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Abstract

ABSTRACT

Harry's Identity in John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy

Kim, Ki-Young Faculty Adviser : Prof. Hong, Sung-Yong, Ph.D. Department of English Language and Literature Graduate School of Chosun University

This dissertation delves into the identity of Harry Angstrom, male protagonist in the Rabbit Tetralogy written by John Updike who was born in Pennsylvania to poor, well-read parents. At the age of 7, Updike had already begun cartooning. When he went to Shillington High School, he contributed to the school newspaper and served as class president. He entered Harvard on a tuition scholarship, eventually majoring in English and graduated summa cum laude in 1953. His senior thesis won a Knox Fellowship, enabling him to attended Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, England. Beginning with The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1959), he has produced many works in various areas such as novels, short stories, poetry, children's literature and play. He wrote a "Rabbit" series every 10 years. Harry Angstrom (the male protagonist) grows 10 years older between each of the four novels. In Rabbit, Run he was a 26 year-old ex-basketball player whose sports success (in high school) left him unfit for the "second-rate" life of working and raising a family. He retained his inner need for first-ratedness or "specialness." The story begins with Harry having difficulties accepting the reality that he is a common salaried man who demonstrates kitchen gadgets and is the father of 3 year old son. In chapter Ⅱ, the background of "gender theory" and the periodical and social background of the Rabbit novels will be examined. Harry's patriarchal attitude and view are the heritage of the culture and society to which he belongs. The defensive attitudes and behavior that Harry adopts are part of his (and sometimes the writer's) cultural inheritance as a male. Critics generally agree that in Updike's work the characters' sexuality reflects their spiritual condition. However, the characters' sexual arrangements, derived from a patriarchal model, also contribute to their spiritual condition. Updike follows Freud's notion of the radical centrality of sex. In the Rabbit novels, Updike is exploring the negative aspects of masculinity, in particular the negative aspects of male power, and revealing their effects on the individual and his relationships. Because the periods and social backgrounds of the Rabbit novels are relevant to the ones experienced by Updike in real life, he may be the primary novelist to read for an understanding of the complexity of American society after 1950. Born in 1932 and thus a child of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Updike matured during the two decades of unremitting national hardship. In chapter Ⅲ, Harry is introduced through Rabbit, Run which is the first novel in the Rabbit series. Rabbit, Run is meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road. The people left behind get hurt. He remains irresponsible and indecisive to the people around him and tends to focus on his own needs and feelings more than anything else. The mentality which triggered his running away from home will be analyzed in this chapter. And the patriarchal attitude he shows in his treatment of women will be examined, too. In chapter Ⅳ, Rabbit, Redux is studied. Harry lives with his son without his wife, who has an extra martial affair. Rabbit, Redux is the most violent and bizarre of the Rabbit novels, but then the Sixties were the most violent and bizarre of these decades. Compared to Rabbit, Run which has very little direct cultural and political reference, Rabbit, Redux covers many controversial issues like the Vietnam War, the women's movement, the moon flight, the civil rights protests, Black Power, and drug abuse. Harry experiences alienation and solitude in the middle of the excitement and confusion of the 60's. The question of where human beings' alienation and solitude originated will be considered here. In chapter Ⅴ, Harry's mammonish way of thinking, which stood out in Rabbit Is Rich, will be examined. Harry, who has reached his 40's, enjoys material abundance. He starts to experience physical decline though. He is also confronted with a psychological and spiritual crisis. He is not an exception from other typical middle aged men. His relationship with his son has deteriorated. This antagonism between Harry and his son is striking in Rabbit Is Rich and will be analyzed on the basis of the Oedipus complex. The analogy between Rabbit Is Rich and Babbit written by Sinclair Lewis in 1922 will be looked into as well. In chapter Ⅵ, the entity of death which Harry is finally confronted with will be explored. Harry dies of heart disease at the age of 56 in Rabbit at Rest. The subject of death is actually Updike's own problem which he has been taking much pains to solve. For Updike, the shock of cosmic precariousness and a resultant fear of dying impelled a religious conversion. Updike's protagonists, including Harry, typically replay the definitional crisis recounted by the author: arrested by a fear of death. He is especially inspired by the Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard and the neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth. Harry, Updike's alter ego, shows a very complicated attitude toward his disease and death. The complex psychological aspects of this will be examined in this chapter. In chapter Ⅶ, Harry's identity will be considered, laying stress on his religious faith and feeling of specialness. A "God-haunted tone" is strongly shown in Run as compared to later novels. Harry and two ministers (who appear in Run) have different theological views. Harry's is very post modern; he pursues something he can feel. He can't express what it is though. Regrettably he fails to expand his thinking on God to the idea of salvation. So he doesn't consider himself as a being receiving God's grace. As a result he is unable to enjoy calmness of spirit and leads an unstable spiritual life. In chapter Ⅷ, the analysis of the protagonist, Harry as a symbolic figure representing America will be attempted. Since each book is steeped in American history, linking Rabbit, Run to Rabbit at Rest produces a review of the major political and social determinants in American life and raises the importance of Rabbit by enforcing his symbolic representation of America. Rabbit is now part of the honor roll of American literary heroes, characters who reflect the culture. The difference between the purity of Natty Bumppo (who appears in Prairie) and Harry Angstrom's paradoxes are immense, but both embody the dreams of the society of their time. The honor roll calls the names of the American identity - Natty, Hester, Uncle Tom, Ahab and Ishmael, Huck and Jim, Gatsby, Tom Joad, Holden Caulfield, the invisible Man, Augie March, Rabbit. This list confirms the changing nature of the country's sense of its own individuality, its own greatness, its own destiny. All through the Rabbit novels, Updike's subject is the puzzle of America.