Of course, he always comes right back out. Whenever he can’t handle all the people around him, he runs off and gets lost in the wood. When he first runs from his suburban life, he even feels trapped by the map and tears it up.

Harry is a human, city name, and Rabbit is a wild animal, a roaming-free name.

In addition to trying to find a compromise between being a grown-up and being a kid, Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is trying to find a compromise between living in society and living in the wild. This is the perfect setting for one of major ideas the novel explores: civilization vs. So we have varying degrees of wilderness, and varying degrees of civilization. Judge (a suburb), then Brewer (a big city). It goes: mountains, then virgin forest, then Mt. Let’s look at the setting of Rabbit, Run from the top down. This is an engrossing novel.March through June, 1959 in Brewer, Pennsylvania and its suburb, Mt. The writing is elegant and vivid, describing the mundane with great care, Updike was an early practitioner of the hyper-realist style.Īn intense study of family life and how the decisions we make affect those around us, the responsibilities of growing older, the lost dreams of youth and the learned pleasures of adult life. But there is also warmth in Updike’s treatment of the desperate and sometimes despicable characters that populate this entertaining novel. In the first of four Rabbit novels, Updike forensically dissects the tropes and trappings of a middle class suburban life in 60’s America with savage wit.

Will he return to his family? Or will he run off again? But it turns out that it’s not so easy for Rabbit to get escape the only life he knows and we watch on in dismay as his own failure of imagination leads him in circles until he is forced to make a choice. With a young wife, a little boy and another child on the way Rabbit is trapped in a life of seeming mediocrity, the blame for which he lays squarely at the feet of the world, and he decides to get away, to run.

But now, only a few years later, nothing has worked out the way he was so sure it would. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrum was young, popular and the high school basketball star. Poor Rabbit, his life was meant to be so good.

Run rabbit run novel