52 pages • 1-hour read
Rabbit, Run
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Background
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Background
Series Context: The First Installment of the Rabbit Tetralogy
John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) is the first novel in his acclaimed four-part series chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The tetralogy, which also includes Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), follows its protagonist from his restless youth in his mid-twenties to his death from a heart attack at age 56. Updike later published a related novella, Rabbit Remembered (2001), which explores his family’s life after his death. Taken together, the books serve as a detailed social and cultural history of the American middle class in the latter half of the 20th century.
Each novel is grounded in a specific historical moment, immersing Rabbit in the defining events and anxieties of his time. Rabbit Redux confronts the turmoil of the late 1960s, including the Vietnam War, the Apollo moon landing, and the Summer of Love. Rabbit Is Rich is set during the 1979 energy crisis and the Iran hostage crisis, reflecting the nation’s sense of economic and political unease. The final installment, Rabbit at Rest, takes place against the backdrop of the Lockerbie bombing and the decline of the Cold War. As the inaugural volume, Rabbit, Run establishes the foundational themes of the series: the elusive nature of personal freedom, the search for meaning in a secular age, and the friction between individual desire and social responsibility that defines Rabbit’s life and reflects the changing American landscape.
Historical Context: The Restlessness of Late 1950s America
Set in 1959, Rabbit, Run captures the tension between the idealized conformity of post-World War II America and a growing undercurrent of existential discontent. The 1950s are often remembered for unprecedented economic prosperity, the rise of suburban communities like Levittown, and a cultural emphasis on the nuclear family. This vision of the “American Dream” promised fulfillment through a stable job, home ownership, and domestic life. However, this period also produced significant cultural critiques of conformity. Sociological studies, such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), analyzed the psychic costs of a society that prized social approval and corporate loyalty over individuality. At the same time, the writers of the Beat Generation, most famously Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957), championed instinct, spontaneity, and rebellion against mainstream values.
Rabbit Angstrom’s impulsive flight from his family embodies this cultural restlessness. His life contains all the prescribed elements of success: a wife, a child, an apartment, and a sales job demonstrating the MagiPeel kitchen tool. Yet he feels suffocated by “the continual crisscrossing mess” of his domestic life (14) and senses he is caught in a trap. His decision to run is an instinctual escape from a life that feels hollow despite its outward propriety. Rabbit’s journey is a personal, less articulate version of the rebellion voiced by the Beats, reflecting a widespread, if often unspoken, yearning for authentic experience in an era of perceived spiritual emptiness and rigid social expectation.
Philosophical Context: The Search for Grace in a Secular World
Rabbit, Run opens with an epigraph from the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances” (3). This quote frames the novel as a spiritual drama, exploring a modern search for meaning in a world where traditional faith has lost its authority. For Pascal, grace was an unearned, transformative gift from God that could overcome humanity’s inherent corruption.
Updike transposes this theological concept to the spiritually vacant landscape of mid-20th-century America. Sociological studies of the era, like Will Herberg’s influential Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), argued that while church attendance was high, religion for many Americans had become more a marker of social identity than a source of deep personal faith. It is in this context that Rabbit Angstrom seeks a secular form of grace. He longs to recapture the feeling of effortless perfection he once knew as a high-school basketball star, a time when “every one goes right in… like I’m dropping stones down a well” (58). This memory of athletic glory represents an ideal state of being where his actions were pure and true. His impulsive flight is a misguided spiritual quest to find “something that wants me to find it” (110) and to reconnect with a sense of purpose and rightness that his adult life lacks.
Rabbit’s journey is a modern enactment of Pascal’s formula: his desperate actions are “motions” toward a feeling of grace, but they are constantly thwarted by his own selfishness (or “hardness of the heart”) and the mundane reality of his “external circumstances.”
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