
-Harry, to Eccles' wife Lucy, part II.
"'That's what you have, Harry: life. It's a strange gift and I don't know how we're supposed to use it but I know it's the only gift we get and it's a good one.'"
-Mrs. Smith to Harry when he quits his job, part II.
"He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The best he can do is submit to the system and give Nelson the chance to pass, as he did, unthinkingly, through it. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."
-Harry's thoughts as he prepares to go back to Janice, part II.
"…you're wife's parents can't get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there's something relaxing and even comic about them."
-Harry's thoughts as he prepares to go back to Janice, part II.
"His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it."
-Harry, as he goes to church, part II.
"He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly he loves the ones dressed for church; the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible: the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest, sandwiched between their parents with olive complexions and bony arms, walk in Rabbit's eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of relief, he could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear."
-Harry, as he goes to church, part II.
"He is surrounded by people who know God; he has come into a field of flowers."
-Harry, in church, part II.
"'Right and wrong,' he says, and stops; his big head shifts, and the stiff downward lines of his mouth and bad eye show. 'Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably'—his pride at negotiating the long word shows, simple as a boy's—'misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.'"
-Tothero to Harry, after the baby's death, part III.
"The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of 'any place,' prelude to the ultimate, 'Why am I me?'—starts panic in his heart. Coldness spreads through his body and he feels detached, as if at last he is, what he's always dreaded, walking on air."
-Harry's thoughts after his night at the Springers' house, part III.
To top of Updike's Rabbit, Run
...you want complete and candid entry into the life and thoughts of a modern man in search of a way to live happily; or, you want to see the results of angst combined with selfishness.
To top of Updike's Rabbit, Run
If you like this, you'd also like...
(for the restless in search of life:)
-Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1921).
-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945).
-J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
-John Updike, Rabbit Redux (1971).
(for the struggler with blatant sexual instincts and interactions:)
-Jean Racine, Phaedra (1677).
-Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862).
-D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1921).
-John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus (1947).
To top of Updike's Rabbit, Run
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