Summary

Harry Angstrom, walking along a street, happens upon a group of children playing basketball. The novel's protagonist is twenty-six years old, and a salesman for a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler. He is nicknamed Rabbit for "the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose." He joins the game, inspiring him to reminisce about his own high-school glory days as a basketball star.

After playing with the children for some time, he heads home. He lives in an apartment in a development that dates from the thirties - a collection of nondescript buildings in the equally nondescript town of Mt. Judge, a suburb of Brewer, PA. He finds the door to his place locked, although his wife, Janice, several months pregnant, is inside. He asks her why she locked the door, but all she can say is: "It just locked itself." This response annoys Rabbit, revealing the sorry state of their marriage. Rabbit no longer finds Janice pretty, and is contemptuous of what he perceives as her clumsiness and general stupidity. Janice's appearance and actions seem to exacerbate her husband's low opinion of her: she is sitting idly, watching the Mouseketeers on television. Rabbit learns that their car is at Janice's mother's place, and that their two-year-old son, Nelson, is at his own mother's. The situation angers Rabbit, and he talks to his wife with thinly veiled scorn. Janice responds with tears, forcing her husband to take her in her arms and pleading to him: "Don't run from me, Harry. I love you."

Rabbit sets off to get the car, his son, and a pack of cigarettes for Janice. Even this casual request of hers fills him with bitterness, and the walk outside only serves to deepen these sentiments. He passes the Sunshine Athletic Association, a dilapidated building in which Marty Tothero, his high-school coach, found work after being ousted from his position at the school due to a "scandal". Rabbit's mind drifts back to the days when he was a basketball star, and when he finally arrives at his old house and sees Nelson through the window, being fed by Rabbit's sister, Miriam, he feels that "this home is happier than his." All he can do at the end is turn around, locate his car, and drive away alone. Once in the car, "the highway sucks him on." Rabbit seems incapable of turning back: he may not know where he is going, but he knows that he must keep driving. He exits Mt. Judge, reaches the highway, stops at a gas station, gets directions, and starts heading south.

Soon enough, he finds himself as far south as West Virginia. He briefly stops at a roadside diner and notices a couple who seem to reflect his own predicament through a rosier lens. Rabbit's eye is constantly drawn to those around him: he notes that "he is unlike the other customers" at the diner, and that they seem to be staring at him; he feels like a stranger in a strange land. Back in his car and on the road, he grows frustrated that the more he drives, the more the country surrounding him looks like that of Mt. Judge. No matter how far his travels take him, he still feels trapped.

Night falls. Rabbit gets off the road by accident, and nearly crashes the car. He finds himself on a "lovers' lane." He stops his car, tears up his map in exasperation, and begins heading back to Brewer. The return trip is far easier than his attempt at escape; even though he has no map and hardly any gas left, he quickly reaches Brewer without difficulty and parks beside the Sunshine Athletic Association. He decides to sleep for a bit, hoping to catch Marty Tothero when he exits. It is already early morning, and when Tothero appears, Rabbit swiftly runs up to him and asks him for advice. He communicates his dissatisfaction with his marriage, refers to Janice as a "dumb" alcoholic, and finally claims that he is not "interested" in her. These remarks prompt Tothero to say: "I don't believe it. I don't believe that my greatest boy would grow into such a monster." He shows Rabbit to a small side-room in the Sunshine and tells him that he can sleep there on the condition that the two discuss his problems after he awakens.

To Rabbit's unease, Marty watches him undress. Later, Rabbit decides Marty's act was simply a means to reminisce, to return to the better days of the past when Marty would hover over the boys on his team, watching them prepare for a game. This memory leads Rabbit to recall a prostitute he slept with in Texas while he was in the Army, and how hurt he was to find out that she had faked her part in the act.

Analysis

The opening image of Updike's novel - "Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it" - establishes the sport as a motif that will help structure the novel. Clearly, Rabbit sees the kids' game as a reflection of his own lost youth. The boys only offer him "puzzled silly looks" when he asks them if he can join in; although they acquiesce, Rabbit remains distant from them, a phenomenon exacerbated by Updike's prose, which locates the reader firmly within Rabbit's consciousness while infusing the text with irony. The reader can share in the thrill of the sport, of Rabbit's elated discovery "that his touch still lives in his hands," while simultaneously laughing at the image of a six-foot-three, twenty-six-year-old man in business attire playing ball with "the real boys."

It is perhaps too easy to interpret this moment as a distillation of Rabbit's yearning to return to his youth; as Updike describes it, the game seems infused with the same gloom that pervades all of Mt. Judge. It is there in the opening line: the kids play not on a real court, but by a "telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it." Consider the language itself: "b" and "p" are the two consonants most heavily used in the sentence, and recall the noises of a basketball smacking against asphalt. Immediately we sense that Updike's strategy is not merely to provide a window into a consciousness, but also to create a sensory experience through his near-poetic writing: the sounds of the words he uses are as important as the actions they convey, and his use of fragments (e.g. "Legs, shouts") recall the quick cuts of cinema - a medium Updike himself claimed was hugely influential on his prose.

Throughout the ensuing events the reader remains close to Rabbit, and the specter of basketball returns on three separate occasions: when he passes the Sunshine Athletic Association, when he reaches the highway in his car, and when Marty Tothero watches him undress. The second instance is perhaps the most illuminating: "He doesn't drive five miles before this road begins to feel like a part of the same trap. The first road offered him he turns right on. A keystone marker in the headlights says 23. A good number. The first varsity game he played in he made 23 points." Thus, basketball and memory serve to frame his present attempt to escape the doldrums of his life; the road that reminds him of his first varsity game is the road worth taking. Why? It is not clear whether Rabbit wishes to literally return to the past, and there is a level of distaste in his perception of Marty Tothero, the former coach who lost his position because of an unnamed "scandal." Yet there is an undeniable bond between Rabbit and Tothero, and the former enjoys "getting into the old man's hollow" in the Sunshine, as if he were being tucked in by his father. Similarly, seeing Nelson through the window of his parents' home projects Rabbit back into the past, as if he were watching himself as a two-year-old child. The window frames his perception like a movie screen, and again Rabbit is a spectator, somehow removed from the world around him.

Therein lies the central paradox of Updike's novel, introduced in all its complexity in this lengthy opening section. Rabbit feels trapped by his environment, and yet he seems to remain aloof from it. Since Updike relentlessly writes from the vantage point of Rabbit's psyche, sometimes even going so far as to indulge in the stream-of-consciousness style of his idol James Joyce, the characters and places that surround the protagonist take on an almost ethereal quality, as if it were all a dream of Rabbit's. The use of the present tense heightens this effect by blurring the boundaries between incidents and their temporal spans, by gliding over gaps in time, and by uniting everything in a sort of continuum. The road itself seems the best metaphor for the narrative: a road down which Rabbit knows he must go, but whose destination he cannot ascertain or predict.

Nonetheless, it is worth examining what, exactly, Rabbit's "world" consists of. Updike's novel, published in 1960, is often interpreted as an indictment of the fifties - not middle-class life in general, but middle-class life in the Eisenhower era. Rabbit's job reflects the growing prevalence of door-to-door salesmanship in that decade, his suburban home recalls the boom in suburbia, and his high school star status is indicative of the hero worship of student athletes that reached a fever pitch in those years. This world is a solidly middle-class one; hunger is never an issue, but happiness certainly is. When we first see Janice she is watching a Mouseketeers special on TV. Ironically, Updike uses this tacky show to segue into the theme of religion that is so crucial to the later parts of his novel.

The "big Mouseketeer", Jimmy, appears on the set and says: "[B]e yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent." He seems to be speaking to Rabbit directly, but what does he really mean? Should Rabbit have stuck with basketball? What is he doing in a mediocre marriage, selling useless products? Updike writes, "Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God's name makes them feel guilty." That "God's name" is spoken for the first time in the novel by a character on a TV show seems sadly appropriate.

And yet Updike does not use Rabbit's plight merely to excoriate religion. Through the complex persona of Jack Eccles, introduced later in the novel, and through Rabbit's own wrestling with his faith, Updike suggests, even here, that the specter or idea of "God" may be both a boon and a curse for his characters: it represents something higher than their dull existence, something to which they can aspire, but it may indeed offer false hope. Certainly the prevailing mood of this opening section is gloomy: besides a fleeting feeling of elation during the basketball game, Rabbit is upset, disappointed, frustrated, or resentful for much of the novel. Even his rebellious drive out of Mt. Judge is a failure. That the return trip is so easy suggests that there is an indiscernible force that binds Rabbit to his city, if not to his "home." With this in mind, the structure of the novel - primarily composed of comings and goings, of Rabbit's repeated attempts to leave and his repeated returns - comes into focus as an endless cycle. That image - of a loop from which Rabbit cannot hope to break free - is evident here in the novel's beginning, and is, to say the least, depressing.

