This essay presents a critical analysis of John Updike's novel Rabbit, Run (1960). Updike writes mostly of the lives of common people in small-town Pennsylvania situations. Frank N. Magill suggests: "The quality distinguishing John Updike's fiction and putting him in the front rank of novelists at an unusually young age is his ability to 'get into' his characters, to experience their palpable worlds as they experience them, and to convey these experiences in prose that is at once rich and translucent. He is in that stream of post-realism that conceives life as it is broadly and inclusively, that finds in the ordinary enough of the extraordinary to excite the poetic imagination without forsaking thorough grounding in quotidian reality. Beyond this, faint but perceptible, is a tough intellectual and religious concern for values, appearing in his fiction not so much as the assertion of one given value system or the other but rather as a constant probing of conflicts of evaluation as these arise in tangible experience " (Magill 1042).
This religious interest is observable in Jack Eccles, the Episcopal minister, used by Updike to place emphasis on spiritual and moral considerations. Although Eccles may often appear to be foolish and sometimes ridiculous, he does serve the purpose of pointing out the truth about Harry Angstrom, nicknamed 'Rabbit.' It is as if Eccles is a guide for Rabbit, who is suffering the age-old, but very modern problem of separation from God and faith. Consequently, Updike's novel expresses the theological and spiritual crisis of twentieth-century society.
Certainly, Rabbit is always running throughout the novel. He seems to be on an ever-lasting quest for something beyond his everyday surroundings. The quest is a universal archetype that has appeared in literature throughout history. As Carl Jung states: "The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a demon, a human being, or a process--th...