Rabbit, Run 1097comprehend. In order to avoid his nagging mother-
in-law, he sneaks around the big Springer house and
into the car, a “‘55 Ford that old man Springer . . .
sold him for an even thousand in 1957 because the
scared bastard was ashamed, cars being his business
he was ashamed of his daughter marrying somebody
who had nothing but a ’36 Buick.” He elects not to
pick up his son at his parents’ miserable two-family
dwelling, where his mother will gossip about his
spoiled wife. Duties and troubles be damned; he
decides to escape by aiming the car due south, a $73
paycheck padding his pocket.
But Harry’s beach-bound getaway from his sorry
family is short-lived. His flight from the suburbs of
Brewer, Pennsylvania, only calls to mind his unen-
viable social position. The road sucks him toward
Philadelphia—”Dirtiest city in the world”—despite
his intentions. He turns toward Wilmington, a town
owned by the wealthy Du Ponts, and wonders what
it would be like to sleep with a really rich girl pool-
side in France. Road and radio continue to conspire
against him: He gets nowhere. The ballads he sings,
the pie he eats, the news he hears, and the lover’s
lane he wrongly turns down all remind him of the
wife and life he’s abandoning—of the “criminal” act
he’s committing. He feels as though he is caught in
a “net” or “web,” a novel-long theme representing his
tenuous ties with his social network. He asks himself
why he is “unlike” other people, why he is “outside”
all of America.
Unlike the road trips of his Beat Generation
contemporaries, Harry’s is anything but liberating.
His highway getaway rouses his feelings of un-
belonging and entrapment. This is why he turns
to the ex-basketball coach Marty Tothero when
he returns to Brewer the next morning. Tothero
reminds Harry of his high-school days, where he
captained a winning team. Furthermore, Tothero’s
broken condition (he is old, sick, poor, alone, and
dirty) provides a telling contrast to Harry’s own
circumstances. Harry feels neither ashamed nor
unworthy when with Tothero and his disreputable
associates. Feeling affluent, Harry pays for meals and
drinks. He extends this relative sense of richness. He
takes up with Ruth, a prostitute to whom he gives
money for food and rent, thereby gaining a measure
of social improvement. For as long as this escape
from his legal family lasts, he is no longer an embar-
rassing husband, no longer the son of a blue-collar
dad with filthy fingernails.
Social class determines every character and rela-
tionship in Rabbit, Run. Whether we consider the
down-at-the-heel gas attendant with whiskey on
his breath; the inhospitable Minister Kruppenbach
and his sweat-stained shirt; the very aged widow
admiring the many acres of her grand garden; the
pug-faced, game-legged, and sexually restless Ron-
nie Harrison; or the rich, disapproving, yet kindly
Mr. Springer in his “spiffy graphite-gray dip-and-
dry” funeral suit, we cannot help but define charac-
ters (fictional and not) in terms of their economic
positions and interests. And we often come to our
conclusions—or dismissals—before obtaining reli-
able information. Updike therefore paints a dour
portrait of the late 1950s America, a portrait that
forces us to reconsider our tendencies to make
assumptions about the people around us. In Rabbit,
Run, we identify with characters who are simultane-
ously rich and poor, friendly and unfriendly, lucky
and unlucky—complex characters who are just like
real people. And we empathize with them based not
simply on what they have done but also on what
they can, and what they want to, do.
Jason S. PolleySucceSS in Rabbit, Run
A tall 26-year-old walks an alleyway home from
work as John Updike’s Rabbit, Run opens. Nearby,
boys are playing a game of basketball. The former
joins them and sinks all manner of shots with little
effort. This on-court success reminds him of his
high-school days, when he was “famous through the
county” for his “B-league scoring record.” Spoiling
his sweet nostalgia, however, is his fatigue. Though
still thin, his body feels weighty, a sign of the grow-
ing distance between his present and his past. He is
no longer the tireless Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. To
everyone, save Updike’s narrator, he is just Harry.
The “Rabbit” nickname therefore has an ironic ring.
It speaks of who he was rather than who he is. Irony
likewise extends to Rabbit’s prior success. He starred
in the B leagues, not the A leagues, after all.
What Harry actually is is an underemployed
and unhappy family man. He routinely escapes