Running in Circles
English 631
December 3, 1990
Gian Pagnucci
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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 used car lots (John Updike, Rabbit, Run, p. 250).
Somewhere there is something better. Somewhere, out there, is the great truth, the meaning of it all. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's impulses tell him to go in search of this truth. However, he has social restraints that make it hard for him to follow those impulses. People depend on him, and if he ignores his duty to them, their cries for help may go unheard.
This is the central theme of John Updike's novel Rabbit, Run. The theme is a common one, rooted in the picaresque literary tradition. It is the theme of natural impulse versus genteel restraint. Of course, since Updike's characters are average, working-class Americans rather than wealthy aristocrats, the genteel restraint is really just the restraint of social norms and conventions; nevertheless, the essential conflict between impulse and restraint remains the same.
Harry is surrounded by social commitments. He has a young son, a pregnant wife, a job, and a social standing in the community of Mt. Judge. Social restraint demands that he not shirk from these responsibilities. But Harry's marriage seems loveless, his job seems deceitful, and his life seems unfulfilling. So Harry follows his impulses and runs away. No matter how far or how fast his impulses tell him to run, though, society's restraints keep pulling him back.
Because he is working with a picaresque theme, Updike employs many of the traditional picaresque conventions in his novel. In fact, the book is essentially a picaresque work. This can be seen by looking at its structural matter, narrative devices, character development, symbolic material, and satiric content. All of these aspects contribute to developing the book's theme of natural impulse versus social restraint.
One sees the novel's picaresque nature right away when considering its structure. This is because the novel is quite episodic even though its events occur during the relatively short period of time between March and June. In the first episode, Harry plays a basketball game. Next he has an encounter with his wife, Janice. After that he makes an aborted flight to the South. Following this are episodes with Martin Tothero, Ruth Leonard, and Jack Eccles. While these episodes do all follow a very detailed chronological progression, they are also fairly complete incidents in and of themselves. Additionally, Updike uses a standard picaresque time gap after this series of episodes to further emphasize that the novel's events should be looked at for their individual importance as well as for what they contribute to the story line.
After the jump in time, the reader finds Harry taking care of Mrs. Smith's garden. The episodes which follow in this section of the book involve Harry's life with Ruth, his return to Janice, his second desertion of Janice, and the death of their new baby, Rebecca June. Again these events are connected, but Updike now begins to use changing points of view to separate one episode from another. He continues using this method for the novel's final episodes, which involve Rebecca's funeral, Ruth's revelation to Harry of her pregnancy, and Harry's ultimate flight from everything.
Updike also makes the novel appear episodic by repeatedly using the convention of escape. Most of the novel's episodes end with Harry having to escape from some societal trap. He always succeeds in doing this, but then falls into another trap in the next episode. A good example of this pattern of escapes occurs when Harry learns that Janice is having her baby. He has escaped the trap of his marriage to Janice, but now finds that his relationship with Ruth is also a trap. He wants to go to the hospital, but Ruth doesn't want him to leave and refuses to give him her blessing to go:
'Ruth. I got to go this once, it's my baby she's having...'
Perhaps this wasn't the best way to say it but he's trying to explain and her stillness frightens him and is beginning to make him sore.
'Ruth. Hey. If you don't say anything I'm not coming back. Ruth.'
She lies there like some dead animal or somebody after a car accident when they put a tarpaulin over. He feels if he went over and lifted her she would come to life but he doesn't like being manipulated and grows angry. He puts on his shirt and doesn't bother with a coat and necktie...
When the door closes...Tears slide from her blind eyes and salt the corners of her mouth as the empty walls of the room become real and then dense
(pp. 178-9).
Just as when Harry's impulses led him away from Janice after their marriage became too restraining, so now his impulses lead him away from Ruth. For Harry this is an escape, simply another episode in his quest for the truth. The escape does, indeed, mark Harry and Ruth's affair as just another episode in the novel. But while this certainly holds to the picaresque tradition, the sight of Ruth weeping in the dark, pregnant and alone, moves the reader away from the picaresque's usual light-hearted flavor. Instead one gets only the bitter taste of what suddenly seems to be a very grim picaresque theme.
True to picaresque structure, though, characters from past episodes return to trouble Harry. Hence, while talking to his mother, Harry learns that his escape from Ruth is not complete when his mother asks him:
'And what's going to happen to this poor girl you lived with in Brewer?'
'Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn't expect nothing.' But he tastes his own saliva saying it. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother's mouth (p. 210).
Recurrences of social responsibilities are Updike's way of reworking the standard picaresque recognition scene. Harry may not physically reencounter the people he is involved with, as here where Ruth is not actually present, but the event has all the impact of the normal picaresque recognition scene, perhaps more so, since Harry is so shocked to find that leaving Ruth does not get her completely out of his life. Updike uses these mental recognition scenes to emphasize the idea of the social net that Harry is a part of and which his natural impulses urge him to flee. Updike also involves Harry in some more traditional recognition scenes, in particular with Tothero and Eccles' wife Lucy, but it is the times when Harry is simply forced to remember the people who depend on him that the novel's structure most powerfully demonstrates the conflict between social restraint and natural impulse.