Summary

Rabbit, having fallen asleep, is awoken by the sounds of card-playing and drinking from down below. A moment later, Tothero enters the room, beckoning him to get out of bed. The old man is in a markedly different mood now: he is wild, energetic, and perhaps a little inebriated. He declares that it is six o'clock, and that he wants Rabbit to join him for dinner in Brewer with two girls. He talks incessantly about one of them, trying to convey just how great she is. When Rabbit brings up the subject of Janice, Tothero tells him not to think about "mutts" like her, displaying a shockingly different attitude towards her than he did earlier.

Tothero brings Rabbit downstairs into the body shop of the Sunshine, where his friends are gathered. He proudly introduces Rabbit to them as his greatest athlete. Tothero and Rabbit take Rabbit's car to meet up with the girls in Brewer: Ruth Leonard and Margaret Kosko, the one who Tothero praised earlier. To Rabbit's dismay, Margaret appears to be "just another Janice"; Ruth, though fatter than Margaret, attracts him more, although perhaps only because she represents something new, something different. Together the foursome enters a Chinese restaurant, formerly a French eatery. It turns out that Ruth knows of Rabbit, since they graduated high school the same year - 1951 - and that their school's basketball teams were competitors. The name of one of Rabbit's teammates, Ronnie Harrison, is also mentioned; it seems that Ruth knows him, but she refuses to answer Rabbit's questions about the exact nature of her relationship with him.

The four order drinks. Tothero insists on getting chopsticks; only Margaret holds onto her silverware. Rabbit remembers the Chinese food he ate in Texas while in the Army, and is disappointed to find that the chopsticks here are plastic. In the meantime, he converses with Ruth and finds that she by turns irritates and intrigues him. For example, she annoys him by loudly referring to Tothero as a "bum." Rabbit defends Tothero as a great coach, leading Ruth to dismiss the role of a coach altogether. As a result, Tothero himself enters the conversation, explaining that a coach's function is to develop the "three tools we are given in life": the head, the body, and the heart. At the same time, Tothero insists that all he gave Rabbit was the will to win, that Rabbit was already a great player when he first joined the team. This may be false modesty, but Tothero's words inspire Rabbit to begin reminiscing once again - this time about a game he played at Oriole High during which he felt he "could do anything." All his shots were perfect, and he was filled with a sense of youthful vigor and power. No one at the table, however, is much impressed by Rabbit's account; they do not seem to understand what the game meant to him, or what it still means to him.

Later in the meal, Tothero refers to Margaret as a "tramp." The word enrages her, and she promptly slaps him. Tothero takes it as a joke, but he knows the party is over. He gets up to leave with Margaret and asks Rabbit if he can use his car. Rabbit politely refuses, and is left in the eatery with Ruth. Rabbit and Ruth begin talking about how "dumb" Margaret is. Ruth insists that Tothero enjoys being slapped by her, a claim that Rabbit seems to disapprove of, though he regretfully notes that his former coach is indeed in "sad shape." Ruth, who is a little on the plump side, is sensitive about her weight, but Rabbit makes sure to tell her that she is not fat, but rather "perfectly proportioned." Whether or not he believes this is perhaps beside the point: he is clearly attracted to her, and his attraction only grows as the time passes. He mentions that he is married, then adds: "Well, I was. Still am." He explains that he thinks he's left Janice. Ruth then reveals more of her own background. We learn that she lives alone in an apartment: her former roommate left, and she now has to pay the $110/month rent on her own. What is more, she does not have a job. Rabbit gives her fifteen dollars to help her out, which she takes without question; he also pays for everyone's meal.

Rabbit and Ruth leave the restaurant and walk through the nighttime streets of Brewer. She is treating him coldly now, and Rabbit remembers the prostitute in Texas who "hadn't meant her half." He feels something similar has occurred with Ruth, that "she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas." Ruth even goes so far as to call Rabbit a "pig." He feels compelled to ask her: "Didn't you kind of like me in the restaurant?" He adds that he had tried to make Tothero feel good by telling him how great a coach he was. Ruth responds that Rabbit had only seemed to be talking about how great he was.

The two wind up at Ruth's apartment, where Rabbit embraces her forcefully by the doorway. His aggressiveness act scares her, and she tells him to leave. He pleads with her not to send him away, explaining that he's been full of desire for her all night, that he couldn't help it. She gives in, and appears to agree to sleep with him. That is as far as the agreement goes, however. Ruth tells Rabbit to wait for her by the bed while she undresses, but he insists on undressing her himself. She wants to use a contraceptive, but Rabbit asks her not to, and refuses to wear a condom. Ruth reluctantly gives in to his demands. When she goes to the bathroom to urinate, Rabbit watches her through the opened door and suddenly remembers how he and Janice have been toilet-training Nelson. He notes how tidy Ruth is in the act.

The would-be lovers get into bed. Through the window, the only source of light in the room, Rabbit can see a church. He seems at this moment overwhelmed by Ruth's beauty. Although she continually refers to herself as plump, the darkness hides her faults and helps create of her "beauty's home image." But Rabbit's demands continue. He wants to wash the makeup off her face, and when she objects, he pleads: "I just love you too much." She remains cold with him, acquiescing to his requests but maintaining that this is strictly a one-night fling. Rabbit, on the other hand, goes so far as to allude to his desire to marry her. He seems to be head over heels in love with her.

When he scrubs Ruth's face, however, something changes. Suddenly, her face is "not pretty." As Updike notes, "he makes love to her as he would to his wife." The foreplay is a sad affair, but once the intercourse is underway, Rabbit feels his spirits lifting, his "love and pride" reviving. These happy feelings do not last long, however: the orgasm ushers in a new round of sadness, which Ruth seems to sense as well. She goes to the bathroom to wash, an activity that "repels" Rabbit. He feels it is "insulting" how women "wash away men's dirt." Soon enough, however, he falls asleep.

Analysis

The first question that comes to mind when reading this section of the novel concerns Tothero: why has he changed? In the first glimpses Updike offers the reader of Rabbit's former coach, he appears to be a father figure, scolding Rabbit for his treatment of his wife but nonetheless willing to lend a helping hand. The reference to the "scandal" that resulted in his dismissal from the high school is the only obvious blemish on his persona. After he begins drinking, however, he freely calls Janice a mutt and seems intent on using Rabbit to relive his own adolescence. In other words, the benevolent father-son relationship seems to have been abandoned. Tothero would now like to maintain the illusion that he and Rabbit are the same age, at least figuratively speaking - brothers or best friends, out to paint the town red. It is easy to forget that he is a married man, chasing after younger women without a hint of remorse.

That said, Updike refuses to paint any character with a single brush. Tothero's underlying sadness is palpable in the scene at the restaurant, where he seems beholden to Margaret - infatuated with a woman who clearly does not respect him in the slightest. Ruth herself is cruel to Tothero, and Rabbit gains our sympathy by leaping to the older man's defense. Later, however, that sympathy is dramatically undercut when Rabbit uses his defense of Tothero as evidence of why Ruth should like him: "Didn't you kind of like me in the restaurant?...The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?" The reader's allegiances thus fluctuate back and forth throughout this section, recalling Rabbit's own state of mind.

The dynamics in the restaurant point again to the cinema as a prime influence on Updike's writing. He describes actions in an almost bullet-point fashion, refusing to linger over them. Consider the following sentence: "Margaret hits [Tothero]: her hand flies up from the table and across her body into his mouth, flat, but without a slapping noise." The writing is breathless, hurried, and yet tremendously precise. The mood at the table has shifted dramatically, but that sentence is the only description Updike offers of the moment itself. These sudden crisis points, in which a social dynamic is irrevocably altered, recall the cinema of John Cassavetes, who, in his excoriating examinations of fifties and sixties middle-class American life, dwelled on the strange things that can occur when people are gathered together at a meal or party. Faces (1968), though released eight years after Rabbit, Run, seems to bear the imprint of Updike's style, just as Rabbit, Run suggests, in its treatment of time and incident, the urban chaos and frantic search for love found in Shadows (1960).

Ruth and Margaret's characters are suggestive of prostitutes, and indeed, Rabbit will later confront Ruth about her past as a "whore." Mainly, however, the women remain enigmas here, perceived strictly through Rabbit's gaze - a gaze that obsessively pores over every detail of the female body. Only a few pages into the novel, Rabbit notices, when looking at his wife, that "with the tiny addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth has become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it." In this section, his eyes are continually locked on Ruth, who he finds at turns beautiful and plain. The most glaring instance of this highly subjective masculine gaze constructing the object of the "woman" comes when Rabbit scrubs the makeup off of Ruth's face: "Her wet face, relaxed into slabs, is not pretty; the thick lips, torn from most of their paint, are the pale rims of a loose hole."

