Rabbit, Run

The novel begins with a basketball game meant to evoke Rabbit’s past, which is marked by athletic grace and a clear sense of purpose. The game offers a temporary liberation from domestic life that will motivate Rabbit’s more consequential retreat from home, but this freedom is illusory. Rabbit’s flight is driven by an immersion in The Trap of Nostalgia. His present is defined by its failure to live up to the glory of his high school basketball career, a time of public adoration and personal transcendence. He revisits his childhood neighborhood and stands outside his parents’ home, peering through a window at an idealized family scene from which he is excluded. The window is a barrier between him and the inaccessible diorama of the past, reinforcing his status as an outsider. His search for Marty Tothero is also a search for a figure who represents the peak of his past, yet Tothero is now a diminished man living in a club attic. While Rabbit seeks validation, Tothero can only offer a messy cot and a double date, using Rabbit to relive his own coaching days. This reliance on a decaying past offers no viable solution for Rabbit’s anxieties; instead, it underscores the inadequacy of memory as a permanent refuge.

Nevertheless, the novel’s opening chapters establish flight as Rabbit’s primary response to crisis. This flight is both a physical and psychological retreat from the constraints of adult life, encapsulating the theme of The Pursuit of Freedom and the Rejection of Responsibility. Once in his car, a symbol of American mobility, his journey becomes directionless. Rabbit aims for a fantasized southern landscape of “orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women” (23), but his ignorance of geography leads him in circles. The hardware store owner’s advice that “the only way to get somewhere… is to figure out where you’re going before you go there” (26) articulates a rational approach to life that Rabbit instinctively rejects. His frustration culminates in him tearing up his map, an act signifying his abandonment of prescribed routes in favor of aimless impulse.

Updike’s close third-person limited perspective confines the reader almost entirely within Rabbit’s consciousness, rendering his existential panic with intimacy. This perspective eschews objective judgment, instead presenting Rabbit’s rationalizations and sensory experiences as his immediate reality. The narrative conveys his feeling of suffocation directly, such as when he “senses he is in a trap” (15) after Janice asks him to buy more cigarettes. His memories are presented as fluid intrusions into his present thoughts, blending his walk through Brewer with recollections of his childhood. This method forces the reader to inhabit Rabbit’s deeply subjective worldview, which views his wife’s behavior as disdain for her pregnancy and adult responsibility as a “tightening net” (14). The prose captures the rhythm of his mind, which constantly seeks moments of grace, like the memory of a basketball dropping through “the high perfect hole with its pretty skirt of net” (34), in a world that offers only mundane clutter.

The initial chapters also depict a landscape of failed authority and spiritual vacancy, reflecting The Inadequacy of Modern Religion and secular institutions. Rabbit’s identity as a Christian is nominal, surfacing as a flicker of guilt while he observes a children’s television program. The show’s simplistic proverb, “Know Thyself” (10), offers a hollow platitude that provides no real guidance for his profound discontent. The authority figures he encounters are similarly flawed. The gas station owner who offers sober advice smells of whisky, undermining his credibility. Marty Tothero, the coach who once embodied discipline, is now framed in Rabbit’s eyes as a diminished, manipulative figure whose lectures on achievement ring hollow. This consistent failure of external figures and belief systems to provide meaning contributes to Rabbit’s isolation. He is adrift in a post-war American landscape where the traditional pillars of community and faith have eroded, leaving him with only his flawed impulses as a guide.

Rabbit’s rejection of responsibility is inextricably linked to his perception of women, whose bodies represent the messy, biological realities he seeks to escape. He is repulsed by Janice’s pregnant form, which serves as a constant, physical reminder of his deepening domestic obligations. His memories of her pre-marital body are idealized, nostalgic for a time before consequences. By contrast, his encounter with Ruth Leonard introduces an alternative. Though his initial assessment of her is objectifying and coldly transactional, he is drawn to her because she exists outside his domestic trap. The date becomes a performance of his past self as the basketball hero for a new female audience. By offering Ruth money, he attempts to establish a relationship based on a simple exchange, free from the emotional and historical entanglement that defines his marriage. This dynamic establishes a core conflict: Rabbit’s desire for an uncomplicated, idealized form of femininity clashes with the complex reality of women as individuals.