Like its structure, Rabbit, Run's narrative material is suffused with picaresque conventions that develop the impulse versus restraint theme. This might seem surprising at first. After all, even though the novel's theme is picaresque, its setting in 20th Century America does not seem conducive to the use of standard picaresque narrative material like duels, disguises, and damsels in distress. Nevertheless, Updike does manage to work this picaresque material in, no doubt because it serves so well to elaborate his novel's picaresque theme.
For instance, Updike works the common picaresque material of battle and war into his story through Harry's recollection of his military service. In particular, Harry describes his visit to a whore house while he was in the military. Updike then ties this whole scenario into a statement Janice makes to Harry:
The girl in the other bed in here went home today so why don't you sneak around when you go and come in the window and we can lie awake all night and tell each other stories? Just like you've come back from the Army or somewhere. Did you make love to lots of other women? (p. 190).
Janice is trying to pretend that Harry's infidelity is like that of a soldier at war, a circumstantial type of disloyalty that is somehow excusable because it is only temporary. Yet for this to be true, Harry would have to accept the social order that says he cannot leave his wife for good, and this is something his instincts won't let him do. While most picaresque novels do not use the idea of war in quite this way, Updike is able to connect the idea very directly to Rabbit, Run's theme.
Similarly, Updike reworks the damsel-in-distress convention to develop his theme in the novel's modern setting. Ruth is certainly a type of damsel in distress. Her life as a prostitute is unhappy and obviously dangerous. Harry rescues her from this, but then, through his selfish insistence that they not practice birth control, he impregnates her. Thereafter, he abandons her, so Ruth probably ends up being more of a damsel in distress after Harry saves her than before.
Likewise, when Harry returns to Janice, he ends her distress at being deserted during her pregnancy. Unfortunately, he subsequently leaves her for a second time which pushes her to drink so much that she kills her baby in a drunken stupor. As with Ruth, Janice is better off in her initial distressed condition than she is after Harry attempts to save her.
So like a chivalrous knight, Harry does sometimes save damsels in distress, but, regretfully, he also turns out to be a knight who puts damsels into distress. He is like the evil knights in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen who would rescue princesses from dragons only to rape the women themselves. Harry may, on impulse, save a damsel in distress, but it should not be forgotten that following his impulses is what causes Janice's initial distress in the first place. Even Ruth seems fairly content with her life, though not particularly happy, before Harry's interference. Harry's impulses can lead to good, but more often than not they lead to damsels crying in distress.
While Updike's use of war and distressed damsels may stray a little from standard picaresque conventions, he does incorporate a number of more typically picaresque narrative techniques into the work to develop the impulse versus restraint theme. For instance, he puts sporting contests in the novel. These include both basketball games and golf matches. The golf matches are especially important because Eccles uses them as an opportunity to try forcing Harry to accept society's restraints:
...for Eccles there is an additional hope, a secret determination to trounce Harry. He feels that the thing that makes Harry unsteady, that makes him unable to repeat his beautiful effortless swing every time, is the thing at the root of all the problems that he has created; and that be beating him decisively he, Eccles, will get on top of this weakness, this flaw, and hence solve the problems (p. 157).
Yet even as Eccles works to impose society's restraints on Harry, Harry is awakening in Eccles the impulse to join him in the search for the great truth: "Only Harry gives the game a desperate gaiety, as if they are together engaged in an impossible quest set by a benevolent but absurd lord, a quest whose humiliations sting them almost to tears but one that is renewed at each tee, in a fresh flood of green" (p. 157). Obviously this sporting contest is playing right into Updike's theme.
Another typically picaresque narrative technique which Updike uses is seduction. In a sense, Harry seduces Ruth into making love to him as a lover and not just as another trick. Updike's main use of seduction, though, is in the encounters between Lucy Eccles and Harry. While neither actually gives in to their sexual desires, each seems intent on seducing the other. Harry swats Lucy on the rear, and she invites him in while her husband is away at church. Even if Lucy's desire is only in Harry's mind, he certainly lusts for her. In fact, at one point his desire for her becomes so great he has to resort to masturbation. In the end, Harry does not give in to this sexual impulse, but the temptation of seducing someone's wife, especially a minister's wife, shows how Harry is wrestling with the conflict between natural impulse and social restraint.
One other picaresque narrative convention that adds to the impulse versus restraint theme is disguise. While Harry doesn't actually dress in any disguises, he does often have to wear other people's clothes. He borrows shirts from Tothero and Mr. Springer. Whenever Harry does this, it is because he has narrowly escaped from some social commitment without time to bring along any clothes. He borrows the shirts both times he leaves his wife, and this emphasizes the price Harry, as well as Janice, pays when he follows his impulses and breaks society's rules. Though not disguises, the borrowed shirts are Harry's attempt to cover up his social transgressions; at the same time, however, they force him to think about those transgressions and their cost.
Considering how much Updike uses picaresque structural and narrative conventions to develop his impulse versus restraint theme, it should not be surprising to find that his characters match the picaresque conventions as well. Indeed, like many picaresque protagonists, Harry is an idealist. He thinks society is corrupt and needs to be changed. In fact, as the book progresses he comes to believe that he, and only he, can figure out how to save society because everyone else seems willing to accept society's corruption as a necessary and perhaps good thing. Even when he first runs out on his marriage, Harry is already forming the idea that he can see society's evils
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while no one else can:
Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside cafe for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers...He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside, or is it all America?