This essay examines how four major works of postmodern American fiction — John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, Raymond Carver's "Neighbors," and Don DeLillo's White Noise — reflect the widespread disillusionment of Cold War America. Drawing on scholars including Rachel Adams, David Fekete, Michael Moreno, and Bill Mullen, the essay argues that the political and ideological pressures of the Cold War eroded traditional structures of family, gender, and individual identity, replacing them with rampant consumerism and pharmaceutically managed anxiety. The paper traces a historical arc from the early 1960s to 1985, showing how postmodern literature registered these cultural ruptures and gave voice to the vacuum left behind.
The paper exemplifies comparative literary analysis across a curated corpus. Rather than treating each text in isolation, the writer identifies a shared historical pressure — Cold War ideology — and traces how successive works register its deepening effects. This creates a coherent interpretive throughline, showing students how to construct an argument that spans multiple primary sources without losing analytical focus.
The essay opens with a broad thesis situating four texts within Cold War cultural history, then provides a two-paragraph historical and theoretical framework. It proceeds text by text in roughly chronological order, with each section building on the previous one. A paired structure governs the body: Rabbit, Run and Revolutionary Road form the first generation of texts; "Neighbors" and White Noise form the second. The conclusion synthesizes findings and restates the overarching argument about consumerism replacing meaning. Works Cited follows MLA format throughout.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw a raft of dramatic changes to American culture and society, bringing with them new forms of living and thinking about the world. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing onward, the country saw a deep disillusionment with the suburban trappings of contemporary America, as Cold War anxiety combined with rampant consumerism to instill a sense of moral vacuity, which was reflected in a variety of literature from the time. In particular, John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, Raymond Carver's short story "Neighbors," and Don DeLillo's White Noise all explore how the ramifications of this widespread disillusionment play out in the lives of their characters.
The narratives demonstrate the paradoxical nightmare of postmodern America: just as the trappings of the so-called "American Dream" crop up in the form of the suburb, the overwhelming dread of the Cold War fuels rampant consumerism by posing a constant threat to these very same homes and property, so that every purchase and life is simultaneously crucial and disposable. This loss of meaning beyond property and fear precipitates the crises of each of the aforementioned stories, using the characters to enact the larger crisis of identity America was undergoing at the time and, in doing so, exploring the eroding notions of family and value, which are replaced by empty objects and pharmaceutically induced contentment.
Before examining each narrative in further detail, it is useful to consider how the social upheavals of the 1960s precipitated a dramatic shift in cultural production, and more specifically, in the literature of the subsequent years. In the essay "Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics," Michael Rothberg sees the 1960s as the site of a revolution "that represent[s a] novel development" in the history of American politics "rather than [a] return to important topics or rescaled geographies" (Rothberg 301). In particular, "the recasting of social or economic relations in political terms, the recognition of the political dimensions of cultural phenomena, [and] the rise of studies of politics in journals of literary criticism since the 1960s" combined to "fundamentally [reshape] the objects of our attention, causing (or allowing) us to see politics everywhere" (Rothberg 301).
Although Rothberg deals with how this change in scholarship during the 1960s affected the interpretation and historicization of the American Revolution, his analysis remains cogent because of what it implies for life in America beginning in that decade. The Cold War saw a previously unseen — or at least never so explicit — conflation of the political, economic, and social hierarchies in America in opposition to communism. In addition to the very real threat of nuclear war, communism as embodied by the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to America the likes of which the country had never encountered before. As Soviet policies embedded themselves in every aspect of Soviet citizens' lives, and communism represented a questioning of not only the visible political constructs of America, but also the economic, religious, and social ones, Americans soon realized that the political actually permeated everything about American society.
