I finally got around to reading John Updike's 1960 novel "Rabbit, Run." It is one of those ones that all the smart kids read in college and I knew I would like if I just got around to it. Well I got around to it.
For those who don't know the book, it is the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a 26 year old with a wife a kid and another on the way. Rabbit, out of the blue, decides to run off. He ends up living for four months with a prostitute in another town until his wife has the new baby, when he comes home.
Shortly after the birth of his new daughter, he and Janice (his wife) argue and he runs off again. In shame and dismay, his wife becomes very drunk and accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub. This brings Rabbit home yet again.
The funeral proves to be more than Rabbit can handle...so, you guessed it, he runs away again. Thus ending the first of four Rabbit novels with the line, "...he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."
The very well written book makes one great statement about mankind. It is but this: we are idiots and we are not worth saving! Rabbit runs away when he realizes that his adult life is not what it might have been. He looks back on his glory days when he was a rising high school basketball star and he refuses to see that he is no longer that kid. He cannot see that being the most important thing in high school doesn't make him the most important thing in the new world. So he runs. He runs back to those days.
When he realizes that he has sinned against his wife and against his family, he returns. But he stays only until he does not get what he wants (in this case, sex... actually Rabbit's internal drive throughout the novel centers on a constant need for sex). Then, he is gone again. And the cycle repeats itself yet a third time before the book is over, when he finds out that his girlfriend in the other town is also pregnant.
Rabbit runs all over Pennsylvania trying to satisfy his own desires and, as do the rest of us, he leaves misery in his wake. Rabbit's life in an extreme example, but an example none the less, of what we all do all the time. We make ourselves all important. We become the only human with rights and we do whatever we must to make ourselves comfortable. Nina Baym was correct to include this novel in a list of book about the myth that is the American dream (in her essay "Melodramas of Beset Manhood"). We do desire the dream of being able to run from whatever holds us back in our own minds. This is what it means to be American. I may do whatever I wish, regardless of the cost incurred on those I love.
Baym calls Rabbit's actions (or perhaps Updike's telling of them) an "evocation of flight for it's own sake." I disagree. It is not for it's own sake. Rabbit does not fly simply because he can or to celebrate his freedom to fly. It is flight born out of his own selfishness. Flight because my comfort is more important that the lives of my children. As long as I don't hold the baby's head under water, I'm not guilty. As Rabbit says to his wife at the funeral, "What are you looking at me for? I didn't kill her."
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