SOURCE: “Rabbit Is Rich as a Naturalistic Novel,” in American Literature, Vol. 61, No. 3, October, 1989, pp. 429–45.

[In the following essay, Lasseter examines elements of naturalism, literary realism, and deterministic philosophy in Rabbit Is Rich. According to Lasseter, “The theme of entropy which dominates Rabbit Is Rich can be understood in terms of the naturalistic trap. This is a novel about limits, energy crises, hostages, and death.”]

Throughout John Updike's “Rabbit” novels, Harry Angstrom makes striking economic progress. By most American standards, he has found success in Rabbit Is Rich. No longer feeling the need to escape, as he did in Rabbit, Run, and having survived the collapse of his marriage and the fire that destroyed his home in Rabbit Redux, he now runs the family Toyota franchise and lives with his reconciled wife Janice in their new suburban home.

Although Rabbit the automobile dealer seems reasonably successful, in Rabbit Is Rich—and in the two earlier Rabbit novels—Updike recreates in many ways the grim world of American naturalistic novels such as McTeague, The Red Badge of Courage, or Sister Carrie. A specific parallel to McTeague may be noted, for instance, when Janice and Rabbit make love on a pile of gold coins and to An American Tragedy when Nelson pushes his pregnant wife down the stairs. Indeed, Updike restricts his protagonist's freedom in so many ways that Rabbit Is Rich suggests the naturalistic “chronicle of decline,” the reverse success story. Like Carrie Meeber in her rocking chair, Rabbit in his new pink wing chair has achieved only a partial success. Caught in middle-aged complacency, Rabbit is sexually and spiritually unsettled and, more than he realizes, economically vulnerable. At the same time, Updike insists that Rabbit's only hope for freedom lies in his spiritual impulses and therefore depicts Rabbit's worldly successes as not only limiting and unsatisfying but reversible. Although Updike is not a twentieth-century naturalist like Norman Mailer or James T. Farrell, the Rabbit trilogy and Rabbit Is Rich in particular resemble classic American naturalism enough to make the title Rabbit Is Rich ironic.

The successful Rabbit seems rid of his oppressive past. As a boy in a lower-middle class family, “his life was a paltry thing.” After reaching his apogee as a high-school basketball star, Harry Angstrom surprisingly rises again from demonstrating MagiPeels and living in a miserable apartment house to running a Linotype machine and later managing his wife's Toyota agency during the energy crisis. Rabbit now lives close to a middle-aged nirvana: “For the first time since childhood Rabbit is happy, simply, to be alive.” He inhabits a world of expensive Japanese economy cars, cocktails, and golf. With money comes validation at his country club: “At the Flying Eagle Harry feels exercised, cleansed, cherished.” This leisure-class comfort seems to prove his guiding principle that “life can be lived selectively, as one chooses from a menu, or picks a polished fruit from a bowl.” Whereas in Rabbit, Run he flees from his wife and in-laws, he now submits to a matriarchy. “This is what he likes, domestic peace. Women circling with dutiful footsteps above him and the summer night like a lake lapping at the windows.” Home in Rabbit, Run is suffocating; but now at middle-age Rabbit tolerates restriction.

Since Rabbit himself seems to be happy at last, whether Rabbit Is Rich is a chronicle of decline is a point of dispute. James Wolcott maintains that “the mood of the book is grumpy and despairing, swollen with forlorn rue.” Updike has “dropped his butterfly coyness and pumped himself up with all the woe of Theodore Dreiser contemplating a boulevard of crushed souls.” Most writers, however, feel that Updike is basically sanguine about his protagonist. Thomas R. Edwards writes that the latest Rabbit novel is “a story of disasters averted” and that the couple's life is “reasonably equable and contented.” The ending, in fact, suggests further progress: Rabbit has a new Celica, an “elegant little stone house,” a granddaughter, and a son going back to college.

Similarly, Donald J. Greiner feels that Updike has developed Rabbit into a fairly happy character, although Greiner notes that Rabbit's earlier fear has been replaced by frustration. Without overstating the contentment, Greiner believes that there is little anguish in Rabbit Is Rich. “Questing in the first novel, mired in the second, [Rabbit] is secure and almost smug in the third.” Comparing Updike to Sinclair Lewis, Frederick R. Karl says that Updike is the “less enthusiastic naturalist” because “Rabbit remains on top.”

