Rabbit, Run is the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star living in Brewer, Pennsylvania with his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. Harry experiences a crisis of self that leads him to abandon his family and make many abortive attempts to "find" himself. Harry repeatedly pressures women for sex, attempting to exert control over his life even as it loses all form and purpose. At the novel's end his newborn child dies in an accident and Harry's fate is left uncertain.
Updike said, "About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior." Rabbit has an animalistic obsession with sex rather than a romanticized vision. He uses superficial criteria to pick his partners. He is taken with Ruth because she "feels right" as long as she doesn't use a "flying saucer," and even compels her to fellate him during a particularly intense bout of physical desire. He seems to use intense sex to replace what is missing from his work and life at home. His sexual prowess also supplies him with the sense of identity that his basketball playing gave him.
For Updike, the particular etiology of Rabbits sickness can be perceived as his distance from God, illustrated by his cavalier conversations with Eccles. The existing framework of religion and ethics should support his devotion to his marriage, job, and life, but he finds it utterly unsatisfactory. Rabbit is clearly a sinner and in some ways he is aware of that, but he still quests for some kind of religious meaning in his life,“Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you. I do feel, I guess that somewhere behind all this… there’s something that wants me to find it!”
Rabbit faces a deep-seated psychological identity crisis throughout the book. This is due somewhat to his affectionless relationship with his mother, which has at the very least given him cause to imagine matricidal and suicidal acts. Rabbit hungers for something more than what he has, for a return to the golden era of his youth, for the sexual comfort of his relationship with Janice, and for a worldview that fits his tumultuous emotions.
Rabbit, Run is set against the background of the America of the fifties. The Eisenhower era, apart from offering tremendous consumerist possibilities, urged Americans to renegotiate themselves to the postwar reality. The cultural atmosphere of the 1950s, charged by the politics of the Cold War, thus necessitated the phenomena of self-definition at all levels and in all areas of life. Alive to the mood of inner-directedness, Updike’s Rabbit considers himself “as a person in the process of becoming”. This involves his rejection of certain traditional aspects of American life in search of a satisfactory place in the world that is never really found, as the book ends with his fate uncertain.
Rabbit is always running, searching and questing for meaning. But while at times he finds himself enthralled with people, like his relationship with Ruth, his conversations with Eccles, and his initial return to his family, in the end Rabbit is dissatisfied and takes flight. Transience appears to be implicit in the character.
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