Search for Identity in John Updike’s Rabbit Redux

          John Updike, one of the most eminent novelists in America, focuses on the poignancy of the human struggle to discover the meaning of life and man’s perennial search for values that sustain him in the midst of chaos. His fiction portrays the problems concerning with man’s place in the society, in the world and his ultimate return to nothingness. In his fiction modern man is presented as trapped in a whirlpool of industrialization and commercialism. He is, therefore, concerned with the loss of identity of an individual in a dehumanized society, which is marked by erosion of spiritual and moral values. He has exposed modern man’s continuous suffering in his writings that makes him to search for values and his identity. As Robert Detweillr observes, “In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom undergoes a quest, a reduction, a conversion and an education. This sequel to Rabbit, Run is also a quest novel.”1

          John Updike, in Rabbit Redux, treats the problems of man’s survival in such circumstances where neither scientific humanism nor religious values can provide spritual sustenance and social stability. Devoid of all social and religious values, Updikes characters strive in the atmosphere of despair, disillusionment and disbelief. His characters “exist in a climate of adjustment, and in their own ways they confront various identity crisis.”2

          In Rabit Redux, Updike’s contention is to portray his protagonist in quest for his identity. He portrays almost all the characters with due emphasis as required by their roles in the story but his primary focus is to study Harry’s response to chaotic social and domestic circumstances, Now, “Harry has lost his nikname emblem of his former vitality; he has become Harry, ‘pale and sour.”3 He presents Harry in a state of self-research, burdened as he is with the deep felt need for release and redemption. For his characters, this problematic quest involves great ankiety, anguish and hazardous adventures into unknown territories of spirit. It is through such an inward quest that one is able to sense the reality of existence.

          Updike does not directly portray his characters into social chaos; rather he presents them through a conflict in their domestic life: the riddle of sex and death, the difficulty in social survival and overpowering corruption for evolution. His characters in Rabbit Redux, feel threatened, alienated, isolated, lonely, angst – ridden, guilt-stricken; they try to counter the menacing, corrupt world, and in the very process oscillate between faith and sex, between faith and morality, between time and space, between guilt and redemption, between conceivable and inconceivable between heaven and earth, between this world and the next, between morality and immorality. George J. Searles observes, “Updike is dominantly concerned with human sexuality and its attendant complexities… [His] lovers seem always to be stymied by a fundamental conflict involving the demands of the self versus one’s obligation to others, and are frequently beset by feelings of inadequacy and quilt because of their failure to understand or balance his basic opposition.”4 Once this happens he finds that he is captrive held by family responsibilities, by social class and by his work. “All of Updike’s protagonists… are locked into extremely  complex, psychologically demanding family responsibilities that in many cases becomes Updike’s principal subject.”5 The protagonist, Harry is a passive man in his mid-thirties. Now he stays home to watch television while his wife and son go their different ways. Circumstances are so beyond his control a dying mother,  a teenage son, an unfaithful wife, and then a lost job – that the protagonist finds comfort in a stoical and passive retreat. His mother’s illness provides the counterpart, for Harry feels trapped by te dying of parents, the death of babies and the importence in between. Living in a world of plastic of modern gadgets that can not be fixed, he encounters row after row of emptiress when he enters a dray store to buy the massanger for his mother Updike is masterful here cataloguing America’s sordid plenty.

          In the earlier ‘Rabbit’ book, it was the quest of only Harry, but in the present book almost all main characters are in search of meaning and freedom in their lives. Janice also suffers from identity crisis. Harry’s sexual aversion drives. Janice out. She too goes out to revive her dead self and to search for a valid identity “I’m searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same…” (93-94). When Harry wants to bring her back, Janice tells him, “I’m trying to look honestly into myself, to see who I am, and where I should be going”(93). She is trying to survive the domestic stalemate a common phenomenon in Modern American society. As Jill says about Janice, “She’s like all you people caught in this society. She wants to be alive while she is alive”(236). Janice finds the world hollow and purposeless, not catering to her spritual longings. She uses sexuality because “it is a way to get rid of the freedom that has entered her family life.”6 Having a lover renews her, makes her past seem like a flat, fuzzy movie. Adultery has given her a voice, a sense of self, and she uses it to confront an unexpected passive husband who wants to live by traditional rules. She does not conform to the established social and moral codes. She is led to asultery because what is primary for her is her “existence which precedes essence.”7 She, too, wants a home and a family but no longer at the expense of denying the self. Updike’s account of the life is fair and reasonable. “For Updike, life is like a coin is not complete but lopsided or incomplete. The fullness of life demands acceptance of juxtaposition and contrasts.”8

