The Aeneid 1099Beyond basketball—or more specifically, his
nostalgic fixation on high school glory—Harry
senses that he is trapped. Whether figuratively in a
“web” or a “net,” a metaphor that runs all through
the novel, the young husband and father feels that
he has no choice but to run away, which he often
does. After the basketball game, he returns home
to his pregnant, drunk, and “dumb” wife, Janice.
They argue. Repentant and indignant, he leaves to
retrieve the car from her mother’s. But rather than
pick up vehicle and son as promised, Harry makes
what ends up being the first of his many getaways.
These are always spontaneous, which saves him
from “the inconvenience of lying.” Yet because they
are unplanned, his exits are never lasting, never
successful. Perhaps this is why, always acting in
“decisive haste,” Harry does not prepare his escapes.
Perhaps he sees them as but small vacations from the
demands of the everyday, much like the brief relief
provided by his high-school nostalgia. Or, perhaps,
he really is entrapped by the claustrophobic, spiritu-
ally oppressive expectations of late-1950s suburbia.
After his first flight from his very pregnant wife,
Harry takes up with Ruth, a prostitute. Two months
later, right after he forces her to give him a blow
job, he leaves the now-pregnant Ruth and returns
to Janice in the delivery room. He quickly reconciles
with his heavily sedated wife. Soon after, however,
he walks out on the postpartum Janice because she
cannot yet have sex with him. Afraid, angry, and
alone with their two children, Janice resumes drink-
ing. Inadvisably, she decides to bathe her newborn.
Updike’s free indirect narrator relates this scene
from Janice’s drunken perspective, a disconnected
view that concludes with the horrible drowning
of the week-old Becky June, the haze of alcohol
distorting any decisive boundary between accident
and murder.
It is in these difficult and always shocking
terms that Updike asks us to think about violence.
Whether detailing the city, the slum, lonesomeness,
sex, loss, desire, or coercion, the narrator asks us to
reconsider how we define, and too often dismiss,
the violence of our actions. In Rabbit, Run, no
one—including the title character, the Reverend
Eccles, and the narrator himself—has a monopoly
on innocence or criminality. In spite of his unshak-
able fear of the police, Harry is no more “guilty” than
Eccles, who disregards his wife and kids to harp on
his parishioners’ problems. Eccles himself is no less
guilty than his wife, Lucy, who flirts with Harry
only to admonish the part-time bachelor when he
declines her advances. Lucy, in turn, is no less guilty
than Janice’s own mother and neighbors, who blame
the young wife for Harry’s infidelity.
Equally implicated in this culture of victim-
hood, wherein social convention perpetuates violent
conformism, is the individual who exposes readers
to all of these forms of violence: Updike. As we are
reassured by his elegant prose, we are also positioned
in a claustrophobic place. In this sense, we are all
like Harry. Though Updike’s wonderful writing style
may offer momentary relief—or escape—from the
plot’s shocking ruthlessness, we are always forced
to return to this story, in which no one avoids the
many violences of modern America. And those of
us who refuse to discuss, much less acknowledge,
the myriad difficulties of the world around us perpe-
trate the greatest violence: that of willful ignorance.
Representing violence is not itself violent. Ignoring
violence and its multiple consequences, however,
most definitely is.
Jason S. PolleyvirGiL The Aeneid (19 b.c.)
The Aeneid of Virgil (70–19 b.c.) is a Latin epic
poem in hexameter verse. Unlike Homer’s The iliad
and The odySSey, it is not the product of an oral
tradition of storytelling but began its life as a written
work explicitly modeled on Greek poetic forms. The
Aeneid is widely considered one of the very greatest
works of Latin literature, and it has had an extraor-
dinary influence on Western literature, music, and
the visual arts. Central themes of The Aeneid include
heroism, cruelty, responsibility, love, com-
munity, family, grief, hope, violence, death,
memory, fate, and nationalism.
The hero of The Aeneid is Aeneas: a Trojan
prince, son of the goddess Venus, who escapes from
Troy in its last hours, leading his father, Anchises;
his son, Ilus; and a group of Trojans in search of the
new land promised to him by dream and prophecy.
The first half of Virgil’s epic resembles The Odyssey: