Rabbit, Run

“The clutter behind him in the room—the Old-fashioned glass with its corrupt dregs, the chock-full ashtray balanced on the easy-chair arm, the rumpled rug […] the continual crisscrossing mess—clings to his back like a tightening net.”

As Rabbit prepares to leave his apartment on an errand for his wife, the domestic disorder is rendered as a physical weight and threat. The author uses a long, catalog-like sentence to accumulate details of the mess, culminating in the explicit simile of a “tightening net,” which represents the entrapment Rabbit feels in his marriage and adult responsibilities. This sensory overload, combined with the net imagery, provides the direct motivation for his impulsive decision to flee, framing his run as an escape for survival.

“The names melt away and he sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somewhere caught in. He claws at it and tears it.”

In a moment of intense frustration, Rabbit’s perception of his road map transforms from a tool of navigation into a reminder of his entrapment. The text explicitly invokes the “net” metaphor again, equating the cartographic lines with the inescapable web of social and geographical connections he is trying to flee. The violent, physical act of tearing the map represents a rejection of logic and a desperate attempt to destroy the system that confines him, highlighting the psychological futility of his journey.

“And there are just a couple dozen people sitting up on the stage and the game isn’t a league game so nothing matters much, and I get this funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sudden I know, you see, I know I can do anything.”

Recounting a minor high school basketball game, Rabbit describes a moment of pure, transcendent grace where his skill felt effortless and absolute. The rambling, anecdotal style of his speech contrasts with the focused, repeated phrase “I know I can do anything,” which pinpoints the feeling of mastery he has been unable to replicate in his adult life. This memory serves as the clearest articulation of Rabbit’s nostalgia, defining the impossible standard of perfection against which he measures his present failures.

“He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, a dime a pound.”

After paying to spend the night with Ruth, Rabbit observes her with detached objectivity. The simile comparing Ruth to “a great green fish, his prize,” transforms her from a person into a commodity he has won, reducing their interaction to a crude transaction. The final, stark sentence, “He calculates, a dime a pound,” reveals the cynical and dehumanizing nature of the “freedom” he has found, suggesting his escape from one form of transactional domesticity has led him directly into another.

“Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath.”

From Ruth’s bedroom, Rabbit observes a church window. The description of the window as a “hole punched in reality” suggests a portal to a spiritual or transcendent dimension that exists beyond the mundane world. This imagery contrasts the sacred with the profane setting of the apartment in the wake of a sexual act, highlighting Rabbit’s persistent, if incoherent, search for spiritual meaning, even as he flees his responsibilities, a key aspect of the theme of The Inadequacy of Modern Religion.

“[T]o his horror her face begins to slide, the skin to slip slowly from the bone, but there is no bone, just more melting stuff underneath; he cups his hands with the idea of catching it and patting it back.”

This quote from Rabbit’s dream uses surreal, visceral imagery to represent his subconscious guilt and fear regarding his wife, Janice. The “melting stuff” points to her perceived emotional and psychological dissolution, for which he feels a helpless, ineffectual sense of responsibility, as shown by his desire to “catch” and “pat” it back together. The author employs this moment of psychological horror to externalize Rabbit’s anxieties about the consequences of his abandonment, foreshadowing the more literal disintegration of his family life.

“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. 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.”

In this key confession to Reverend Eccles, Rabbit articulates the central motivation for his flight, directly addressing the theme of The Trap of Nostalgia. The juxtaposition of “first-rate” and “second-rate” establishes the core conflict of his character: the inability to reconcile the perfection of his athletic past with the compromises of his adult present. Updike uses this simple, declarative statement to crystallize Rabbit’s entire worldview and justify his rejection of a life he feels is beneath his potential.

“Silence blasts him. Chains of cars creep without noise; a dot comes out of a door. What is he doing here, standing on air?”

Atop Mt. Judge, Rabbit experiences a moment of profound existential dread, conveyed through stark sensory details and a rhetorical question. The oxymoron “Silence blasts him” illustrates the overwhelming awareness of his meaninglessness, while the detached observation of the city below points to his alienation from ordinary life. The feeling of “standing on air” externalizes his internal state of being unmoored from the responsibilities and relationships that ground other people, capturing his terror and isolation.