          Updike presents Jill and Skeeter as radicals who have no clear perception of their predicament skeeter and Jill represent an attack of black militancy and woman activism on the literal conscience of the white Americans. The invansion of the black militancy on the white American liberalism leaves everyone panicky and insecure, woman’s liberation brings disaster to the marital relationships, protests against the Vietnam divide the whole American community into factions. Besides, the rise of an activist young generation totally unware of the old religious and social values and completely incapable of  creating new, adds more confusion to chaos. Harry falls into the trap of radical blacks who want to invade his house in his wife’s absence. Harry desperately needs a female companion in his wife’s absence. And, luckily or unluckily, he one day accepts the offer of some radical blacks. They offer him to take Jill, an eighteen year old white activist. She becomes a surrogate wife to Harry. Both Harry and Nelson become very fond of Jill. After sometime Jill brings in her friend skeeter, a black militant on the pretext that he needs protection from police. Angstrom realizes that living with Jill and Skeeter pulls him out of his depth towards a world of disorder and dirt. Now his house has degenerated from a house to a refugee camp and he is more an outsider in his dingy bedroom than the transient. Worse after listening to Skeeter and Jill, he increasingly suspects that he is a stranger in his own land. His acute sense of alienation further adds to his quest for identity Skeeter’s anger is the active side of Rabbit’s passive prejudice. When Jill for example, warns Harry to kick the redical out of the house. She sees that Harry is just as lethargic about the black madman as he is about his runaway wife. The result of his unwillingness to find his old stride is fire and Jill’s death, but as always he survives to scamper away towards tomorrow. In the meantime his confusion middles his sense of the present.

          In Rabbit Redux, Updike creats the atmosphere of social anarchy in a realistic manner through TV news. In words of George W. Hunt:

Television effectively dominates the novelist’s action: just as Harry’s interior world is divided into black and white categories that now are merging beyond his control, so too the black and white images on his TV screen provide his only entry into the world of changing external reality. The news on television, which is all about space, is all about emptiness. Thus becomes the objective correlative for the news of Harry’s soul, ironically he lives by television.9

          Updike keeps the atmosphere of Chaos alive in all four chapters and studies its impact on one particular family. Updike sets all these adverse social forces of the day active in Harry’s house to consider the burning problem: how does one survive as an individual in today’s America? The novel takes place during the late 1960 when pride in the success of Apollo II is pet against the anguish of Vietnam. The novelist dramatizes his protagonist’s situation into four parts that are placed against a common background of America’s Apollo flights to the moon. Each part begins with an epigraph from conversation between various astronauts which taken separately predict the nature of Harry’s experience in that particular part and taken collectively indicate the protagonist’s movement towards a reunion. “In Harry’s house everything is warm, wet still coming to birth but himself and his home which remains a strange dry place dry and cold and emptily spinning in the void of PennVillas like a cast off space capsule” (117). About this Sukhbir Singh observes, “Harry and Janice are like two space travelers moving through social emptiness to join together at the end. But what happens in between embodies the theme of Rabbit Redux.”10 This moon shot adventure which lovers around Harry and which is controlling metaphor of the novel, suggest to Harry and Updike a probe into emptiness, a spectacular show of nothingness. As the astronauts sore up into emptiness, Rabit’s life sinks down. The dark side of the moon shed its gloom on Brewer and Mt.Judge where Harry lives. The space is associated with nothingness and emptiness of spirit. “Updike suggests that the scientific world, when devoid of spiritualism, moves like a space craft, towards nothingness.”

          The anger and frastration of Middle America clash with anger and needs of the black outsider, and Rabbit feels caught in the trap. How can he care about the astronauts’ heroics where political events invade private lives? It is very hard to act responsibility when one’s life is disintegrating. Rabbit Redux  is filled with disease and death as if Harry’s personal predicament where a metaphor for the social collapse of traditional American values in the 1960s. Updike jwataposes the crisis. While Janice dreams of her lover, the astronauts are rearing the moon’s gravitational influence. Harry is passing through a very difficult phase of his life. He is alone, separated from his wife, isolated from his parents. His wife’s absence nags him from inside like a sore spot in his stomach. His future as a linotype setter at Varity is very difficult and uncertain when he thinks, “As a human being I/m about C minus. As a husband I am about Zilch” (66).

          Updike charts the growth of Harry from innocence to self knowledge trigged with sadness. In a desperate attempt to locate, “That something that wants me to find it” (89). Harry finds only nothingness and vacuity. The search is for the knowledge of ‘self’ and ‘valid identity and the journey becomes futile, as Harry is not able to attain spritual love. In Rabbit Redux human love is absent except between Harry’s son Nelson and Jill, the young paramour of Harry. Accroding to Updike human love is the only meaningful source of value in the early llife. Updike feels that modern man is not able to achieve joy, warmth, love, close family ties, and harmony because his interest lies solely in the  realities of existence.

          Rabbit Redux is a five example to project the utterly depraved human conditions in one way or the other. They very well show the human beings in crisis situation that call for moral choice and religious decisions concerning matters of much prominence such as life and death alongwith other issues such as family, sex, society, etc. Updike, in this novel, delineates man’s imprisonment in a hollow and empty world where values have disintegrated and sociopolitical aspects seem to exist in a vacuum. Hary in this novel, does not run or try to evade uncomfortable socio-political questions. He stays with in the matrix to discover the truth highlighting these three different experiences of a man as a sexual being, and lastly as a spritual being. These experiences lead him to some awarness of the components of life and reality.