But is Rabbit really “rich”? Can he remain secure and successfully shape his life? Or does Rabbit face the Dreiserian fact that happiness is more easily achieved than maintained? Dreiser's lovers Clyde and Roberta “were deliciously happy, whatever the problems attending its present realization might be. But the ways and means of continuing with it were a different matter.” Updike too limits his protagonist's world in order to emphasize the futility of Rabbit's sexual yearning and the validity of his spiritual instincts.

Rabbit Is Rich resembles the classic naturalistic novel in several aspects, from the stylistic to the philosophical. There are several general resemblances in manner. The first is the use of documentary realism: the thorough, mimetic depiction of everyday life. The last two novels in the Rabbit trilogy especially share what June Howard in Form and History in American Literary Naturalism calls the naturalistic “prestige of fact.” In the latest Rabbit novel, Updike has learned the details of automobile dealerships, for instance, and also undergirds the novel with contemporary events such as the energy crisis. In particular, according to Karl, Updike is as notable for his “intense attachment to the artifacts of decline” as are Sinclair Lewis, Wright Morris, and John O'Hara. Second, in the manner of Zola or Norris, Updike has written a panoramic series involving two families over several decades; naturalism, James T. Farrell reminds us, began as a fiction of “extensiveness,” a broad depiction of the social milieu. Third, Updike's characters carry familiar naturalistic imagery. Nelson, for instance, is “a rat going out to be drowned.” When Rabbit carries his burden of gold to the bank, he sees himself in a Dreiserian image of cosmic defeat: “he stares up Weiser toward the mauve and brown bulk of Mt. Judge; in his eyes as a child God had reposed on the slopes of that mountain, and now he can imagine how through God's eyes from that vantage he and Janice might look below: two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin.” Here the ant-like quality of human effort is Dreiser, but the God-consciousness, as we will see later, is Updike.“

Apart from these general, external similarities, Updike's treatment of sex and violence echoes a major preoccupation of naturalistic writers often summed up as “the beast in man.” In the naturalistic novel, sex is seldom tender or even erotic; sex is an animalistic, unfulfilled urge. Sex is one of Rabbit's primary goals, motivations, and failures. However, the text hardly supports the claim that Rabbit's sex life is “often imaginative and usually fun” or that the “frantic anguish associated with sex in Rabbit, Run seems lost forever.” During the first bedroom scene in Rabbit Is Rich, Janice falls asleep; in the second, Rabbit is too tired. In the next, Janice makes love reluctantly. During another love scene, Rabbit is able to climax by imagining Janice in a pornographic movie. Next, Janice falls asleep again and Rabbit masturbates. In the final scene with Janice, Rabbit discusses his desire for a new house. His thoughts drift quickly from erotic fantasies to sunken living rooms and real-property appreciation. The longest sex scene is a wife-swapping episode in which the disappointed Rabbit has to make love to the relatively homely Thelma instead of the attractive Cindy.

For one of his few passionate encounters with Janice, Rabbit has just purchased several thousand dollars of Krugerrands. The cause of this rare moment of passion is money: Rabbit has not had an erection “just blossom in his pants since he can't remember when.” As foreplay, Rabbit explains to his naked wife the advantages of gold as an investment. The love-making is detached; the gold attracts him but the reality of the flesh repels as Rabbit “fondles her underside's defenseless slack flesh, his own belly massive and bearing down. Her back looks so breakable and brave and narrow—the long dent of its spine, the cross-bar of pallor left by her bathing-suit bra. Behind him his bare feet release a faraway sad odor. Coins jingle, slithering in toward their knees, into the depressions their interlocked weights make in the mattress. He taps her ass and asks, ‘Want to turn over?’”

Updike is not D. H. Lawrence; rather, severity is characteristic of his sexual scenes. As George Steiner explains, “the more urgent, the more acrobatic the sexual moment, the tauter, the more contemptuous of facility is the writing.” The bleakness in this passage certainly negates eroticism; the sex is too clumsy and sad—not even urgent or acrobatic—to be a means of growth for Rabbit.

This gold scene recalls a similar passage in McTeague; McTeague's wife Trina also needs to convert money to a tactile form so that the sexual passion can be transferred to the material world. In solitude, Trina likes to take out her gold coins and “draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express. She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs.”

