Literary Review of Rabbit Run by John Updike
John Updike's novel, Rabbit, Run, is about a man named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Rabbit is a brainless guy whose career as a high school basketball star peaked at age 18. In his wife's view, he was, before their early, hasty marriage, already drifting downhill.
We meet him for the first time in this novel, when he is 22, and a salesman in the local department store. Married to the second best sweetheart of his high school years, he is the father of a preschool son and husband to an alcoholic wife. We are at ground zero watching Rabbit struggle with aging, religion, sexuality (particularly sexuality), nature, and the trade-offs between freedom and attachment, and rebellion and conformity. In witnessing Rabbit wrestle with these big issues in his blundering, but persistent, way, we come to understand the commonality of the human experience.
Reading Updike's sentences is a breathtaking experience. He has a rare ability to transpose ordinary experiences into rarefied grounds without falsely heightening experiences themselves. Each sentence, each event in the novel is carefully considered and calibrated, so that no sentence or description seems wasteful. The technical facility of Updike is truly something to marvel at, even surpassing the lyricism of Cheever. The way he writes about sex, adultery and guilt in this book is unparalleled in 20th century American fiction, and I haven't seen any other writer come close.
Taken as an individual novel, however, it fails to rise to the status of a 'great american novel.' Although the writing is unsurpassingly beautiful, the plot is a bit thin, and ideas it expresses, commonplace. Minus the prose, the story tracks the wanderlust ...
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...l and emotional range, so why would Updike expend his considerable talent in detailing the life of so common a person? For one thing, Rabbit's experience as an ordinary man is more typical than that of someone on the tails of the bell curve and this allows Updike better to capture the spirit of the times. There is perhaps no better author than Updike in capturing the zeitgeist, and "Rabbit, Run" showcases this ability, as the subsequent books in the Rabbit tetralogy illustrate to a! n even greater extent.
Updike's inventive and flowing prose is well displayed here. Parts of the narrative are pure poetry. The dialog is brisk and gritty and the sex scenes are graphic, especially for a mainstream novel published in 1960. The writing style itself helps create mood -- lyrical when describing a flower garden and so edgy during the climatic scene that it makes you sweat.
Wells, Walter. "John Updike's 'A & P'" Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 30, (1993) : Spring, pp. 127(7).
Saldívar, Toni. "The Art of John Updike's 'A & P'." Studies in Short Fiction 34.2 (Spring 1997):
In his short story "A & P" John Updike utilizes a 19-year-old adolescent to show us how a boy gets one step closer to adulthood. Sammy, an A & P checkout clerk, talks to the reader with blunt first person observations setting the tone of the story from the outset. The setting of the story shows us Sammy's position in life and where he really wants to be. Through the characterization of Sammy, Updike employs a simple heroic gesture to teach us that actions have consequences and we are responsible for our own actions.
A satirical point that the author talked about briefly was Weaver's choice to not read the short, original novel, but the even shorter novel summary. The satire is effective because of how the authors describes the book. By including small lines such as "the most skillful example of American naturalism under 110 pages" and "Weaver's choice to read the Cliffs Notes instead of the pocket-sized novel", the brevity and literary relevance of this book is emphasized greatly. To include how short this novel is makes Weaver look positiv...
John Updike, author of A&P, graphically describes a young man’s coming-of-age story that takes place at an A&P grocery department. Updike gives first person insight into the theme by relying the story through the mind of the main character, Sammy. The author uses the plot to set forth the emotions and actions that Sammy must go through to take his necessary steps into the expedition towards manhood. Updike also takes analogies to another level, while being clever enough to fit it into the theme of the story. John Updike’s combination of plot, point of view, and analogies help glorify the story’s theme of a young man’s desire for more in life and the lessons that come from it.
In Checking out Faith and Lust: Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown and Updike’s “A&P”, Patrick W. Shaw argues that John Updike, author of “A&P”, uses some similar elements that are also present in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” that connect both stories, but they still hold many differences making both stories uniquely different while still holding a connection to one another.
Updike, John “A&P.” Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing About Fiction, Poetry, Drama and The Essay.4th e. Ed. Frank Madden. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 496-501. Print.
Updike, John. "A&P." The Bedford Introduction To Literature. Ed. Editor's Name(s). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2005.
Updike is famous for taking other author's works and twisting them so that they reflect a more contemporary flavor. While the story remains the same, the climate is singular only to Updike. This is the reason why there are similarities as well as deviations from Joyce's original piece. Plot, theme and detail are three of the most resembling aspects of the two stories over all other literary components; characteristic of both writers' works, each rendition offers its own unique perspective upon the young man's romantic infatuation. Not only are descriptive phrases shared by both stories, but parallels occur with each ending, as well (Doloff 113).
...eams of C” (Problems 150). His use of everyday life, feelings and desires makes the fictional story believable. Updike’s emphasis on relationships possibly indicates his own idea that relationships between a men and women are important, especially in the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader, whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike’s “A&P,” the literary elements character and theme are made evident. These two elements are prominent in each of the differing stories yet similarities are found through each by studying the elements. The girls’ innocence and naivety as characters act as passages to show something superior, oppression in society shown towards women that is not equally shown towards men.
"We need scarcely say, that these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral; the horror which abounds in them is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach near the sublime, and when we did not hurry over the pages in disgust, we sometimes paused to laugh outright; and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better. We heartily wish it were so, for there are occasional symptoms of no common powers of mind, struggling through a mass of absurdity, which well nigh overwhelms them; but it is a sort of absurdity that approaches so often the confines of what is wicked and immoral, that we dare hardly trust ourselves to bestow even this qualified praise. The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment."
Most short stories lack the full development of characters and focus on other literary elements to help deliver their message. However, in the short story “A&P,” John Updike uses characterization in order to develop the theme of conformity and rebellion.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
In writing this book, commonly refered to as the “Great American Novel”, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved in showing future generations what the early twenties were like, and the kinds of people that lived then. He did this in a beautifully written novel with in-depth characters, a captivating plot, and a wonderful sense of the time period.