The American response to communism was spastic and reactionary, as leaders attempted to rebut the central ideological attacks of communism simply by stepping up their blind devotion to their own system "in a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres" (Adams 250). Thus, rampant consumerism became a way of defending "American principles"; the empty religiosity of adding "In God We Trust" to paper currency — conflating the spiritual and economic — soothed those predisposed to believe in it, and the animosity between two polar opposite political ideologies permeated the culture so extensively that these attempts at buttressing American imperial capitalism were revealed in all their hollow glory, leading to the widespread disillusionment of postmodern America. The awareness that petty political conflict had so fully permeated American culture, and so fully ensnared its populace into acting out a feverish, vaudevillian opposition to a poorly understood ideology, ultimately led to a loss of individual meaning. If every act is informed by and engages with the false binary of religiously informed American capitalism versus Soviet communism, then those acts lose any novelty or meaning independent of that binary.
Thus, beginning with Updike's Rabbit, Run in 1960 and continuing through to DeLillo's White Noise in 1985, the literature of much of the Cold War contains what Rachel Adams calls "the dark humor; themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy" — representing "a response to and reaction against what Alan Nadel has called the 'containment culture' of Cold War America" (Adams 250). This understanding also helps explain the notion of the postmodern most relevant to this study: "defining [post-modern] more narrowly as a particularly successful mode of narrative experimentation that declined with the waning of the Cold War," which "provides an opportunity to consider the distinctive features and historical circumstances of a new chapter in American literary history" (Adams 250). These "distinctive features" can be divided largely into categories of space and identity, because "the unprecedented integration of the world's markets, technologies, and systems of governance; surprising and innovative new forms of cultural fusion; and the mobilization of political coalitions across the lines of race, class, and other identitarian categories" caused a breakdown of previous categories regarding geographic and personal boundaries. Just as "the perceived ubiquity of transnational corporations and increasing commodification of the world's cultures gave rise to fears about the impending demise of literary innovation," so too did these same changes give rise to a demise of meaning more generally (Adams 251). Thus, space and the identities which fill it are placed in a state of flux, so that each of the protagonists studied here is, in his or her own way, searching for some meaning around which to orient themselves, before being overcome by a crippling void of paranoia or subsumed by the pull of numbing consumerism.
In terms of space, the Cold War precipitated a fundamental reconsideration of the globe. Just as formerly distant countries became reachable via the newest missiles and weapons systems, America itself was becoming further segmented, as the suburbs grew and the individual was relegated an increasingly small portion of space. This in turn created the ideal conditions for a crisis of identity, as previously constructed identities were challenged in the face of a world whose destructive potential had only recently been fully revealed.
These identity crises take many forms, from the spiritual vacuity explored in John Updike's Rabbit, Run to the darkly comedic jealousy of the protagonists in Raymond Carver's "Neighbors." In the former, the protagonist seeks some unattainable meaning through a variety of interpersonal relationships, while in the latter the protagonists' lives become oriented wholly around those of their neighbors and their neighbors' apartment — offering two of the myriad responses to the psychological pressures of Cold War America. Bearing in mind the political and sociological pressures informing the literature of the Cold War, it is now possible to examine these texts in detail as a means of explicating how the historical forces of the time were interpreted and analyzed via postmodern literature.
John Updike's Rabbit, Run, published in 1960, is the earliest text considered here and offers a basis around which to orient the following discussion of postmodern Cold War texts. Its narrative exists superliminally, bridging the gap between what can be considered the relative "blissful ignorance" of the decade immediately following World War II and the active, angry disillusionment of the 1960s and beyond. In "John Updike's Rabbit, Run: A Quest for Spiritual Vocabulary in the Vacuum Left by Modernism," David Fekete argues that "the protagonist, Harry Angstrom [the titular Rabbit], flounders with feelings of spirituality that his culture cannot sustain" (Fekete 25). Fekete sees this failure to sustain spirituality represented in Rabbit's series of increasingly and decidedly unerotic "erotic" encounters, because "concomitant with the death of God, the Modern Period is also pessimistic in its treatment of eroticism," as "God's death includes the death of the god Eros" (Fekete 31). That Fekete identifies Rabbit, Run as "modern" whereas this essay regards it as postmodern is of little concern, since the arguments Fekete makes inform the discussion of postmodern literature equally well, and as previously stated, Rabbit, Run is a superliminal text that can easily be located at both the end of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern.