“In his head he is talking to the clubs as if they’re women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands, are Janice. […] with the woods the ‘she’ is Ruth.”

During a golf game with Eccles, Rabbit’s internal monologue reveals his tendency to conflate objects with people, a psychological device that illustrates his inability to engage directly with his emotional conflicts. By anthropomorphizing the golf clubs, he displaces his complex feelings of anger and frustration toward Janice and Ruth onto the inanimate objects, turning his poor performance in the game into a metaphor for his failing relationships.

“It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. ‘That’s it!’”

Following a game marked by complete ineptitude, Rabbit hits a perfect golf shot, and the lyrical description elevates this physical act to a moment of spiritual transcendence. The asyndeton in “sphere, star, speck” accelerates the prose to mimic the ball’s flight, while the personification of the ball taking a “last bite of space” imbues the moment with life and significance. Rabbit’s ecstatic cry, “That’s it!,” suggests he has momentarily found the unnamed “thing” he seeks: a feeling of grace and perfection rooted in pure, instinctual, and physical success.

“‘If you have the guts to be yourself,’ he says, ‘other people’ll pay your price.’”

Rabbit delivers this line to Ruth, crystallizing the selfish philosophy that underpins his actions and serves as a central argument of the novel’s theme, The Pursuit of Freedom and the Rejection of Responsibility. The quote is structured as a maxim, presenting a deeply amoral concept as a piece of worldly wisdom. Through this statement, Updike reveals the core of Rabbit’s worldview: a belief that personal authenticity justifies the collateral damage inflicted upon others, reframing his irresponsibility as a form of courage.

“There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.”

In this speech to Eccles, Reverend Kruppenbach articulates one of the novel’s central arguments regarding The Inadequacy of Modern Religion. Updike uses Kruppenbach’s severe tone and harsh, metaphorical diction (“stirring the bucket”) to present a theological viewpoint that directly opposes Eccles’s modern, psychological approach to ministry. The quote posits that a minister’s intervention in personal lives is a flight from the true duty of embodying faith, thereby questioning the very foundation of Eccles’s attempts to “save” Rabbit.

“He said to me, ‘This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player.’”

Ronnie Harrison’s comment attacks the core of Rabbit’s identity, which is built upon his memory of athletic glory. This piece of dialogue challenges Rabbit’s self-perception and deconstructs his idealized history, illustrating the theme of The Trap of Nostalgia. The quote reveals that memory is subjective and that Rabbit’s personal mythology is not universally shared, forcing him to confront the idea that his “first-rate” past was flawed.

“‘Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees. I need you to’—he still can’t say it—‘do it.’”

Rabbit’s demand for oral sex functions as an act of punishment and a reassertion of control over Ruth following his embarrassing night at the club. His inability to verbalize the act, indicated by the authorial aside “he still can’t say it,” reveals a conflict between his raw desire for dominance and his innate fastidiousness, highlighting his psychological immaturity. This moment demonstrates how Rabbit’s pursuit of freedom from one set of responsibilities leads him to impose a different, more debasing form of control on someone else.

“A damp warm cloth seems wrapped around his heart. He is certain that as a consequence of his sin Janice or the baby will die. His sin a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of the birth.”

At the hospital awaiting his child’s birth, Rabbit’s anxiety manifests as a form of primitive, superstitious guilt. Updike employs a powerful metaphor, the “black clot,” to give physical weight to Rabbit’s abstract sense of sin, directly linking his moral failures to the biological act of creation. The sentence fragment listing his transgressions reads as a panicked, internal confession, revealing a deep-seated fear of divine retribution that exists outside the formal religion he otherwise struggles to connect with.

“They told me you were here and all the while I was thinking then it was your baby and it was like I was having you. I’m so full of ether it’s just like I’m floating; without any legs. I could just talk and talk.”

Following the delivery of her daughter, Janice’s ether-induced state allows for a moment of seemingly pure reconciliation with Rabbit. The surreal imagery (“like I was having you,” “floating; without any legs”) signals a temporary, almost magical release from the weight of their marital conflict and the constraints of their bodies. This dialogue presents an idealized version of their reunion, one that is untethered from reality and predicated on a chemical dream-state, foreshadowing the fragility of their new beginning.