In making love to her possessions, Trina is making love to herself. Her sexuality is thus autoerotic, and so—even though he has a partner—is Rabbit's. Noting this episode, Edwards claims that Updike's scene is different: Rabbit and Janice make love through rather than to the gold. But if the gold were a medium, a kind of sex toy, would not the Angstroms' lovemaking be less dreary and more exciting? If the gold were a kind of sex toy, would not the sex be more playful? Rabbit makes love to his gold, to his daydreams and fantasies, not to Janice, who is so much “defenseless slack flesh.“

In short, sex in Rabbit Is Rich resembles the sex lives of Joyce Carol Oates's characters: sex is “something which happens to them, a joyless, confusing event to be accepted with glazed looks and a mind wandering elsewhere.” Rabbit's sex life is one of his greatest discontents because the sexual reality is always less fulfilling than the sexual fantasy. This disparity between the imagined and the actual is fundamental to the naturalistic tradition; what Updike adds is that sex has become a nervous substitute for God.

A major expression of “the beast in man” theme is violence, for example the vicious homicide in McTeague. Usually from the lower classes, naturalistic characters tend to lack wealth, sophistication, and education. The fewer resources these characters have, the more likely they are to respond violently. Thus the naturalist deals with “the extraordinary and excessive in human nature.” In Rabbit Redux Rabbit beats Janice, strikes Jill, hits Skeeter, and has more passion for the Vietnam war than for his wife. In Rabbit Is Rich, the newly respectable Rabbit still harbors violent urges, but his affluence and position control his overt savagery. He is now ordinary and cautious. Gone are the black radical Skeeter and his political violence, the political fire that Rabbit courted in Rabbit Redux. Instead, the Rotarian Harry Angstrom often experiences both violence and sex vicariously. He daydreams several times, for instance, about bashing in his wife's head. When an acquaintance insults him, Rabbit imagines using a heavy glass egg as a basketball, “making the pivot from pounding it into Janice's stubborn dumb face to finishing up with a one-handed stuff straight down into Harrison's pink brainpan.” Fantasy combines a perfect basketball play with vengeance. But his violent passivity is paradoxical. He lets Skeeter insult him and takes out his rage at women by letting Skeeter kill Rabbit's young girlfriend. This very destructiveness and self-destructiveness also lead to the burning of his house. Rabbit is violent because he is declining: “Rabbit is the dark side of any man who realizes his ideals and his power are gone.” Thus the Rabbit series reflects the domestic violence of naturalistic fiction.

Nelson's favorite spectator sport is the most violent of all professional games, ice hockey; Nelson also satisfies his violent urge by smashing up several cars. Like his father, he fantasizes about bashing in heads. But at a friend's party Nelson, who resents being trapped in a marriage and having a pregnant wife at a gathering of young people, actually takes out his anger on his wife; he pulls her away from her dancing partner, “squeezing Pru's wrist to hurt.” “Her brittle imbalance makes him want to smash her completely,” but at first he only bullies her. As they leave the party, however, he knocks her down the stairs:

Impatiently Pru passes him on the left, fed up with him and anxious to be out in the air, and afterwards he remembers her broad hip bumping into his and his anger at what seemed her willful clumsiness, but not if he gives her a bit of hip back, a little vengeful shove. … So when Pru in those wedgy platforms turns her ankle, there is nothing for her to hold on to; she gives a little grunt but her pale face is impassive as in the old days of hang gliding, at the moment of launch. Nelson grabs for her velvet jacket but she is flying beyond his reach. …

This scene is a miniature of the drowning incident in An American Tragedy—a violent yet passive act. Clyde Griffiths' violence reveals his hesitation and incompetence; like Griffiths, Nelson suddenly changes his mind, trying to retract his action by grabbing Pru's jacket. Dreiser's protagonist decides not to drown Roberta; then as he changes his mind, she drowns accidentally. Furthermore, Griffiths has to drown Roberta because she is pregnant; Nelson too is an anti-life figure, resentful of the broad hips of pregnancy.

