Abstract
John Updike’s Rabbit, Run addresses the human condition under the reign of capital in the context of a society in transition toward a neoliberal state. By depicting a protagonist preoccupied with desire and consciousness through recounting his immediate experiences, the narrative delineates the confusion inherent in the capitalistic state for the protagonist in search of a way out toward self-actualization. Through the application of possible world theory, it is argued that the imbalance between Rabbit’s counterfactual possible worlds and his actual world accounts for the failure he experiences in his quest. As such, the possible worlds’ disequilibrium, we argue, ultimately leads to Rabbit’s bitter failure in his search; too many possible worlds in their counterfactual state produce a kind of counter-reality where there are too many fantasy/wish worlds, but few obligation worlds, a situation that leads to all the inevitable consequences we witness at the end of Book One of the Rabbit tetralogy.
Highlights
Updike’s Rabbit, Run, written in 1960, owes a great deal of its popularity to its realistic portrait of an American everyman, a young man of modern times known as Harry Rabbit Angstrom
Too many possible worlds in their counterfactual state, we argue, produce a kind of counter-reality in which there are too many fantasy and wish worlds, but very few obligation worlds, a situation that leads to the inevitable sense of failure Rabbit experiences in all the novels of the Rabbit tetralogy
Even when Rabbit wants to attract Janice’s attention, he uses his advertising piece to relate his ideas. This scene opposes the text actual world and Rabbit’s wish world initiated in his blend. What he encounters at home, the failure and the consequent marital suffocation he is experiencing in his married life with Janice, brings about a sense of entrapment for a rabbit ready to run away: “Rabbit freezes, standing looking at the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap” (Updike 18)
Summary
Updike’s Rabbit, Run, written in 1960, owes a great deal of its popularity to its realistic portrait of an American everyman, a young man of modern times known as Harry Rabbit Angstrom. Capitalist culture, either liberal or neoliberal, needs a special type of mentality, one that responds to “the ubiquity of market logic” (Johansen and Karl 203) and is run by it This mentality, comes at great cost in that it de-stabilizes the cognitive balance the individual needs to live with because it promises fake worlds of success and individual self-actualization while simultaneously preventing proper access to them. Run can be understood as a reflection of the society it depicts, and as a meticulous examination of the psyche of the person experiencing life in such a society Not surprisingly, this type of study will prove the point Emily Johansen has in mind: “If earlier forms of the bildungsroman sought to reconcile the self to capitalist and statist sociabilities, the transformations of capital (and the state) under high imperialism begins to disrupt even the possibility of such reconciliation” [300]
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