Rabbit's love for Ruth is likewise prone to fluctuation. Does he genuinely care for her, or is he merely itching to bed her? Updike suggests that Rabbit's drive may be carnal, but that it does involve deep-seated feelings - a need to attach himself to someone, to truly bond with another living person. "He clings there," Updike writes, "crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her crotch he wants, not the machine; but her, her." What follows is the kind of exacting writing that stirred controversy when Rabbit, Run was first published - an unflinching and exceedingly graphic portrayal of the act of sex. Updike constantly relates this act to the emotions that guide it: the foreplay reminds Rabbit of his wife; there is "something sad in the capture," and the moment of release betrays an underlying despair: "Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little price leaves you with nothing."

Throughout the scene in Ruth's apartment, the specter of Rabbit's abandoned marriage looms. When Ruth urinates, Rabbit remembers toilet-training Nelson; during foreplay, Rabbit recalls that "Janice needed coaxing" and that "he would begin by rubbing her back." Even more important, however, seems to be Rabbit's yearning for something ineffable, perhaps spiritual. It is no coincidence that Ruth and Rabbit make love by a window that looks out on a church. Updike's point is not simply one of moral reprobation: it is a suggestion that the church and what it represents is not too far from what Rabbit is seeking in his life - some kind of meaning. Thus, when Updike writes that "as they [Rabbit and Ruth] deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh," he is perhaps alluding to Rabbit's need to aspire to the "impossible." Thus, the act of love and the search for God are two sides of the same coin, and Rabbit's apparently shallow sexual adventure is also a spiritual one.

Summary

Rabbit, asleep in Ruth's bed, has a strange dream. In it, he is seated with his family at a table. A girl opens the wood icebox near them, and Rabbit stares into the "square cave where the cake of ice sits." His mother promptly tells him to close the icebox. He says that it wasn't him who opened it, and points his finger at the girl. His mother replies that she knows her "good boy wouldn't hurt anyone." She then proceeds to viciously scold the girl, who we learn is in fact Janice. Rabbit tries to defend his wife, and is soon left alone at the table with her. Janice is crying. Rabbit attempts to console her, but the dream comes to a nightmarish climax when her face begins to peel off and fall into his hands.

Rabbit wakes up. It is morning. He looks out the window at the church, and is filled with happiness at the idea of these people giving away their Sunday mornings to go to mass and pray. He is even inspired to quickly pray for Ruth, Janice, Nelson, his parents, the Springers, Janice's unborn baby, and his own forgiveness; he prays for God to forgive Tothero and "all the others." Soon afterward he gets into an argument with Ruth, who does not believe in God. His insistence on his belief, however, seems to soften her attitude towards him. When he finally makes her laugh, he asks her why she likes him. She responds, quite genuinely it seems, "'Cause you haven't given up. 'Cause in your stupid way you're still fighting." For whatever reason, Rabbit loves hearing these words.

He suggests that Ruth cook lunch for them, since she has mentioned how much she loves cooking. He heads to the nearby store to buy the necessary items. When the meal is ready, Rabbit notes to himself that Ruth's cooking is superior to Janice's. He seems to want to be with her; for him this relationship is no fly-by affair. Still, she holds back, and Rabbit is compelled to assure her, when he says he intends to return to his apartment to grab clothes, that the clothes are just "for tonight." He also wants to return the car to his wife, since it seems only fair to him: her father, a used-car dealer, originally sold them the car at a big discount.

When Rabbit enters his home, he is relieved to find that nobody is there. His wife and son have cleared out. He grabs clothes, sets down the keys, and hurriedly exits, forgetting his toothbrush and razor in his rush to escape. On the way out, Rabbit runs into an elderly neighbor, Miss Arndt, who is coming back from church. Then a young minister, Mr. Jack Eccles, appears driving a green car, and insists that he give Rabbit a lift. Rabbit gives in, and the two chat. Eccles is a neighborhood reverend and has been consulting the Springers since Rabbit's departure. He tells Rabbit about Janice, how worried she had been when Rabbit didn't return; how she had called the Angstroms; how Rabbit's father brought Nelson to her, tried to reassure her, and went out looking for his son; how Janice didn't call her own parents until two in the morning; how her mother had subsequently called Eccles. This extended narrative does not seem to greatly affect Rabbit, who claims that he has no plan, and is playing the whole thing "by ear." He tries to explain why he left, that he had felt glued in by Janice's petty demands, that her request for him to buy her a pack of cigarettes was the last straw, and that it was partly realizing just how easy it was to leave that prompted him to do so. When Eccles asks him why he returned from West Virginia, Rabbit can only say that "it seemed safer to be in a place I know."

After arguing that God cannot possibly want Rabbit to make his wife suffer, Eccles asks Rabbit to play golf with him. Rabbit agrees, leaves Eccles' car, and makes his way back to Ruth's place. There he finds that Ruth has showered; her smell strikes him, as does her clean appearance. Again, he seems filled with affection for her. The two go for a walk to the top of Mt. Judge, where Rabbit asks Ruth, out of the blue: "Were you really a whore?" She answers: "Are you really a rat?" He says: "In a way."

That Tuesday, Rabbit visits Eccles' place. He is greeted by a woman who immediately seems a little suspicious of him. She turns out to be Jack's wife, Lucy Eccles. The family has two daughters: Joyce, who is three years old, and Bonnie, who is one. Lucy is cold and glib, saying things like, "I thought that brat was asleep." Her attitude shocks Rabbit, who can't imagine that a minister's wife would dislike her children. She, in turn, knows about Rabbit's troubles with his wife. When she turns to address her husband, who has been upstairs in bed, Rabbit slaps her bottom. She glares at him, but says nothing. When Jack comes down the stairs, Rabbit expects Lucy to tell her husband. The revelation will cast Rabbit out of the house, and out of Jack's life, forever - a prospect to which Rabbit is indifferent. Indeed, he can't help but wonder why he's even here in the first place.

Lucy, however, does not tell Jack anything. Her husband seems to be getting on her nerves, which may explain her silence. Moreover, the house is in chaos, with Joyce appearing on the stairs, yelling to her father that there is a lion in her room. He has been reading his kids the vivid Belloc poetry of which he is particularly fond, and of which Lucy sharply disapproves. After taking care of Joyce, Jack reassures his wife that golfing with Rabbit is "work" - that it's the best way to get him to talk. Rabbit is not intended to hear this exchange, but he does.

Rabbit and Jack leave in Jack's car, heading to the Chestnut Grove Golf Course. On the way there, Jack tries to get Rabbit to open up to him, but Rabbit evades his every move. Jack tells Rabbit that Janice seems happy to be with her parents again (though Rabbit knows she dislikes them, particularly her mother), and that when he went to visit her she was with a friend named Peggy Fosnacht. The name reminds Rabbit of "Fosnacht Day," a sort of unofficial holiday in his childhood during which the key was to not be the last to descend downstairs. Musing to himself, Rabbit recalls that his grandfather would wait upstairs until little Harry Angstrom came down first, just so that the boy wouldn't be the "Fosnacht."

Jack and Rabbit's discussion then moves on to the subject of religion. Rabbit asks Jack whether he believes in Hell, to which the minister replies that he believes in Hell as Jesus described it, as a separation from God. Rabbit responds, "Well then we're all more or less in it." Jack objects to this notion, arguing that people do not live in "outer darkness" - i.e. complete separation - but rather "inner darkness." The conversation gives Rabbit faith in his newfound friendship with Jack; he feels positively excited by their rapport. Jack offers him a job gardening for a parishioner of his, Mrs. Horace Smith, and then reveals that he knows of Ruth Leonard.

Rabbit's excitement evaporates as soon as the two men begin playing golf. Rabbit is terrible, and though Jack is not much better, the minister treats him patronizingly. During the course of their game, Rabbit tries to make sense of the sport, obsessively imagining all of the objects and settings standing in for the people in his life: the irons are Janice, the three-wood is Ruth, the bush is his mother, the rainy sky is his grandfather, the scruff is Texas (where he met the prostitute), and the hole is his "home." Finally the subject of Janice comes up again, and Rabbit mentions that she probably would have never married him if she hadn't so much wanted to leave her parents. Eccles notes that Rabbit is obviously still very involved with her and asks him point-blank why he left. All Rabbit can say is that "there was this thing that wasn't there." Jack insists on knowing what "this thing" means. Rabbit dislikes the question, objecting to the idea that Jack, a preacher, a man who sells answers to others as if he knows all, really wants to be told "that it is there, that he's not lying to all those people every Sunday." When Rabbit refuses to answer, Eccles calls him "monstrously selfish" and a "coward." As if in response, Rabbit finally makes a clean hit: the ball rolls into the hole, and Rabbit turns to Eccles with a smile and the words: "That's it."

Analysis

Rabbit's dream foreshadows an encounter Eccles will later have with Mrs. Angstrom, during which the woman will reveal just how much she dislikes, even despises, Janice. The girl is clearly a victim, and Rabbit's guilt at having abandoned such a helpless, fragile, crying creature permeates the dream. As soon as he awakens, however, that guilt is replaced by the happier strains of a burgeoning devoutness. The church reappears - a view that Ruth had called "dismal" the previous night, and which now seems glorious to Rabbit.

It is worth carefully examining exactly what Rabbit's impromptu prayer consists of: "Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen." The line "take me down the way" is another example of the use of the road or path as a motif in the novel: Rabbit's drive away from Mt. Judge and his climactic run down the empty road near the novel's close serve as bookends to a narrative that is largely built out of movement and the desire to know where one is headed.

It is not coincidental that this theme figures so importantly in a novel that portrays a society governed by automobiles. That society is the American middle-class in the fifties, a time when, for the first time in the country's history, nearly every family owned a car. Janice's father is a used-car salesman, and Rabbit intends to use the Ford Mr. Springer sold to them as a token of repentance. That Ford is contrasted with the shiny green Buick Eccles drives - a garish color that seems, much like Eccles' home, ill-suited to a serious minister: "it [the home] looks too cheerful to be right; Rabbit thinks of ministers as living in black shingled castles."

The introduction of Eccles helps underscore the importance of religion in the narrative, and Christianity in particular. Rabbit seems to be echoing the words of Jimmy, the Mouseketeer, when he tries to explain his malaise to Jack in the car: "I once played a game real well. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate." This conversation is echoed by the discussion during the trip to the golf course a day later, when Rabbit and Jack discuss Hell. Updike uses the rhyme effect created by these paired conversations to both point to the development of the friendship between Rabbit and Jack and to suggest its futility. Though the characters are in a moving vehicle on both occasions, the dialogue creates a sense of immobility - neither participant can truly change. The golf course serves as something akin to a cruel joke in this regard, reminding the reader that the "excitement" Rabbit feels at finding a new friend so quickly can just as easily dissolve into muted hostility. The absurdity of the game, with Rabbit frantically swinging and Jack, himself a lousy player, offering pointers, reflects the very absurdity of these men's lives.

And yet life seems precious to Rabbit, insofar as he constantly muses on the prospect of death. Jack mentions off-hand that he has been busy with a death in the neighborhood lately, a casual remark that resurfaces in Rabbit's consciousness hours later, when he is standing atop the summit of Mt. Judge with Ruth, gazing out across the city of Brewer. In a remarkable passage, Updike describes Rabbit's realization that while he looks over the town, "someone is dying." The thought arises simply from an understanding of "percentages"; what it amounts to, however, is something far deeper: "Someone in some house along these streets, if not this minute then the next, dies; and in that suddenly stone chest the heart of this flat prostrate rose seems to him to be." Death emerges as the "heart" and soul of the city to Rabbit. Just as the act of love in Ruth's apartment reflected a need for God, the notion of death now suggests a spirituality that lies just out of reach. "His day had been bothered by God," Updike writes. "Ruth mocking, Eccles blinking - why did they teach you such things if no one believed them? It seems plain, standing here, that if there is this floor there is a ceiling, that the true space in which we live is upward space."

Summary

Rabbit has taken the gardening job Jack offered him, even though he's never gardened before and the pay is low. He seems to derive great pleasure from the work, loving the simplicity of it all, and even the fact that he doesn't have to cut his fingernails if he doesn't want to. The elderly Mrs. Smith is a widow, and often refers to her late husband, Horace, as "Harry". The garden was his more than hers, and she walks through it with Rabbit on her arm, reminiscing about her husband and his love of gardening. We learn that she was a farmer's daughter, and that she disapproves of the rhododendrons that are scattered throughout the garden: according to her, the flowers are uncertain in color, "a mealymouthed plant." Mrs. Smith "would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa." Nonetheless, when Mrs. Smith and Rabbit happen upon a small rhododendron in one corner, she launches into a story about having to go to New York City to get it years ago, because there was only one nursery in England that had it in stock. The shipment had cost two hundred dollars. This memory leads to recollections about the Depression and World War II, in which Mrs. Smith's son perished. She is surprised to find that Rabbit remembers the war, but, as he says, he was "pretty old." This revelation only serves to strengthen his friendship with Mrs. Smith; the old lady is obviously quite fond of him, and uses him as a welcome springboard for her own flights of recollection.

On Memorial Day, Rabbit and Ruth go to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. Two months have passed since Rabbit left Janice and Nelson. Ruth has gotten a job as a stenographer with an insurance company. Rabbit watches Ruth swim, admiring her body even though he can't help but notice two sixteen-year-old girls nearby. In what seems like quite a blow to him, Ruth treats him with a degree of contempt. After she asserts that Mrs. Smith loves him, she is irritated by his smugness when he claims that he is simply "lovable", that he gives "people faith", and that "Eccles has told him this."

In a surprising move, Updike shifts the narrative to Ruth's perspective, as if in an attempt to better understand the source of her anger. To Ruth, it seems that Rabbit has no compunction about having abandoned his wife and child. She thinks of his "mildness" and complacency, and this reflection leads her to remember the other men in her life, the men of her past. She has made love to married men before, often because "they wanted some business their wives wouldn't give." Is she a "whore" after all?

She recalls her childhood, and how her first sexual encounter was with Ronnie Harrison, Rabbit's former teammate. Throughout high school she was ceaselessly surprised by how ashamed the boys were of their genitalia, how much they seemed to yearn for a girl's approval, and how "ugly" they thought themselves to be. There is something sad but also sweetly nostalgic in her remembrances. Before long, however, her thoughts drift back to Rabbit and his smugness. She asks him if he thinks he will have to pay a price for his actions. He answers that, by leaving Janice, he discovered "if you have the guts to be yourself...other people'll pay the price."

In the meantime, Jack Eccles continues to deal with the effects of those actions. He has been playing golf regularly with Rabbit, and is still trying to help him find the way. What exactly the way is, however, he seems unsure of. One day, he visits the Springers and is relieved to find that Janice is not there: she has gone out with Peggy Fosnacht to see a matinee of Some Like It Hot. He sits on the porch and talks with Mrs. Springer, to whom he takes an immediate dislike; she treats him coldly, sarcastically talking about the frequency of his golfing and forcing him to defend his pastime. She makes no secret of her own anger at Rabbit; she seems to think precious little of Harry Angstrom, in contrast to Mrs. Smith, and her comments prompt Jack to defend the man. He tells her that he still thinks Rabbit will return, though he does not actually believe his own words.

Jack watches Nelson in the yard, playing with Peggy Fosnacht's son Billy. Billy steals Nelson's truck, bringing Rabbit's boy to tears. Mrs. Springer refers to Nelson as a "sissy" and explains to Jack that he got that quality from his father, who is also spoiled. Jack objects to this, pointing out that Billy was in fact the one who stole, and that Nelson was only yearning for what was rightfully his. Mrs. Springer interprets this defense as a way of saying that what has happened to her daughter's marriage is "Janice's fault." She then describes the hurtful gossip that has arisen concerning the situation, and mentions that a woman recently told her that if Janice couldn't keep Rabbit she had no right to him at all. While Nelson and Billy begin to play with a dog, Mrs. Springer says that she would like to involve the police, a notion to which Jack initially objects and later agrees. There is, however, one problem with this plan: Mr. Springer has already expressed his disapproval of the idea. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack continues to watch Nelson - now "the leader" of the two children, it seems. Jack sees himself in the Angstrom boy, in the way that he is "always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped." He senses that the dog will react viciously to the boys' teasing, and sure enough, it snaps back, scaring Nelson to tears.

After trying to comfort Nelson, Jack leaves and heads to the Angstroms. There he talks with Mrs. Mary Angstrom, who he notes is a "humorist", full of epigrams and quips. Just as Mrs. Springer was contemptuous of Rabbit, so Mrs. Angstrom is contemptuous of Janice, saying that she never approved of the girl, that the young woman has always had Rabbit wrapped around her finger, that she ceaselessly manipulates him, and that she let herself get pregnant when he was twenty-one in order to force him into marriage. At the same time, Mrs. Angstrom seems dismissive of her son, labeling him "soft" - like her husband. She compares him to his sister Miriam, and relates how back when Rabbit was twelve, he was always stricken with fear for the girl's safety when the family would walk out by the quarry. Miriam, Mrs. Angstrom explains, will never "marry out of pity like poor Hassy and then have all the world jump on him for trying to get out."