Naturalistic characters are often sexually maladjusted, violent “beasts” because they find themselves in a trap, an oppressive or dangerous situation which cannot be evaded. Of course, the trap creates more frustration and violence. Naturalistic fiction emphasizes limitation as a basic condition of life: Howard describes the naturalistic world as “constructed not according to indifferent laws but as a trap or even a torture chamber.” In Rabbit, Run, domestic life suffocates Rabbit. When Janice asks him to buy her a package of cigarettes, “Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap.” His subsequent escape to the South of “orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women” is only an abortive quest, given up when, without a map, he dead-ends into a lover's lane and then retreats to urban, industrial Pennsylvania. After his return, the heavily drinking Janice accidentally drowns their baby. Basic to the Rabbit series, Tony Tanner notes, is an “extensive vocabulary of constriction.”

One of the most important naturalistic features of Rabbit Is Rich is that at his point of greatest success and freedom, Rabbit faces several constraints. First of all, he is not rich; he is a kind of economic prisoner. He may have a comfortable house in the suburbs but it is Janice, if anyone, who has the money. Janice, not Rabbit, owns half of Springer Toyota; when her mother dies, she will own it all. In Rabbit, Run Rabbit's irresponsibility—his refusal to be domesticated—was paradoxically his saving quality. Now, however, he can no longer run—and not simply because he is overweight. To run now is to lose Springer Toyota. The older he gets, the more he becomes a hostage to affluence, the more he becomes “a big bland good guy.”

Rabbit is hardly “cleaning up” and selling cars “like crazy.” Such misreadings suggest the power of Updike's irony to make Rabbit's wealth seem greater than it is; if we are not careful, we make Rabbit into Horatio Alger. Rabbit creates his own restraints. His work ethic is that the cars “sell themselves,” but at the same time he also argues that the agency cannot sell more than twenty-five cars a month—a decidedly uncompetitive attitude. Rabbit seems uninterested in business matters; he reads Consumer Reports but not the Wall Street Journal or Fortune. Rabbit leaves work to spy on his former mistress; his father-in-law used to keep the showroom open during blizzards. While he plays golf, his wife and mother-in-law make personnel decisions. Nelson, with his nostalgia for the large American automobile, represents a further remove from shrewd business tactics. The franchise gives the Angstroms a monthly net of ＄3500—before taxes. This is a very comfortable but not extraordinary income in 1979 considering a double-digit inflation rate, and Rabbit cashes in his sole investment to buy a new house. Forces beyond Rabbit's control could threaten the success of Springer Toyota. Mazda and Volvo offer competition. Interest rates are up. The cars, then, do not in fact “sell themselves.” Rabbit is not wealthy; he is temporarily affluent because buyers need his high-mileage cars.

Another tooth in the naturalistic trap is that in Rabbit Is Rich, even more so than in the very bleak Rabbit, Run, urban environment deadens the characters, as it often does in the naturalistic novel. No matter how affluent Rabbit becomes, his surroundings remain ugly and oppressive; even his vacation escape to the tropics is brief and unsatisfying. Updike's stylistic commitment to documenting the environment of Pennsylvania creates for his characters a high barrier: “as the prose meticulously itemizes the objects among which Harry moves, so we can feel the accumulating weight of them pressing on his eyes and nerves and thoughts to the point of claustrophobia.” Thus, as with Crane, Norris, or Dreiser, the impersonal urban environment stultifies; the city is ugly, cold, and inhospitable to dreams. Rabbit's habitat is the industrial Northeast, where farms have been replaced by tract homes and shopping centers. Big factories have closed, while marginal shops struggle to survive. Power has become decay: “everywhere in this city, once the fourth largest in Pennsylvania but now slipped to seventh, structures speak of expended energy.”

Is Rabbit's immediate, fairly prosperous environment—a bustling, shining car dealership—an exception to the general decay of Brewer? Even the seemingly successful Springer Toyota takes part in the larger decline. Symbolically, Harry's new office has walls of imitation boards on which hang yellowing clippings of his faded basketball glory. After his vacation, Rabbit must return to the old “snowless, leafless landscape, the dust of all seasons swirling and drifting, intermixed with paper refuse from the Chuck Wagon that has blown across Route III.” Nor does Rabbit's suburban dream home afford him a real escape from the dirty, congested trap. The house that Edwards refers to as “elegant,” Updike labels “pretentious” and describes with the detailed disdain of a Tom Wolfe: “a tall mock-Tudor with gables like spires and red-tiled roofs and clinker bricks sticking out at crazy melted angles, and a sort of neo-plantation manse of serene thin bricks the pale yellow of lemonade.” Furthermore, the world of youth is just as stifling as that of adults. Nelson admires the style of a friend's apartment overlooking “the deadened heart of the city.” Here the old oak floors have been “covered wall-to-wall with cheap shag carpeting speckled like pimento, and hasty plasterboard partitions have divided up the generous original rooms.”

