Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
abbit, Run covers three months in the troubled and confused life of
The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all
knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank
in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here, why is this town, a dull suburb
of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains im-
mense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—
the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—ignites
panic in his heart. (260 –61)
As with Caldwell, Rabbit’s pain leads him to question his fate. The terms “rid-
dle” and “mystery” fit, for comedy presents life as perplexing; moreover, it is
appropriate that a familiar, everyday and ordinary scene of neighborhood
houses inspires Rabbit’s inquiries. In contrast, Rabbit had earlier arrogantly
insisted that “it,” the meaning of life, transcended an ugly housing develop-
ment that he and Eccles pass. Now, Rabbit’s musings suggest a heightening of
consciousness, for comedy celebrates open minds and ridicules closed ones.
After the drowning, Rabbit reflects upon why he stayed away from his
home on the day of the accident: “What held him back all day was the feeling
that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies
cry and cheating people in a used-car lot and it’s this feeling he tries to kill”
(250). The reference to killing is appropriate, for the immature Rabbit must
die for him to mature. Gradually, Rabbit comes to recognize the primacy of
parenthood: “Or maybe just being a father makes everyone forgive you, be-
cause after all it’s the only sure thing we’re here for” (187); Janice too “seems
to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white pliant machine for
fucking, hatching, feeding” (216).
The Comic Hero’s Place in the Generations in Rabbit, Run | 61
Later, when Rabbit takes Nelson to a playground, the familiar sounds and
smells of childhood activities produce not nostalgia this time but a revelation:
“He feels the truth: the only thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no
search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the
town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends
when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is
through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower
stalks”(208). Rabbit’s youth is gone and no flight, whether to Florida or to a
nostalgic paradise lost, can recapture it. The final image directly connects this
insight to the repeated images of decaying flower stalks, especially his experi-
ence in Mrs. Smith’s garden, where, as part of his duties, he cut and burned the
“crumbled stalks.”
Rabbit, too, belongs to the natural process of life. At one point Rabbit al-
ludes to a local event called “Fosnacht Day.” The origin and specific details of
this holiday are vague in his mind for it is a vestige of an earlier time, a folk
custom, and dying out. Rabbit does, however, remember that when he was a
child his grandfather would purposely delay coming downstairs in order that
his grandson would not be the Fosnacht:
The term “Fosnacht” is never defined in the novel, but its scapegoat connota-
tions are suggested by the translation of two German words: Fastnacht, mean-
ing “Shrove Tuesday,” and Fasernackt, meaning “stark naked.” As the Hamil-
tons point out, the golf match with Eccles where Rabbit suffers the
humiliation of his embarrassing play and the minister’s sarcasm occurs on
Shrove Tuesday (147). Edith Kern alludes to the “German Fastnachtspiele that
combines scapegoat rites with celebrations of nature’s changing seasons in
such a way that the fool as a central figure is frequently killed and later resur-
rected” (11). Linking the European Middle Ages with modern America, the
preservation of this ritual reflects the comic notion that the essential concerns
of humanity do not change. Like the pharmakos associations with Caldwell
and Eccles, the grandfather’s behavior represents the older generation’s self-
sacrifice on behalf of the younger. On the golf course, the chastened Rabbit
looks to the sky as he had when as a child he would look upstairs for his
grandfather’s protection; now, however, his grandfather is dead and it is
Rabbit’s turn to assume the adult’s protective role.
62 | John Updike’s Human Comedy
An episode occurs that shows Rabbit momentarily accepting this role. Fit-
tingly, the event is both minor and farcical. After reconciling with Janice, he
has accepted his father-in-law’s offer to work in his used car lot and thus must
quit the gardening job with Mrs. Smith. By doing so, he sacrifices his own
happiness for the obligation to support his family. On Rabbit’s farewell visit
with Mrs. Smith, Nelson, who has accompanied his father, bites into a piece of
chocolate candy that she has offered him. The taste, however, is too rich for
him and Rabbit allows the boy to spit out the “bits of chocolate shell and
stringy warm syrup and the broken cherry” into his hand (207). Significantly,
Rabbit accepts “this mess” of his son’s in contrast to his earlier fleeing the
muddle of his home life. As a result, he is left with a hand “full of melting
mashed candy” as Mrs. Smith, unaware of this occurrence, embraces him. The
intent is not to undercut the real emotion in the scene but to indicate Rabbit’s
willingness, at least in a small way, to sacrifice himself for his son.
Yet Rabbit remains far from ready for the demands of the ethical sphere.
Near the end of the novel, the confused Rabbit, once again on the run, allays
his guilt: “Two thoughts comfort him, let a little light through the dense pack
of impossible alternatives. Ruth has parents, and she will let his baby live; two
thoughts that are perhaps the same thought, the vertical order of parenthood,
a kind of thin tube upright in time in which our solitude is somewhat diluted”
(282). Rabbit’s “two thoughts,” which provide some consolation, indicate his
inchoate double vision. Through acceptance of their duties in society, espe-
cially parenthood, human beings create order within the surrounding chaos
and in a sense transcend the limitations of the finite. Yet, maturing remains an
ongoing challenge. At the cemetery when his daughter’s tiny casket is lowered
into the ground, he panics and flees again. Understandably, he has difficulty
accepting the infant’s death and his responsibility for it. The novel’s epigraph
is Pascal’s Pensee 507: “The motions of grace, the hardness of the heart; exter-
nal circumstances.” In “Ungreat Lives,” a review of Andre Dubus’ Voices From
The Moon, Updike describes “our homely, awkward movements of familial ad-
justment and forgiveness as being natural extensions of what Pascal called ‘the
motions of grace’ ” (652). Rabbit recognizes that his desertion of Nelson “is a
hardness he must carry with him” (282–83). Unable to cope with his circum-
stances, he hardens his heart, rejecting the motions of grace.
The tension in Rabbit between his sense of responsibility and his selfishness
reflects the human condition. In “One Big Interview,” Updike asserts, “I feel
that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situ-
ation” (501). At the end of the book, Rabbit tries to determine his course: “On
this small fulcrum he tries to balance the rest, weighing opposites against each
other: Janice and Ruth, Eccles and his mother, the right way and the good way,
the way to the delicatessen—gaudy with stacked fruit lit by a naked bulb—and
The Comic Hero’s Place in the Generations in Rabbit, Run | 63
the other way, down Summer Street to where the city ends.” When he looks
toward the church, its window is dark: “There is light, though, in the street-
lights” (283). For the comic hero, understanding his role in life will come from
everyday experience, not supernatural revelation. In the words of the Stevens
poem, “Let the rabbit run.” Galligan, citing as an example the ending of Huck-
leberry Finn with Huck fleeing civilization, notes that “comedies end in a sym-
bolic gesture rather than a summary assertion” (X). The novel concludes as it
began, with Rabbit, intimidated by reality, attempting to escape from it. This
immature Rabbit still has a long way to run.