Mr. Angstrom arrives. He is of a very different opinion than his wife. He is bitterly angry at Rabbit, claiming that the others simply cannot understand the depths of his wrongdoing because they weren't with Janice the day it happened. Mr. Angstrom had to comfort her and search the town for Rabbit himself, and, having seen Janice's face that afternoon, he cannot be on his son's side. Both parents ponder aloud what happened to their son. They recall how clean, meticulous, determined, and ambitious Rabbit once was - particularly when it came to basketball. Mr. Angstrom decries what he has become: "the worst kind of Brewer bum." He and his wife note that his time in the Army in Texas seemed to permanently alter Rabbit for the worse, that upon returning the young man appeared only interested in "chasing ass." Finally, Mrs. Angstrom asserts that Janice has not let Rabbit "slip away." She maintains control of the situation, and will no doubt "have him back" - an outcome that Mrs. Angstrom clearly does not find pleasant. Mr. Angstrom, however, sharply disagrees, claiming that Rabbit will "slide deeper and deeper now until we might as well forget him." Indeed, he feels sick just thinking about what his son has done. This last comment makes Mrs. Angstrom cry - a change in her wisecracking and dominant demeanor that surprises Jack.

The minister spots Miriam, now an adolescent, before leaving the house, and notes to himself how beautiful she is. He drives to the rectory of Fritz Kruppenbach, a crusty old man who has been Mt. Judge's Lutheran minister for twenty-seven years. Although Jack does not much care for Fritz, he feels compelled to communicate the problem with Rabbit to him. He hopes to finally hear some good advice, since the visits to both sets of parents have not been very fruitful in that regard. Instead of offering Jack counsel, however, Kruppenbach harangues him for confusing religion with psychology, chasing petty problems, trying to be a personal counselor, and not spending more time simply praying to God. His speech infuriates Jack, who refuses Fritz's request that he pray right then and there and promptly leaves, fuming. All this time Jack has been hoping to find someone who agrees with his belief that Rabbit can be saved. At this moment, however, he wonders if he himself might not be the one who needs saving. Though he dismisses Fritz's "insane spiel", something inside him seems to tell him that the old man just might be right.

Analysis

For the first time in the novel, Updike switches the narrative's point of view: a move that strikes the reader as abrupt and surprising. In the majority of novels that feature shifting perspectives between various characters, the device is introduced early on. In Rabbit, Run, however, Updike waits nearly one hundred and fifty pages (depending, of course, on the edition). Moreover, the switch itself is not underlined in any dramatic way, by a section break or anything of the sort; instead, Updike seems intent on providing as smooth a transition as possible from one psyche to the other.

Ruth's eyes are the catalyst for the narrative's shift to her perspective. They are bloodshot from the swimming pool water, and Rabbit looks into them, observing them closely as he so often pores over every part of Ruth's body with his gaze: "These aren't the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale disks like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instincts, disturbs him." There a new paragraph begins, and Ruth proceeds to "sing" for us the truth about Rabbit. Note how Updike establishes the first sentence of Ruth's perspective as a sort of skewed rhyme, creating a faulty couplet with the former line: "These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to hide the tears, thinking, That's one of the signs, crying so easily." "Sting" nearly rhymes with both "singing" and "instincts", and just as Rabbit is positioned as the object of a clause rather than its subject ("disturbs him"), so do Ruth's eyes at first render her a passive object ("these eyes sting her").

One might surmise that the intrusion of Ruth's perspective in this section results from a certain hesitation on Updike's part concerning Rabbit as sole protagonist, for it is doubtless that Rabbit's apparent lack of remorse over his actions severely limits the reader's compassion for him. We have been in his head, so to speak, for half of the novel, and have perhaps begun to chafe under the amorality of his character and the size of his ego. A criticism frequently thrown at Rabbit, Run when it was first published was that Rabbit does not earn our affection. Though Updike's strategy throughout the novel seems to be to belie the assumption that a novel must feature conventionally "likable" characters, he does appear to predict that very critique by positioning Ruth as, in a sense, a critic herself.

For the first time, Rabbit is no longer spectator: he is spectacle. Intriguingly, Ruth comes nowhere close to matching Rabbit's obsessive gaze; she bypasses the physical altogether, musing on Rabbit's flawed character and on her own past. The writing grows more and more stylized, eschewing punctuation conventions in order to achieve a stream-of-consciousness effect. It is curious that throughout our journey with Rabbit thus far, we have never been quite as "close" to him as we are now to Ruth: Updike even uses the first-person pronoun in the following, crucial passage: "For the damnedest thing about that minister [Eccles] was that, before, Rabbit at least had the idea that he was acting wrong but with him he's got the idea he's Jesus Christ out to save the world just by doing whatever comes into his head. I'd like to get hold of the bishop or whoever and tell him that minister of his is a menace."

What is even more interesting than content of that passage is Updike's decision to switch to Eccles' perspective two paragraphs later. Instead of returning to Rabbit, we jump to the second object of Ruth's dismay: "that minister." We may agree with Ruth's dismissal of him, for until now Eccles has been an almost comical character, using Rabbit, it would seem, as an excuse to play golf and feel good about himself. The pages that follow undercut this evaluation of him. We learn that Eccles does genuinely feel for Rabbit and that he is wracked by uncertainty and even guilt. Why exactly he feels compelled to "save" Rabbit is never completely revealed, but his need to do so is palpable. As if in a picaresque, we follow Eccles from one encounter to the other, each of which disheartens him further. The climactic speech by Fritz Kruppenbach underlines the crisis of faith Eccles is experiencing. Try as he may to dismiss the "insane spiel", Eccles cannot quite shake it off: "His depression is so deep that he tries to gouge it deeper by telling himself He's right, he's right and thus springing tears and purging himself, however absurdly, above the perfect green circle of the Buick steering wheel. But he can't cry; he's parched. His shame and failure hang downward in him heavy but fruitless."

This section, then, is nothing less than a three-part rumination on loss and failure, using three separate characters and the ineffable connections that bind them - the look of an eye, a stray thought passing through the mind: a sort of makeshift trinity through which Updike seeks to present humanity in all its flaws and foibles. The need for connection pervades everything. It is perhaps his desire to both befriend Rabbit and feel superior to him that drives Eccles' quest. The golf games become reminders of what Rabbit can do for Jack: "Their rapport at moments attains for Eccles a pitch of pleasure, a harmless ecstasy, that makes the world with its endless circumstantiality seem remote and spherical and green."

Summary

One night, Rabbit and Ruth go out to Club Castanet, an establishment on the south side of Brewer. Rabbit is unhappy at the club: time has passed, and he is growing uneasy about his relationship with Ruth. She seems "heavy" to him now. Try as he may, he cannot shake off his ideas about her sordid past, and there is something that seems to be eating her; he remains paranoid that she doesn't think much of him.

At the club, Rabbit and Ruth join Ronnie Harrison and Margaret.

Reacquainting himself with his former high school teammate is not a pleasant experience for Rabbit; he is annoyed by Ronnie's presence and disturbed that Margaret isn't with Tothero, and feels competitive about Ronnie's rapport with Ruth. Hardly any time passes before Ronnie and Ruth begin reminiscing about a drive they once made to Atlantic City with another sex-crazed couple. Soon enough, the talk shifts to basketball. Ronnie, with more than a hint of jeering in his voice, calls Rabbit "the great Angstrom" and "the old Master." When the subject of Tothero comes up - whom Margaret claims didn't join them because he wasn't feeling well - Ronnie refers to the coach as "the man who made us immortal." Rabbit is quick to interject: "Me, you mean...You were nothing."

The gauntlet is thus thrown down. Rabbit makes no secret of his hostility, and Ronnie, for his part, claims that Tothero once confided to him that Rabbit was not a team player. Rabbit points out Ronnie's two fake teeth - from a football injury - and claims that they stand out like sore thumbs. Just when the rivalry reaches its pitch, however, Rabbit's sister Miriam appears in the club with a young man on her arm. Rabbit, distressed by the sight, approaches her and asks her what she is doing in such a seedy place. Confronted by Miriam's companion, Rabbit forcefully shoves him away and walks brusquely off. He can hear the young man tell Miriam: "He's in love with you."

Rabbit leaves Club Castanet with Ruth, barraging her with questions about Ronnie. Did they have sex? She says they did. He asks her about her past. She says: "I took some money. I told you." He asks her if she gave oral sex to the guys in her life. She says she did. This piece of information inspires Rabbit to ask Ruth to perform fellatio on him. At this point, Updike again switches to Ruth's perspective. Although she is close to fed up with Rabbit and prefers Ronnie because he isn't under the impression that he's "the greatest thing that ever was," she decides to appease her man, and gives him oral sex in her apartment.

We then jump to Lucy Eccles' perspective. She is alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return home. She has been waiting for hours. She muses on her marriage and the effect of religion on Jack: now, the gaiety she used to love in him is "spent on other people." Finally Jack shows up, but expresses little concern for his wife's malaise. It turns out he was at drugstore all this time, chatting with kids, as he is so fond of doing. This angers Lucy even more; again, it seems apparent that Jack cares more for his parishioners than for his own family. Jack, for his part, has a lead on the Rabbit situation - a phone number that Peggy Fosnacht gave him. He dials it, and to his relief Rabbit picks up. Jack tells him that Janice has gone into labor, and Rabbit immediately decides to go to his wife in the hospital.