This deadening concrete environment also destroys the rich, productive farms of rural Pennsylvania. In Rabbit, Run, Rabbit finds satisfaction working as a gardener. But after driving to rural Galilee to spy on the young woman he believes is his daughter, Rabbit finds the country in Rabbit Is Rich to be a briar patch. Summer weeds get in his way; a dog chases him to his car. Ruth's “soft dishevelled” farm shows the same neglect that has made the city ugly.

The landscape—urban, domestic, and rural—does not simply contrast to Rabbit's wealth; it repels and inhibits him. The first pages of Rabbit, Run introduce a prominent technique in the trilogy, the city tour in which Updike follows his anxious protagonist through suffocating Brewer, where Rabbit fears he will be assaulted. Updike uses this peripatetic device almost a dozen times in Rabbit Is Rich; these tours invariably circumscribe Rabbit's world to the dirty, the decaying, and the frightening.

The many resemblances between Rabbit and his son Nelson suggest another important naturalistic idea: heredity combines with environment to thwart the wills of the protagonists. Heredity in Rabbit Is Rich paradoxically suggests both sterility and impotence or generational doom, reinforcing the idea of the naturalistic trap. In Rabbit, Run Janice accidentally drowns their child. When Rabbit discovers that Nelson's girl friend Pru is pregnant, he offers to arrange an abortion. Nelson demurs, although earlier, upon learning that she was pregnant, he had persuaded her to go hang gliding in hopes of inducing a miscarriage. Seed imagery then suggests not birth or hope but determinism: “seed that goes into the ground invisible and if it takes hold cannot be stopped, it fulfills the shape it was programmed for, its destiny, sure as our death, and shapely.”

The hereditary trap extends from Rabbit's pathetic father to the third generation: the twenty-two year old Nelson is also out of gas. He is “a sick man” who is “just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.” Nelson is an adolescent cynic who reverses Huck Finn's move west. Nelson returns to Pennsylvania from Colorado; in the West, he claims, “There's nothing to see.” At the same time, to Nelson the old Detroit automobiles symbolize American power and destiny, but he cannot admit that this brief post-war period of American might is past. Even though Nelson rebels against limits, he comes to symbolize them; in fact, Updike associates Nelson's return to Brewer with the taking of American hostages in Iran. The Nelson-hostage parallel implies that Nelson is bound to his own myopic view of America, a view just as fear-driven as his father's.

Nelson is such an unsympathetic character that we risk sharply contrasting him to his happier, more accommodating father. Even though Nelson rebels against his father, their many similarities establish an hereditary chain. For instance, Nelson abandons his family just as his father had. Like Janice and Rabbit, Nelson and Pru are becoming fairly heavy drinkers. Rabbit Is Rich, moreover, uses a structural device of parallel parties to underscore the idea of hereditary force. At Webb Murkett's party, a gathering of the middle-aged, Rabbit voyeuristically rummages through the hosts' bedroom until he finds some Polaroid pictures of Webb and Cindy. At a gathering of young people, Nelson also becomes fascinated by his hosts' bathroom literature, in this case a picture book about the Nazis. In both instances, father and son are outsiders, discontented, seeking satisfaction in fantasy—one with voyeuristic sex, the other with fascism and death. Updike does not suggest as strongly as a naturalist like Zola that heredity is an irresistible obstacle to growth, but in many ways Nelson is Rabbit's aimless soul reincarnated, and Rabbit himself has to admit that “there's no stopping heredity.”