“When his eyes reach Lucy’s an amazing thing enters the silence. The woman winks. Quick as light: maybe he imagined it.”

Lucy Eccles’s wink is a subtle but highly charged gesture that undermines Rabbit’s newfound resolution to reintegrate himself to domestic life. The act introduces a new temptation and complication, suggesting that the very structures of social propriety, represented by the minister’s wife, contain their own hidden invitations to transgression. On the other hand, the narrator’s qualification, “maybe he imagined it,” casts ambiguity on the event, reflecting Rabbit’s unreliable perception and his tendency to project his desires onto the world.

“The baby is held by the nurse so her profile is sharp red against the buttoned white bosom of the uniform. The folds around the nostril, worked out on such a small scale, seem miraculously precise; the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid runs diagonally a great length, as if the eye, when it is opened, will be huge.”

Updike utilizes precise, microscopic detail to convey Rabbit’s awestruck perception of his newborn daughter through the viewing window. The focus on the baby’s physical perfection, which Updike describes with words like “miraculously precise” and “stitchless,” frames the moment as an encounter with a form of grace, a stark contrast to the moral chaos of Rabbit’s life. This scene allows Rabbit a moment of pure, detached wonder that momentarily elevates him above his self-absorption.

“That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.”

Spoken by the elderly Mrs. Smith, this line offers a counterpoint to Rabbit’s profound confusion about his existence. Her characterization of life as a “gift” provides a moral and spiritual anchor that Rabbit, who views his adult life as a trap, is unable to grasp. This moment of simple wisdom highlights Rabbit’s immaturity and inability to find value in the responsibilities that constitute his life, underscoring the novel’s exploration of modern spiritual aimlessness.

“Her daring to say this infuriates him; he realizes she hasn’t had it for three months and in all that time has got an unreal idea of what sex is. She has imagined it into something rare and precious she’s entitled to half of when all he wants is to get rid of it so he can move on, on into sleep, down the straight path, for her sake. It’s for her sake.”

In this passage of internal monologue, Rabbit’s solipsism reduces the potential for marital intimacy to a purely physical transaction. The diction of wanting to “get rid of it” reveals his view of sex as a burdensome need rather than a shared experience, exposing his failure to comprehend Janice’s emotional state. Updike employs potent dramatic irony in the final sentences, as Rabbit rationalizes his selfish desires as selfless, a psychological maneuver that directly precipitates his decision to abandon his family once again.

“She drops gently to her knees by the big calm tub and does not expect her sleeves to be soaked. The water wraps around her forearms like two large hands; under her eyes the pink baby sinks down like a gray stone.”

Updike narrates the novel’s central tragedy with detached, chillingly factual prose, mirroring Janice’s intoxicated numbness and the sheer mechanics of the accident. The author uses unsettling personification and simile, describing the water wrapping around Janice’s arms like “two large hands” and the baby sinking like a “gray stone.” This figurative language renders the moment both surreal and brutally physical, stripping it of sentimentality to focus on the horrifying, irreversible consequence of the accident.

“He turns, and Janice’s face, dumb with grief, blocks the light. ‘Don’t look at me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t kill her.’ […] He just wants this straight. He explains to the heads, ‘You all keep acting as if I did it. I wasn’t anywhere near. She’s the one.’”

At the emotional climax of the funeral, Rabbit shatters the shared ritual by publicly assigning blame. The image of Janice’s face “block[ing] the light” underscores his rejection of their common grief in favor of a simplistic, self-serving truth. His act of addressing the mourners as disembodied “heads” illustrates his profound alienation and precipitates his physical flight, cementing his isolation from family and community.

“She looks at him with dull wonder and says softly, ‘Boy, you really have the touch of death, don’t you?’ […] ‘You’re Mr. Death himself. You’re not just nothing, you’re worse than nothing. You’re not a rat, you don’t stink, you’re not enough to stink.’”

Ruth’s verbal indictment serves as a direct and devastating moral judgment on Rabbit’s character, linking his irresponsible pursuit of freedom to its destructive consequences. The epithet “Mr. Death” makes this connection explicit, while her assessment that he is “worse than nothing” defines his flaw not as malice but as a complete moral void. This moment crystallizes the novel’s critique of a man whose desperate search for an authentic self leaves only ruin behind him.