We then switch back to Rabbit's perspective as he tells Ruth that he has to go, that his wife is having a baby, but that he'll be back soon. Already he regrets having made Ruth please him; he was "half-hoping" she would refuse his demand. The writing then adopts Ruth's point of view, and we get a further hint of her deeply conflicted feelings. She feels physically sick after the oral sex, and yet yearns for Rabbit. She feels somehow certain that she has lost him to Janice.

Rabbit waits in the hospital, overcome with fear at the thought that Janice or the baby might die. He remembers that Nelson's birth took a painful twelve hours. The Springers pass by him; Mr. Springer says hi, prompting his wife to rail at Rabbit: "If you're sitting there like a buzzard young man hoping she's going to die, you might as well go back to where you've been living because she's been doing fine without you and has been all along." Some time later, the doctor arrives to congratulate Rabbit on "a beautiful little daughter." Rabbit is surprised and even a bit disturbed by the doctor's kindness to him. The man asks Rabbit if it's all right for Janice's mother to see her, a question that strikes Rabbit as bizarre, given what a shameful act he has committed. His guilt is finally weighing down on him, and the last straw, it seems, is the sight of Janice herself: she displays no anger or bitterness whatsoever to him, and is only happy to have him back. He tells her that he loves her and that he'll be back tomorrow, and the reader can sense the honesty in his words.

Rabbit spends the night at Eccles' house, telling the minister that he cannot possibly go back to Ruth's apartment now. The next morning Lucy wakes him and makes him a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Rabbit feels he has begun a new life, but already small details seem to hamper his newfound confidence. He thinks of Ruth when Lucy pours the milk on his Cheerios; he remembers touching Lucy's bottom and decides that she must in fact desire him; on his way out of the house, he gazes at her breasts and then notices her subtly winking at him: "Quick as light. Maybe he imagined it. He turns the knob and retreats down the sunny walk with a murmur in his chest as if a string in there had snapped."

Analysis

Despite the continued use of the shifting perspective and the introduction of a new point of view - that of Lucy Eccles, who is bitter at religion itself and what it has done to her previously happy marriage - this section belongs chiefly to Rabbit and to his new awakening. His obsession with mortality, with the fragility of life itself, is evident when he waits in the hospital, wracked with the fear that his wife or the baby will die. This preoccupation with death seems to have begun with Rabbit's musings atop Mt. Judge while looking over the city of Brewer with Ruth by his side, and culminates in the baby Rebecca's drowning.

If one is to interpret Rabbit as the prime catalyst for all that transpires in the narrative, it might be argued that it is precisely Rabbit's decision to go back to Janice that allows the birth to go smoothly, just as it is his second departure that leads to the baby's death. In other words, his return enables the mother to successfully give life; his parting prompts her to take it away. This interpretation may seem both schematic and anti-feminist, ascribing all the narrative power to Rabbit alone, but it is nonetheless worth considering. Rabbit instinctively objects to any indication that he may be a passive participant in the events that occur around him. When Lucy tells him Eccles is "overjoyed" that Rabbit has decided to return to his family - "It's the first constructive thing he thinks he's done since he came to Mt. Judge" - Rabbit "feels his smile creak." As Updike writes, "This suggestion that he's been managed rubs him the wrong way." Rabbit feels the need to claim his actions for his own, a need that renders his own search for spirituality ambiguous. What, exactly, is he looking for?

"Last night driving home," he tells Lucy, "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." This image precisely mirrors the moment near the novel's end in which Rabbit emerges from the forest and jumps onto the clean, straight road: "He jacks his long legs over the guard fence and straightens up...The asphalt scrapes under his shoes and he seems entered, with the wonderful resonant hollowness of exhaustion, on a new life." Of course, the irony is that this "new life" is no newer than the one he feels he has begun when he awakens in the Eccles household. Rabbit is condemned to continually "start anew" until the act and the expression that describes it lose all meaning. Every new leaf Rabbit turns over - be it his drive out of Mt. Judge early in the novel, his love for Ruth, his return to Janice, his second departure, or his climactic run - only brings him back to where he was before. The myth of Sisyphus looms over these proceedings - the man sentenced to roll a stone up a hill and have it fall back down again and again for all eternity.

The implication of the rhyming effect Updike creates is once again that of a closed loop. From both the world in which he lives and the form of the novel itself, Rabbit is unable to escape. Is Updike suggesting, then, that Rabbit's growing faith in religion is foolhardy - that religion is nothing more than an opiate? When Lucy reckons that "the one good thing if the Russians take over is they'll make religion go extinct," one cannot help but wonder if Updike shares her perspective.

Summary

Rabbit returns to the hospital, where he runs into Marty Tothero's wife. At first, he knows that she is familiar but cannot remember who she is. When she introduces herself as Harriet Tothero, he recalls seeing her once in and a while on the streets when he was still in high school. The students at Mt. Judge High knew of Tothero's tendency to play around, but he was such a clown that the sins didn't seem to stick to him; instead, they accumulated around the image of his wife: "his wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr." Harriet Tothero asks Rabbit if he'll visit Marty, who, it turns out, has suffered two strokes, is incapacitated, and is staying in the same hospital as Janice. She explains it would make Marty "very happy" since he has had so few visitors. Rabbit agrees, but when he goes to see his former coach he finds the experience deeply disturbing. Tothero is unable to move or talk, and Rabbit cannot say much of anything except to tell him about the baby and thank him for his help. Feeling like he has failed both Harriet and Marty, Rabbit crawls over to Janice's room, where he quickly begins bickering yet again with his wife. She has apparently not been paying the rent on their apartment, and it may no longer be available to them. Finally Janice turns on the television, which "makes for a kind of peace" by bringing a stop to the argument. Husband and wife silently watch a crass program on which women tell of the tragedies they have experienced and are awarded money according to how much applause they receive.

After watching the show, Rabbit leaves to see the baby. He is escorted by a female nurse whose body he voyeuristically consumes with his eyes. But then, just when all seems potentially lost, the sight of his beautiful new daughter - whose beauty surprises Rabbit, habituated as he is to the idea that newborn babies tend to be ugly - revives Rabbit's spirits, and he rushes back to Janice intent on naming the girl June, for the month in which she was born. Janice, however, would like to name her Rebecca, after her mother. Rabbit finds himself moved by his wife's willingness to play the part of the loving daughter, and they reach a compromise: the child is named Rebecca June Angstrom.

It turns out that Mr. Springer has in fact been quietly looking after the apartment's rent, as if sure that Rabbit would eventually return, but not wishing to advertise his certainty. He also gets Rabbit a job on his used-car lot while the young man lives with Nelson in the apartment, awaiting Janice's release from the hospital. Rabbit takes his son with him to tell Mrs. Smith that he can no longer work for her. She is friendly as always, but hints that he was all that was keeping her alive the past few months, and that she will not be around when the next set of rhododendrons blossoms.

Next, Rabbit pays a visit to the Springers. Mrs. Springer, still somewhat bitter, tries to pick a fight with him, but his refusal to fight back seems to lead to a kind of mutual understanding and even friendliness between the two. They sit on the porch while she sips iced tea and relates how much she disapproves of Peggy Fosnacht. Her love of Nelson, her affectionate behavior around him - both of which stand in sharp contrast to the attitude she displayed earlier, when Rabbit was still living with Ruth - please Rabbit and endear her to him.

Rabbit's visit to his own parents, however, does not go well at all. His mother, whom he expected to be pleased by her son's return, seems angry with him. What upsets him most of all is her coldness towards Nelson, which he finds unacceptable for a grandmother. Rabbit's favorable talk about the Springers only irritates Mrs. Angstrom further; she seems to be bitter that her son gave in to a family that she has never cared for. Mr. Angstrom is at least kind to Nelson, but "looks at Harry like there isn't anything there."

At night in the apartment, Rabbit grows obsessed with the fear that Nelson will die in his sleep. When Janice finally comes home the following Friday, he becomes fascinated by the sight of her breast-feeding Rebecca and by her new attitude with regards to her own body. She is still shy of her nakedness at times, but she is in general more careless; Rabbit, in turn, regards her as "a bleeding wound" and "worships her."