If the naturalistic novel emphasizes a decline in the protagonist, Rabbit Is Rich goes even further in depicting an entire nation mired in corpulent middle age. Allegorically, America was once young and powerful with inherited resources, as Rabbit himself is for an athletic moment in Rabbit, Run. In adulthood, however, unsolved political problems such as the racism and a bellicose foreign policy seen in Rabbit Redux begin to reveal national limits: Rabbit's typical neighborhood is “slowly spinning in the void, its border beds half-weeded.” Rabbit Is Rich shows the United States as middle-aged and perhaps unrealistically complacent, like Rabbit with his inventory of Toyotas that sell themselves. After ignominious retreat from Vietnam is humiliation at the hands of Iran. Representing the younger American generation, Nelson will only withdraw into the Springer home, just as his father had. In short, Rabbit has peaked at forty-six, but Nelson has peaked even in his youth. Both Rabbit and his America are trapped.

The theme of entropy which dominates Rabbit Is Rich can be understood in terms of the naturalistic trap. This is a novel about limits, energy crises, hostages, and death. The globe's natural resources are dwindling; America depends for fuel on other nations, which then take her citizens hostage; and Rabbit's own energy and aspirations fade in middle age.

The idea of entropy begins all three novels. Rabbit, Run begins as Rabbit intrudes on a basketball game. The month is March, when “Love makes the air light. Things start anew. …” But he does not belong with the young boys, and the game is in a back alley. The opening scene in the Angstrom-Springer chronicle raises this issue: can Rabbit still shoot, and if he can, does his retained skill offer him any advantage whatever at age twenty-six? After the game, he goes home to a wife he dislikes. Rabbit Redux begins in a bar: the topic is the failing health of Rabbit's mother and the infidelity of his wife. If the first Rabbit novel begins with a failed athlete and the second a failed husband and worker, the third goes on to suggest a failed national energy. Rabbit Is Rich begins with the phrase, “Running out of gas.” And at the end of the first day, when he has done nothing very strenuous, Rabbit is “dead tired.” He is not one of Crèvecoeur's new men, but a fatigued American Everyman.

By the end of Rabbit Is Rich, both Rabbit and Nelson become stationary, that is, indifferent. At forty-six, Rabbit has finally moved out of his mother-in-law's house. The novel ends with Rabbit inertly watching television. While the symbolic core of the first novel is Rabbit's running, the trilogy thus pauses at an “image of immobility,” an important motif in naturalism that deemphasizes human volition in favor of “enforced spectatorship.” Rabbit is now a watcher instead of a runner.

Updike wanted to be a writer like Flaubert or Joyce, whom he called “the great exquisitists.” Why would a writer with such a refined sensibility write a novel emulating naturalistic fiction with its sometimes plodding, documentary style and expansive themes? Of course, Updike may have wanted to answer critics who continue to complain that he is more style than substance. More importantly, however, the naturalistic emphasis on human helplessness appeals to Updike's Christian theology.

There have always been periods when theologians, philosophers, statesmen, and artists—that is, men attempting to interpret life—have had a bleak estimate of human nature and experience. Often belief during a period of this kind—the belief, say, of a St. Augustine, a Calvin, or a Hobbes—derives from a reaction against an exalted notion of a man held during a previous period and a responsiveness to the oppressive conditions of contemporary life. Often this belief thus stresses that man's ability to choose, to express his will consciously and freely, is limited both by his own nature and by the world in which he lives.

The Rabbit novels—marked by a naturalistic emphasis on boundaries—appeared during the “human potential movement” with its emphasis on expanded selfhood. Updike, however, echoes the naturalists' stress on limits. Still, he does not see decline as inevitable: the Rabbit chronicle hedges the determinism so important in the naturalistic novel. And the naturalism Updike emulates is itself, indeed, ambiguous about the human condition, a fact that recent scholarship has emphasized. While Howard acknowledges that two elements distinguishing naturalism from realism are “squalid scenes and pessimistic philosophy,” she also points out that naturalistic fiction depends on antinomies such as free will vs. determinism and optimism vs. pessimism. Invariably, a discussion of naturalism must deal with determinism; recent discussion has emphasized the degree of human freedom possible in naturalistic fiction. John J. Conder, for instance, argues in Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase that naturalism embraces both determinism and free will, using the Hobbesian definition of liberty as the absence of impediments not contained in the agent, a view which leaves room for individual will. One particular kind of naturalistic novel, as Pizer points out, is the “novel of questing, as in The Red Badge of Courage, Sister Carrie (for Carrie), and The Adventures of Augie March, in which the protagonist seeks inconclusively in a shifting, ambivalent, and often destructive world some form of certainty about himself.”

