Rabbit, Run

Janice Angstrom is Rabbit’s wife. She is the primary embodiment of the domestic life Rabbit spends the novel trying to flee, though this does not necessarily make her his antagonist. Presented as a round character, Janice is trapped in an unhappy marriage, where she struggles with the insecurities that come with fulfilling her role as a mother and satisfying her husband’s desires and expectations of her, as well as reckoning with her total lack of agency at home. As pages 214 to 227 show, Janice’s vices, like drinking and smoking, are responses to these issues, which she uses to cope with her insecurity since she can change neither her situation nor Rabbit’s behavior. She expresses a genuine, if desperate, love for Rabbit, pleading, “Don’t run from me, Harry. I love you” (12). This signals her desire for Rabbit to understand the challenges of her life and help her to manage them as her partner.

Rabbit, on the other hand, values her primarily for her appearance, rather than for who she is as a person. His observation that Janice has “stopped being pretty” (8) helps to catalyze his perception that he is trapped in his adult life. Janice’s pregnancy, rather than being a source of joy, infuriates Rabbit with its “look of stubborn lumpiness” (11) . Furthermore, the Angstroms’ cluttered apartment, with its broken toys and overflowing ashtrays, is a direct reflection of the overwhelming burden Rabbit places on Janice to manage his home. During her first appearance in the novel, Janice contemplates the past of their relationship and feels it was easier when they were just having casual sex during their courtship. This underscores the contrast between her acknowledgment of the responsibility she has to her family and Rabbit’s impulse to abandon responsibility in favor of his self-fulfillment. When she asks him to buy cigarettes on page 15, she is implicitly pointing to her need to cope with the emotional challenges of her life. Instead, this expression catalyzes Rabbit’s impulsive decision to escape from her and from his life.

Reverend Jack Eccles is the young Episcopalian minister who attempts to counsel the Angstroms and serves as a primary foil to Rabbit. Eccles is a thoughtful, well-intentioned man whose modern, psychological approach to faith proves inadequate in the face of Rabbit’s spiritual malaise. He represents the central theme of The Inadequacy of Modern Religion, employing pastoral tools like friendly games of golf and sympathetic conversation rather than dogma, yet he consistently fails to reach Rabbit on a meaningful level. Eccles becomes fascinated with Rabbit’s case, pursuing him with a tenacity that blurs the line between professional duty and personal need. His own immaturity frames Rabbit as a raw, untutored spirituality that both challenges and attracts him.

Eccles’s life is fraught with the kind of quiet desperation he tries to solve in others. His marriage to his wife, Lucy, is strained and argumentative, revealing his insecurities and inability to connect with others emotionally. Lucy accuses him of being afraid of women and using his parishioners’ problems as an escape from his own. His conversations with the rigid Lutheran minister Kruppenbach further expose his uncertainty. Kruppenbach condemns Eccles’s methods as mere social work, arguing that a minister’s only role is to be “on fire” with faith. This critique strikes at the heart of Eccles’s weakness: His faith is more intellectual than visceral, and he lacks the certainty required to address the kind of existential dread that motivates Rabbit. His relationship with Rabbit is a complex mixture of friendship, rivalry, and spiritual wrestling. Ultimately, he fails to provide Rabbit with a compelling reason to embrace responsibility, and his ministry is shown to be as ineffectual as the secular world in providing true spiritual comfort.

Ruth Leonard is the woman with whom Rabbit briefly lives after abandoning Janice. She functions as a foil to Janice, representing a life of perceived freedom and sensual experience, detached from the obligations of marriage and family that Rabbit tries to escape. Ruth is characterized as world-weary and pragmatic, with a tough exterior that conceals a deep-seated vulnerability. Unlike Janice, Ruth possesses a degree of self-awareness and is candid about her past and her transactional relationships with men, eventually alluding to her experience in sex work. When Rabbit first meets her, she is direct and observant, possessing an emotional sturdiness that he initially finds comforting.

Despite her cynicism, Ruth develops genuine feelings for Rabbit. She is drawn to his lingering innocence and his unarticulated quest for something more from life. She tells him she likes him because, “[Y]ou haven’t given up. In your stupid way you’re still fighting” (80). For Rabbit, Ruth’s apartment becomes a temporary haven, a space where he can exist without the pressures of his former life. However, this refuge is ultimately illusory. When Ruth becomes pregnant, she presents Rabbit with another form of responsibility, one that mirrors the exact situation he fled from with Janice. She confronts him with a clear choice: divorce his wife and marry her, or leave forever. This demand for commitment is something Rabbit cannot face. By forcing him to confront the consequences of his actions, she exposes the superficiality of his quest for freedom and serves as the catalyst for his return to Janice, and later, for his final, desperate flight.

Marty Tothero is Rabbit’s former high-school basketball coach and a flawed mentor figure. He represents a direct link to Rabbit’s glorified past, the era of his “first-rate” self. When Rabbit first runs away, he instinctively seeks out Tothero, who now lives a lonely, disgraced life with alcoholism in a room at the Sunshine Athletic Association. Tothero is a pathetic figure, a man whose career was ended by scandal. He eagerly takes Rabbit in, seeing in the younger man a chance to relive his own past glory and reassert his identity as a coach and mentor. He attempts to offer Rabbit advice on life and marriage, claiming that he gave him “the will to achievement” (57), but his counsel is often rambling, contradictory, and self-serving. 

Tothero’s primary function in the narrative is to illustrate the destructive nature of nostalgia. He is a ghost from Rabbit’s past, and his dilapidated existence serves as a grim portent of what happens when one can no longer move beyond former triumphs. His physical and moral decay demonstrates that the past Rabbit so desperately seeks to recapture is gone and cannot be a foundation for the present.

Mary and Earl Angstrom represent the working-class environment and emotional landscape that shaped Rabbit’s immaturity. Rabbit’s mother, Mary, is a formidable and critical woman whose love for her son is deeply possessive. She resents Janice for “trapping” Rabbit and remains convinced that he is a “good boy” (90) who has been wronged. Her refusal to acknowledge her son’s faults contributes to his inability to accept responsibility for his own actions. Rabbit’s father, Earl, is a weary, defeated man who works as a printer. He is disappointed in Rabbit for rejecting a life of steady work and feels alienated from his son, viewing him as having become “the worst kind of Brewer bum” (141). Together, the Angstroms’ conflicting attitudes toward Rabbit illustrate the familial dysfunction that underlies Rabbit’s impulse to run.