Sex
Updike said, "About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior."[7] Rabbit has an animalistic obsession with sex rather than a romanticized vision. He uses superficial criteria to pick his partners. He is taken with Ruth because she "feels right" as long as she doesn't use a "flying saucer" (a diaphragm), and even compels her to fellate him during a particularly intense bout of physical desire. He seems to use intense sex to replace what is missing from his work and life at home. His sexual prowess also supplies him with the sense of identity that his basketball playing gave him.[8] He tries to be with two women in his life, his wife Janice and Ruth Leonard. Rabbit's marriage with Janice resulted from her pregnancy when Rabbit was 23 years old. Janice was prone to drinking and has a knack for angering her husband, although she may truly love Rabbit for who he is. Ruth Leonard worked as a prostitute; she lives alone in a two-person apartment before Rabbit settles in with her. She is very conscious of her weight, considering herself plump, but at one moment, to Rabbit's eyes, she becomes “Beauty home image.” She lives with Rabbit for two months, during which time Rabbit impregnates her.
Religion
For Updike, the particular etiology of Rabbit's sickness can be perceived as his distance from God, illustrated by his cavalier conversations with Eccles. The existing framework of religion and ethics should support his devotion to his marriage, job, and life, but he finds it utterly unsatisfactory.[9] Rabbit is clearly a sinner and in some ways he is aware of that, but he still quests for some kind of religious meaning in his life, “Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you. I do feel, I guess that somewhere behind all this... there's something that wants me to find it!”[10] Rabbit has a crisis of faith and doesn't know what to do and calls his local pastor for help with the issue. He calls Jack Eccles who is a young minister suffering a crisis of faith. Eccles makes “saving” Rabbit his mission. “Updike explores whether someone like Rabbit might gain the sanguinity of a genuine faith as posited by Updike's hero Kierkegaard, whether in fact even God's grace might defeat the thoroughgoing identity problems that seem to plague contemporary men and women like Rabbit. In Rabbit, Run Updike raises the question of whether ethical wrongdoing and sin—acts for which we would hope Rabbit would take responsibility and repent—even exist for those with confused identities, especially when genuine loving requires sexual restraint. Some readers might ponder, along with Updike, whether grace penetrates not only sinful incorrigibility, but also theological confusion, genetic predisposition, and mental illness (Crowe 82).” Rabbit is faced with human challenges in his marriage with a drunken wife, an overbearing mother, the death of his newborn daughter and the pregnancy resulting from his infidelity. It is a general reoccurrence that Rabbit has religious thoughts or conversations and “Harry can be considered as a religious. It is because of the loss of faith that causes his first escape. When he finds that life is meaningless, he abandons his wife and children, and leaves home to seek that self under the guidance of God. But his religion is not strong; he just treats it as a kind of spiritual sustenance to escape from the reality and a tool to solve practical problems. When religion cannot solve problems for him, and indicate a way out, his faith in God begins to shake,” (Zhang, 283). Nothing is consistent in Rabbit's life except for his need to run from all of life's problems.
Identity
Rabbit faces a deep-seated psychological identity crisis throughout the book. This is due somewhat to his affectionless relationship with his mother, which has at the very least given him cause to imagine matricidal and suicidal acts.[11] Rabbit hungers for something more than what he has, for a return to the golden era of his youth, for the sexual comfort of his relationship with Janice, and for a worldview that fits his tumultuous emotions. Rabbit Angstrom is dealing with his identity crisis and is trying to get help from the people he loves and needs to be next to him. Rabbit gets many scenarios and situations from family and friends to make his life better for himself and others around him. He tries his best to become a better person and man. Rabbit filled his emptiness in his life through lessons taught by other people in his life. He was taught that Faith can be used to help you become at peace with what you are going through like a tragic time you just encountered and how to cope with it after that. “If we are to understand Rabbit's identity crisis as emerging from Updike's Christian apologetics, the important critical task is to recognize the combination of sin, agitated depression, and simple worldliness in Rabbit, and to detect and describe the particular form of irony with which Updike hints at alternatives to his character's acts. These alternative acts will be Christian works of love that, in Kierkegaardian fashion, transcend the ethical and epitomize a genuine faith and sanguine identity. (Crowe 84)” In this paragraph by Crowe, he talks about how Rabbit has an identity crisis and he is explaining the Christian way that Rabbit grew up in and how that affected how he is to combat sin and depression and other worldly things that have happened in his life.
Vision of America
Rabbit, Run is set against the background of the America of the fifties. The Eisenhower era, apart from offering tremendous consumerist possibilities, urged Americans to reorient themselves to the postwar reality. The cultural atmosphere of the 1950s, charged by the politics of the Cold War, thus necessitated the phenomena of self-definition at all levels and in all areas of life. Alive to the mood of inner-directedness, Updike's Rabbit considers himself “as a person in the process of becoming”.[12] This involves his rejection of certain traditional aspects of American life in search of a satisfactory place in the world that is never really found, as the book ends with his fate uncertain.
Transience
Rabbit is always running, searching and questing for meaning. But while at times he finds himself enthralled with people, like his relationship with Ruth, his conversations with Eccles, and his initial return to his family, in the end Rabbit is dissatisfied and takes flight. Transience appears to be implicit in the character.
