It seems funny to them, an adult walking up the alley.

They’re doing this for themselves, not as a show for some adult walking around in a double-breasted cocoa suit. The words “real boys” disclose the narrator’s intent which is to show that Rabbit acts “as if” he is boy in front of them. His standing there makes the real boys feel strange.

So tall, he seems the unlikely rabbit…He stands up thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding up on you. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, coming up the alley in his business suit, stops and watches, thought he’s twenty-six and six three. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. It’s a world where movements in space can make one forget about the world:īoys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. The main point is that this is the world that gave him his childhood dreams. Rabbit is much older than them, but he tries, by way of his movements, to come closer the children. The book starts off with the main character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s flight to a basketball court and a group of children. The experience of an American losing his dream, grappling with present circumstances, and slowly realizing his loss informs the central arc of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Blindness is painful for the reader and the subject’s blindness informs many narratives (whether in fiction or religion) throughout history. What makes the loss most intriguing for readers is when the person who experiences such loss is not fully aware of it or…the implications. Fiction gives us time to think about our movements and our need to escape. The blind hope is that if one moves fast enough, one can escape the realization that he or she has failed and that life has passed one by.īut fiction allows us to pay closer attention to this process and allows the us to ask ourselves whether we are also caught up in flights. Movement can help us to forget the loss and to somehow outrun it. Americans like to move and know that traveling to another place may provide solace in the face of the void that opens up when one’s dreams dissolve into thin air. The link between one possibility or another is to be found in the figure of movement. It’s taken as commonplace that at a certain point in life people either give up on their dreams, move on to new ones…or to none at all.

But when we see the rise and fall of American dreams, we often don’t think about ourselves. We see failure and success all around us. Americans are familiar with the trials and tribulations of success and failure.

Run rabbit run john updike