Though Rabbit's erotic couplings are ultimately "successful" in the traditional, biological sense — as any woman he has sex with becomes pregnant — these pregnancies do not bring accompanying relief or joy. Rather, they serve to highlight the utter lack of attainable meaning in Rabbit's life. Whereas in earlier historical moments the birth of a child and the passing on of one's genetic information was considered the ultimate attainment for a male, in Rabbit, Run this "accomplishment" is rendered irrelevant by "unrelenting social forces" under which "human endeavor is ultimately crushed," and thus the acts which precede these pregnancies become devoid of meaning or eroticism (Fekete 31). This lack can be understood in strictly mathematical terms: where before numerous children were prized due to their individually high mortality rate, when all of one's children — no matter how numerous — are constantly under threat from nuclear annihilation, each additional child brings no real extra meaning into the world.
Thus, Janice, Rabbit's wife, is left to struggle with their new child in a world in which that child means very little. As "her breasts are used without shame, [as] tools like her hands" by the baby, Janice is drained of her agency and meaning, to the point that she breaks down crying, exclaiming "I'm dry. I just don't have anything to feed her" (Updike 195, 203). This moment suggests that along with the loss of eroticism noted by Fekete, the breakdown of previous standards regarding intimacy and sex extends into the consequences of sex as well — that is, into motherhood and children. Just as the Cold War milieu has robbed American life of any focalizing values other than fear and consumerism, so too has this same milieu metaphorically robbed Janice of her life-giving abilities as a mother, so that she has nothing to offer her baby to drink aside from her tears, and eventually, the bath water in which her baby drowns.
Although Rabbit and Janice's crises remain particularly gendered — Rabbit struggles with a loss of eroticism and meaningful sexual fulfillment, whereas Janice suffers from the loss of her "motherly" attributes — they offer a picture of how the erosion of previously sustaining cultural constructions erodes even the most basic structures of identification and meaning creation, including notions of the family. As time goes on, the family becomes less immediately relevant to postmodern literature in favor of questions regarding the individual and his or her belongings, and Rabbit, Run represents the initial movement of the family away from being the central orienting structure in the individual's life.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through to the end of the Cold War, postmodern literature reflected the underlying social and political struggles of the time. In the early 1960s, John Updike's Rabbit, Run and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road confronted the failure of preexisting notions regarding family and gender roles to account for the emotional and psychological realities of Cold War America, with its attendant fears and fetishes. The characters of these two novels are unable to escape a social structure they know to be inadequate but are unable to find a suitable replacement. Raymond Carver's "Neighbors" and Don DeLillo's White Noise demonstrate the consequences of this lack, with their characters replacing previous loci of meaning with numbing consumerism and pharmaceutically managed anxiety, respectively.
America's response to the specter of communism was an overzealous reification of its dominant social mores, but in doing so, American society revealed the vacuousness of these social mores explicitly for the first time. As they were exaggerated and amplified by the emergence of a true mass media, the hollow standards regarding family, identity, value, and life gave way to a disillusionment only briefly amenable to forgetfulness — whether by inhabiting someone else's life or by escaping into chemically induced feelings of safety.
Adams, Rachel. "The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism." Twentieth Century Literature. 53.3 (2007): 248–272, 230. Print.
Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.
Fekete, David J. "John Updike's Rabbit, Run: A Quest for a Spiritual Vocabulary in the Vacuum Left by Modernism." Religious Studies and Theology. 26.1 (2007): 25–44. Print.
Moreno, Michael P. "Consuming the Frontier Illusion: The Construction of Suburban Masculinity in Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road." Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. 3 (2003): 84–95. Print.
Mullen, Bill. "A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver." Critique. 39.2 (1998): 99–114. Print.
Packer, Matthew J. "'At the Dead Center of Things' in Don DeLillo's White Noise: Mimesis, Violence, and Religious Awe." Modern Fiction Studies. 51.3 (2005): 648–666, 729. Print.
Rothberg, Michael. "Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics / Quantifying Culture? A Response to Eric Slauter." Early American Literature. 45.2 (2010): 301–324, 492. Print.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. Print.
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2008. Print.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.