John Updike's Rabbit, Run: Character, Sexuality, and 1950s America
This paper analyzes John Updike's novel Rabbit, Run (1960), focusing on the protagonist Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his role as a symbol of postwar American middle-class disillusionment. The paper surveys Updike's biography, provides a plot summary, and examines the novel's character development, sexual frankness, and cultural commentary. Drawing on critical sources including Donald Greiner, Stanford Pinsker, and Donald Anderson, the analysis explores how Rabbit's restlessness, failed relationships, and sexual adventures reflect the spiritual emptiness of 1950s suburban life, the absence of meaningful work, and the broader cultural anxieties of the Cold War era.
- John Updike: Author Background: Updike's biography and literary career overview
- Plot Summary: Harry Angstrom's flight from middle-class life
- Character Development: Rabbit's confusion, guilt, and critical reception
- Sexuality, Symbolism, and Cultural Reflection: Sexual frankness and its cultural meaning in the novel
- Conclusion: Novel's legacy and 1950s sports-hero nostalgia
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What makes this paper effective
- Integrates multiple scholarly sources (Greiner, Pinsker, Anderson, Heddendorf) to support analytical claims rather than relying solely on plot description.
- Balances close textual quotation from the novel itself with critical commentary, grounding abstract arguments about culture and character in specific passages.
- Connects the literary analysis to its broader historical context — 1950s Cold War anxiety, the "sexual revolution," and the myth of sports heroism — giving the paper cultural depth.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of secondary sources as interpretive frames. Rather than simply summarizing critics, it uses them dialectically — for example, presenting Time magazine's negative reception of the sexual content, then countering it with George Steiner's defense, and finally resolving the tension with Greiner's argument that meaningless work, not sexuality, is the novel's true subject.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an author biography, moves into a plot summary, then develops a sustained character analysis of Rabbit and Janice. A central section addresses sexuality and cultural symbolism, incorporating extended textual quotations and critical debate. The conclusion broadens the lens to consider sports imagery and the novel's lasting significance as a document of 1950s American life. The structure is largely thematic rather than strictly argumentative, appropriate for a literary survey paper at the undergraduate level.
John Updike: Author Background
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He later attended Harvard University and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. He began his professional writing career by contributing poems, articles, and book reviews to The New Yorker magazine from 1955 to 1957. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 for Rabbit Is Rich and wrote over 25 books over the course of his career. He was the father of four children and lived in Massachusetts. It is believed that the central character in Updike's "Rabbit" series — four novels beginning with Rabbit, Run — was based on a real-life basketball hero from Shillington, Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up.
Plot Summary
The central character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, is an unhappy middle-class Pennsylvanian living in the 1950s. He is trapped in unfulfilling jobs — selling "MagiPeel Peelers" in supermarkets and, later, selling Toyotas — that give him no satisfaction compared to the thrills and glory he experienced as a high school basketball star. His wife, Janice, bores and frustrates him, and he leaves her for a number of explicitly described sexual encounters. He also abandons her to "run" — taking to the road, uncertain of his destination. Updike's broader literary statement about middle-class 1950s society is that people were going through the motions of a meaningful life without achieving genuine meaning from it. The novel suggests that a kind of perversion very likely resulted from this vacuous lifestyle.
Character Development
The character at the center of this novel is so erratic that he keeps the reader consistently off balance — which mirrors what Rabbit is doing, in a fictionalized sense, to his wife Janice and to others around him. Rabbit does things like standing in a hospital parking lot praying to the moon on the night his son is born, having recently returned to his wife from the prostitute with whom he has an ongoing affair. In one of his "runs," he makes offhand decisions about where to go based on his past: for example, he takes Highway 23 because in his first varsity basketball game he scored 23 points. He is clearly confused about his life and times — confusion that Updike uses to reflect the widespread cultural bewilderment of the Cold War 1950s.
Rabbit desperately needs good advice, but Updike builds his character around the fact that nobody knows what to tell him or what is right. He hears only clichés and platitudes on the radio and elsewhere, and this keeps him in a state that is sad and depressing.
In describing the futility and flaws of the Rabbit character, Greiner (55) writes that Rabbit is "a decent but flawed adult who finds the little complexities of life — a boring job, a dreary wife, a dingy apartment — too much to handle." The problems Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom faces are "not those of poverty, politics, and the nuances of keeping up with the Joneses." Instead, Rabbit's central difficulty is more along the lines of "how to sell junk he does not believe in while returning home each night to a marriage that drains his spirit, that insists on finality instead of fluidity."
Continuity is the key to Updike's maintenance of character growth throughout the series. It is notable that almost all of the characters introduced in the first book, Rabbit, Run, continue to appear in his three sequels. "Part of the resonance of John Updike's Rabbit saga," writes Donald R. Anderson in the Journal of Modern Literature, "comes from the cast of characters that continues to reappear in the novels, either directly or through flashback." By "braiding and re-braiding major and secondary characters," Anderson continues, "Updike gives the works — Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990), and the novella Rabbit Remembered (2000) — the sense of an ongoing present unthreatened even by the death of the title character at the conclusion of the fourth novel."
"Rabbit turned out to be one of contemporary American literature's more durable protagonists," writes Stanford Pinsker (74) in his essay "Restlessness in the 1950s: What Made Rabbit Run?" "The problems he faced during the next decades tell us much about how and why the culture changed."
As for Rabbit's wife Janice, Pinsker quotes from the novel (10–11) that Rabbit thinks, "Janice is a frightening person. Her eyes dwindle in their frowning sockets and her little mouth hangs over in a dumb slot." And Rabbit abandoned Janice for what he considered noble reasons, Pinsker points out. "I once did something right," Rabbit says (106–7). "I played first-rate basketball...and after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." He adds, "...that little thing Janice and I had going was really second-rate."
In addition to being bold and morally questionable in his decisions, Rabbit also carries a pronounced guilt complex. While waiting in the hospital for the birth of his child (196–8), "He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die...the thrust whereby it was conceived becomes confused in his mind with the perverted entry a few hours ago he made into Ruth" — the prostitute. "He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women."
Conclusion
Is Rabbit, Run a reflection of the 1950s, or a product of the 1950s? This line of semantic argument is best left to critics and historians who examine such questions. What can be said is that Rabbit, Run is among the most important literary works of that period and should be read by anyone who aspires to understand the era of "I Like Ike" — the Eisenhower years.
Another aspect of 1950s America brought to life through Updike's novel is the theme of the sports hero. At the very outset of Rabbit, Run, Harry "Rabbit" is watching a pick-up basketball game among kids and removes his business suit jacket to shoot a few baskets. This revives his "glory" period, invoking an athletic nostalgia that was a significant feature of postwar American culture. He temporarily douses his work and family frustrations in this small return to "glory." Sports metaphors are woven throughout the book: religion is offered to the reader as a golf game, and Harry's recollections of Saturday mornings as a young boy evoke "the blank scoreboard of a long game about to begin" (40). Even some of his sports passages carry sexual innuendo, as on page 9 of the novel: "The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands..." — in front of Rabbit. And Rabbit, still chasing his youth, catches it "on the short bounce" with a "quickness that startles" the young boys in the pick-up game.
Works Cited
Anderson, Donald R. "Eccles Redux. (John Updike's Rabbit Saga)." Journal of Modern Literature 24 (2000): 327–338.
Greiner, Donald J. John Updike's Novels. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984.
Heddendorf, David. "Rabbit Reread." The Southern Review 36 (2000).
Trachtenberg, Stanley. New Essays on Rabbit, Run. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1960.
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