That Sunday, Rabbit goes to Eccles' church. He feels he owes it to Jack, but also loves the idea of going to mass, of believing, of being one of those churchgoers he observed through the window of Ruth's apartment. Indeed, he feels that he has finally found himself. The sermon, however, is less than impressive: it concerns Christ's conversation with the Devil, and Jack's delivery does not please Rabbit. He winds up staring avidly at the back of Lucy Eccles, intently observing how the light plays with her skin and her hair. She sees him on her way out, and invites him to walk with her and her daughter, Joyce. During the walk, Rabbit contemplates the possibility of "lay[ing] the truth bare" - of telling Lucy that he loves her. But does he love her? The image of Janice's breasts comes to his mind whenever he glances at Lucy's chest. In any case, when she invites him into her house, he tells her he cannot enter, explaining that he has a wife. Lucy is furious, and shuts the door in his face. Rabbit wonders why she has reacted so angrily: is it because he refused her advances, or because he interpreted her invitation as a "proposition"?

Back in his apartment, Rabbit finds himself consumed with lust for Janice. He is itching to bed her, but Rebecca cries ceaselessly, and Janice complains that she has no milk left in her breasts to feed the baby. She and Rabbit quarrel; Janice is piqued that he recommends she have a drink to cool off. That night Rabbit tries making love to her, but after almost allowing him to ejaculate inside her, Janice abruptly tells him: "I'm not your whore, Harry." Rabbit promptly gets out of bed and leaves the apartment, ignoring Janice's pleas for him to stay. In fact, the sight of her weeping only furthers Rabbit's resolve to leave. He doesn't tell her where he's going.

After Rabbit's departure, we stay with Janice, adopting her perspective as she sinks deeper and deeper into despair, waiting in vain for her wayward husband to return. The morning comes; dawn becomes day, and the hours pass. Janice begins drinking - one drink after another, until she is fully inebriated. Her father calls her around eleven in the morning, asking why Rabbit hasn't appeared on the lot. Her mother phones later in the day, and tells Janice that she is worried and that she is coming over. She even suggests that she once thought Rabbit's original abandonment was his fault, but that now she's "not so sure." In a panic, Janice struggles to clean the apartment, and in her rushed attempt to clean Rebecca, who is soaked in urine, she accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub.

Analysis

Almost immediately, Rabbit's calm has begun eroding; he is doomed to remain restless throughout the novel. His eyes and his mind continue to wander. He remembers the vision he shared with his high school classmates of Harriet Tothero, the ill-treated husband of the too-lovable Marty: "His wife appeared to their innocent eyes wreathed in dark flame, a walking martyr." What is important in this particular memory is that the husband - the sinner - remains unsullied by his actions. Rabbit is still unsure of where he stands in regards to Janice, who at first seems to have completely forgiven him but now, in the hospital, treats him more scornfully. Is she the martyr, burdened by her husband's thoughtless crimes? Or is he the victim of her constricting grip on his life?

Though the section opens by suggesting that there is hope for Rabbit and Janice, and though the baby Rebecca is like a beacon of light that illuminates and revives their troubled relationship, the specter of the television set seems to bode ill for their reunion. The show that Rabbit and his wife watch is a disgraceful attempt to turn tragedy into a commodity: the depth of a human's suffering is translated into a numeric value. Rabbit notes that, with all the commercials, "there isn't much room for tragedy left" - a bitingly ironic statement, since it is the very commercialism of the program that is the tragedy. This passage is certainly one of the sharpest indictments Updike offers of the society in which his characters reside.

The church, however, remains a possible savior. Rabbit's joy at the idea of going to mass should not be dismissed as simply misguided hopefulness; here, his yearning for some kind of faith seems, as always, admirable. Unfortunately, the service, perhaps due to its focus on Christ and the Devil, Jack's unimpressive delivery, or Rabbit's incorrigible wandering eye, leads Rabbit down the wrong track once again. The church becomes merely a theater in which Rabbit can consume the spectacle not of God, but of the female body. It is hard to believe that he actually "loves" Lucy: "He always thinks when they meet again he will speak firmly, and tell her he loves her, or something as blunt, and lay the truth bare." But what "truth" does he mean to "lay bare"? (Note that "truth" is described in insidiously sexual terms.) It seems that the notion of loving Lucy is no more than a reaction against his own situation; his desire to escape is confused with love. The reader must then wonder whether the affair with Ruth can be explained in the same way? Did Rabbit ever love her? Updike gives no easy answer to these questions, refusing to offer pat psychological explanations. Since his writing remains so focused on the perspectives of his characters, the ability to weigh and judge that would be offered by the use of the omniscient narrator is more or less absent. Thus it is sensory experience that holds sway, the power of the moment itself, as Virginia Woolf first formulated it in Mrs. Dalloway.

The influence of Virginia Woolf is clear in the following passage, which describes Rabbit's view of Lucy Eccles' back: "Against the dour patchwork of subdued heads, stained glass, yellowing memorial plaques on the wall, and laboriously knobbed and beaded woodwork, her hair and skin and hat glow singly, their differences in tint like the shades of brilliance within one flame." The "dour" church - recalling Ruth's earlier reference to it as part of a "dismal" view - fades away, while the flesh and hair of a woman take on an almost otherworldly quality. The most spiritual thing in the whole church is not the cross, not the altar, not Jack's sermon...but the back of Lucy Eccles' head.

This intense and evocative description recalls similarly precise passages concerning Rabbit's desire to "consume" Janice's body: "Top-heavy, bandaged, Janice moves gingerly, as if she might spill, jarred." Updike writes that she "seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for loving, hatching, feeding." But this anti-feminist description hatches disaster, for it is precisely Rabbit's need to view his wife as a machine for satisfying his lust that turns Janice into a killer. The "machinery" fails and turns on itself, destroying that which it was created to protect. A more feminist interpretation of the chain of events might argue that Janice implicitly rebels against being treated like a "whore" by ironically turning herself into just that, according to the most conservative perspective - a woman who makes love without the intent or desire to procreate. By violently extinguishing her role as mother, Janice is only reflecting the same rebellion attempted by Rabbit, who forsakes his role as husband and father.

One must not forget, however, that in no way does Updike suggest that Janice is a latter-day Medea: it is critical to note that she does not intend to drown her child, that alcohol - and the threatening phone call from her own mother - serve as the primary catalysts. And, of course, Rabbit must bear his share of the guilt: when he sets off from Lucy's doorstep "jazzed" and "clever and cold with lust," he is sowing the seeds of his family's destruction. Sex may be a spiritual act in Rabbit, Run, but in this case it becomes a murderous one. There is a French expression that refers to an orgasm as "a little death." In this case, one might go so far as to argue that the orgasm that Rabbit never reaches with Janice is later provided by the baby's death - whose drowning in the bathtub recalls the liquids in a mother's womb as well as the fluids associated with sex. The tragic potential of the sexual act thus culminates in a "real-life" tragedy - one that recalls the tragedies sold on the television show that Janice and Rabbit watched in the hospital. One can only wonder if Janice will one day appear on a show like that one, bartering her misfortune for a little money.

Summary

Jack has just gotten off the phone with Mrs. Springer. The news of Rebecca's death and Rabbit's departure is a shock to him. He tells Lucy what has happened and declares that he has to find Rabbit, but his wife only responds with indignation for his persistence in trying to help "that worthless heel." Jack responds: "He's not worthless. I love him." A bitter fight breaks out between Jack and Lucy, who asks her husband why he doesn't seem to love her or their children. "You couldn't bear to love anybody who might return it," she says. Finally she proclaims that Rabbit "as good as [killed his baby]. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The girl had adjusted and something like this never would have happened." The implication that Jack is ultimately responsible for the accident cuts him to the quick; although his wife takes it back, he can't help but feel that she was probably right. He tries calling Ruth, but no one picks up. He then gets a call from Rabbit, who is at a drugstore in Brewer and wants to go back to Janice. He has been calling the apartment, he tells Eccles, "but nobody answers." He is worried his wife may have called the cops. Jack braces himself for his "familiar duty" - breaking tragic news - and tells Rabbit: "A terrible thing has happened to us."

We then switch to Rabbit's perspective, picking up moments after Eccles has told him what has happened. He reels back from the phone; he feels that there is a "loop" inside of him, threatening to come out, and is overcome by nausea. He boards a Mt. Judge bus - the same kind of bus he rode into Brewer the previous night. He reminisces about that night, wonders what, exactly, kept him from returning home. He had initially wanted to visit Ruth, but there had been nobody in the apartment. He had wandered through Brewer, hoping to spot her, but it was more than just a desire to see her that kept him out into the next day; deep inside, he had begun to feel that something was wrong, that something terrible had happened. What kept him out and about was, he recalls, more than anything "the feeling of being closed in."

Rabbit heads to the Springers. Mrs. Springer slams the door in his face, but Eccles arrives and lets him in, informing him that the undertaker has taken the baby away. Nelson is there as well, and Rabbit takes him out onto the porch. Eccles prepares to leave, but tells Rabbit to stay: he is needed here. Some time later Mr. Springer serves Rabbit and Nelson some sandwiches for dinner, but Rabbit can't eat a thing. Mr. Springer is calm and civil with his son-in-law; he explains to Rabbit that though he can't say he doesn't blame him, "life must go on," and assures Rabbit that he remains a member of the family.

Rabbit tucks Nelson into bed in a room that may have belonged to Janice when she was a child. Nelson asks him if Becky is dead, to which Rabbit can only say: "Yes." Nelson asks his father if she was frightened (Rabbit says "no") and if she is happy now (Rabbit says yes, "she's very happy now"). Rabbit then leaves to spend the night at his apartment, where he drains the bathtub and tries in vain to pray, only to find that "there's no connection." He goes to the bathroom, terrified of seeing a tiny corpse in the bathtub. In the morning, he returns to the Springers. Mrs. Springer fixes him coffee and even speaks to him, albeit "cautiously." He goes up to see Janice and tells her that it was his fault, and the two "cling together in a common darkness." To Rabbit's surprise, Mr. Tothero appears. He walks with a cane and half of his face is paralyzed, but he is very much alive, and he tells Rabbit: "Didn't I warn you?" He tries to explain to his former star athlete his vision of right and wrong, how they aren't "dropped from the sky," but are created by man. His speech disturbs Rabbit, who would rather "believe in the sky as the source of all things." As if on cue, Eccles appears: he is there to complete the arrangements for the next day's funeral. Rabbit asks him what to do, but for once Eccles cannot give him a clear-cut answer. The minister confesses that the guilt is his to share as well, and tries to offer a silver lining by suggesting that this tragedy has "at last united" Rabbit and Janice "in a sacred way." Rabbit - with considerable difficulty - "clings to this belief" for the hours that follow.

Asleep beside Janice in her bed, Rabbit dreams he is alone on a "large sporting field, or vacant lot." There are two "perfect disks" - one a dense white, which hovers directly below the second, slightly transparent, one. A loudspeaker announces that "the cowslip swallows up the elder," and the pale disk promptly moves down and eclipses the dense one. Rabbit is seized with the sense that he finally understands life and death, and is filled with the desire to start a new religion. As soon as he awakens, however, he realizes that it was all a dream and "that he has nothing to tell the world."

It is Wednesday, the day of the funeral. Rabbit and Janice go to their apartment to pick up some things. She is unable to fit into the black dress she has selected to wear. They return to the Springers' house: Janice winds up wearing her mother's dress, while Rabbit dons an outfit Mr. Springer lends him. Rabbit, Janice, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and Nelson all head to the funeral. Once there, Rabbit becomes terrified at the prospect of seeing his parents, especially his mother, whom he feels has at this moment the ability to crush him irrevocably: "if she gave him life she can take it away." He is relieved to find that she treats him and the Springers with kindness upon arriving at the funeral home - despite one question that the Springers seem to dismiss and forgive as momentary madness: "Hassy, what have they done to you?" She calls Janice "my daughter", and the two women seem to silently bond over the tragedy: "His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a member with her of an ancient abused slave race, and then she had realized that, having restored her son to herself, she too must be deserted."

Eccles gives the sermon. His delivery is, as usual, "false" to Rabbit's ears, but the words themselves affect him: the imagery that Eccles uses - a shepherd, a lamb, arms - fills his eyes with tears. Later, at the cemetery, Rabbit becomes convinced that his daughter is indeed going to Heaven, and feels imbued with a new kind of understanding. This change, however, inspires him to utter unspeakable words without realizing the effect that they have. Finding that Janice's "face dumb with grief" seems void of any comparable awareness, and seems instead to block "the light", he tells her: "Don't look at me...I didn't kill her." Everyone is shocked: Janice snatches her hand away from him, and even Rabbit's mother looks horrified.

And so Rabbit runs. He darts through the woods, with Eccles chasing him. He loses the minister, but soon finds himself lost in the darkness of the forest. He stumbles upon an abandoned house and feels the presence of the past, of previous human activity, of "ghosts" surrounding him. He finds a road and feels liberated as soon as his feet hit the asphalt. Once again, he believes he has begun a new life. He makes it to the top of Mt. Judge, where he gazes out over the city of Brewer. He wants to explain his change of heart to Eccles, to reassure him that everything is fine, but instead Lucy answers the phone, and promptly hangs up when she finds out it's him.

He descends the mountain, and goes to visit Ruth. She is furious with Rabbit, and orders him to leave. She reveals that she knows what has happened; Eccles has called her. What is more, she is pregnant with what she assumes is Rabbit's child. Rabbit fears she has aborted it, and is overwhelmed with joy when she tells him she has not. It seems that Rabbit wants to be with her again: he tells her that he would love to marry her. However, when she asks him how he can possibly hope to make things work out, he replies that he does not know. She is upset: "Maybe once you could play basketball but you can't do anything now. What the hell do you think the world is?" She finally gives him an ultimatum: she would like to marry him, but if he wants her to have the child he has to divorce his wife. If he does not, Ruth will be "dead" to him, and "this baby of yours is dead too."

Rabbit agrees to Ruth's condition, and runs out to grab some food to bring back. As soon as he exits the apartment, however, worries begin to plague him - the very worries he had hoped to vanquish once and for all. How will he be able to divorce Janice? What will happen to Nelson? What will his mother do? The questions prove too much for Rabbit, and he finds himself simply walking past the delicatessen, away from it all. He is filled with "a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter" as he sets off running yet again.

Analysis

The closing section of the novel is predominantly concerned with Rabbit's perception of the events taking place. It is indeed a very internalized piece of writing that finishes the book; Rabbit, Run culminates in so focused an examination of Rabbit's interior world that by the end it seems as if Updike is attempting to literally burrow inside his character. The author and the reader are both rebuffed, however, by Rabbit's essential impenetrability. Updike admits as much in his penultimate paragraph, writing: "I don't know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn't know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn't know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture." "I don't know" is thus not solely Rabbit's answer, but is also, in a sense, Updike's. He is incapable of satisfactorily explaining Rabbit's actions; he suggests that no person can ever be fully understood or "known," that everyone is more or less "impossible to capture." The shifting means by which Rabbit is described reflect this quandary. Consider that, in the immediate aftermath of Rebecca's death, Rabbit is consistently referred to as "Harry" in the prose; only once he begins running again, into the woods and away from his child's grave, does his nickname return in full force. To be sure, "Rabbit" is used a few times before this event, most notably when the protagonist of the novel witnesses Rebecca's burial: "Rabbit's chest vibrates with excitement and strength; he is sure his girl has ascended to Heaven." That event recalls Rabbit's dream of the disks. In both instances an object is lowered vertically, both events take place outside, both are presented as spectacles to be gazed upon, to be consumed, and both seem to have spiritual significance. What do the disks represent? Rabbit, deep in his dream, seems to suddenly understand it all: "'[T]he cowslip' is the moon and 'the elder' the sun" - that is to say, the pale disk is the moon and the dense one the sun - and "what he has witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death."

Of course, death is like Rabbit, in that it cannot be explained. When thinking of his mother and contemplating his fear of her behavior at the funeral home, Rabbit muses that "if she gave him life she can take it away" - linking her to Janice, and likening the act of birth to the act of murder. They are indeed two sides of the same coin. In Rabbit's dream, death is defined by life, and both are "lovely": one might interpret that word as referring simultaneously to "love" itself - recalling both Janice's killing of her loved one and the proximity between sex and death - and to aesthetics, to beauty. The latter connotation implies that death is primarily something to be seen. Thus, the importance of the gaze is reaffirmed for Rabbit. He sees himself as the only true spectator of the world around him, the only true "seer." What he finally objects to in Janice during the climactic scene at the cemetery is that she does not share this view: "She doesn't see. She had a chance to join him in truth, just the simplest factual truth, and turned away in horror." Her refusal to look returns her immediately to his perception of her at the novel's beginning; in other words, it returns her to mediocrity. The word "dumb" is frequently used to describe Janice early in the book, from Rabbit's perspective, and here it reappears with all its spiteful force: "He hates her dumb face."

Updike concludes his novel, then, on a decidedly downbeat note - and yet hope remains. Rabbit's persistence in questioning his life rather than passively accepting it, as well as the very relentlessness which inspires so many of his flawed actions, can easily be seen as positive qualities. When Rabbit wonders, while contemplating Mt. Judge, "why [he was] set down here, why...this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, [is] for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines, cities, seas," it is possible to both pity his life and to admire his ability to see beyond it, to grasp - if not in entirety, then in fragments - the larger picture. Yes, his search for meaning, for God, for a new life may fail, but at least he tries. In that sense, the reader may recall Ruth's earlier explanation of why she "likes" Rabbit: "'Cause you haven't given up. 'Cause in your stupid way you're still fighting."

• Biography of John Updike
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• Full Summary and Analysis
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• Summary and Analysis of Section 3
• Summary and Analysis of Section 4
• Summary and Analysis of Section 5
• Summary and Analysis of Section 6
• Summary and Analysis of Section 7
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