In spite of his naturalistic passivity, a dim but persistent spiritual force continues to operate in Rabbit which prevents the Rabbit saga from being only a tale of decline. In Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is called a kind of “mystic.” In Rabbit Is Rich, Updike continues to suggest that Rabbit might push beyond the emptiness of this material life. He welcomes rain because it represents “the last proof left to him that God exists.” His life is now sometimes haunted by “ghosts”—openings to a spiritual world—whose influence he cannot and really does not want to escape. These are dangerous ghosts, the narrator tells us, because every time Rabbit has made a move towards the invisible, someone has been killed. But this fear does not stop him from listening to the invisible world, nor does Updike suggest that it should. Rabbit feels these spiritual moments at odd times, on a bus or while playing golf: “The fairway springy beneath his feet blankets the dead, is the roof of a kingdom where his mother stands at a cloudy sink. … The earth is hollow, the dead roam through caverns beneath its thin green skin.” This passage, with its theme of mutability, does not suggest nihilism, however; Rabbit's recognition of mortality gives him a spiritual consciousness that naturalistic characters, such as the beer-bloated McTeague, lack. Recognizing his own diminishing sexuality, Rabbit confronts mortality. Updike thus associates sexuality with limits.

Eros fails Rabbit on the wife-swapping trip to the Caribbean. As the airplane ascends, Rabbit savors the revelation that “outside Brewer there is a planet without ruts worn in it.” He feels hope and a propulsion towards God who, “having shrunk in Harry's middle years to the size of a raisin lost under the car seat, is suddenly great again, everywhere like a radiant wind.” But God is secondary on this vacation. In paradise the routine becomes golf, eating, drinking, and entertainment “set in a rigid weekly cycle.” As if he were in Brewer, Rabbit talks about inflation and makes love to his wife “out of general irritation.” At the same time, paradise presents dangers: the stars “hang in the sky with a certain menace.” After this sadly anti-climactic vacation, frustrating to Rabbit because he loses in the wife-exchanging, his snare is set. “He has risen as high as he can. …” Updike is saying that the material, hedonistic Rabbit has reached his limit in his frustrating obsession with unloving sex. “Where eros and sadness meet” in Updike's writing, Steiner says succinctly, “theology begins.” George Hunt's study of Updike's theological sources may help here. In Kierkegaardian terms, Rabbit's sexual desires and attitudes keep him in the aesthetic sphere of existence, that is, hedonism. His spiritual currents, however, may prepare him for the religious sphere: the pursuit of God. He will have to keep looking into space, or closer by, for answers.

As Rabbit looks for God in space, Updike emphasizes in the return of Skylab the probe of the unknown. This interest in “heaven” is a persistent theme in the trilogy. Updike's aging protagonist “scans the paper every day for more word on these titanic quasars on the edge of everything, and in the Sunday section studies the new up-close photos of Jupiter, expecting to spot a clue that all those scientists have missed; God might have a few words to say yet.” Even when earthbound, Rabbit tries to float above the deadness of Brewer: “Harry has always been curious about what it would feel like to be the Dalai Lama. A ball at the top of its arc, a leaf on the skin of a pond.”

Nearby Galilee offers the possibility of renewal. Updike does not suggest that the pastoral is altogether blighted. In fact, one of the few idealists in the novel, Ruth's daughter, has grown up in the country. Although a minor character, Annabelle has escaped the cycle of meaninglessness that stunts so many lives in the Rabbit series. Unlike the worldly, confident Melanie, the burdened, cautious Prudence or the bitter Ruth, Annabelle lives by solid but idealistic values. Ruth, the ex-prostitute, has tried to raise her “very innocent.” Annabelle is calm, amiable, attentive, “willing to please,” but also independently pragmatic: she refuses to marry her boyfriend, who wants to go on to college, until they are both certain. Unlike the complaining Nelson, Annabelle has freedom, freedom from marriage until she wants it, for instance. And she is more of an idealist than almost any other character in the Rabbit books: she works in a rest home and shares none of Nelson's self-indulgent cynicism. When he can't understand why she works with sick people, she tells him, “I like taking care of things.” Rabbit's illegitimate daughter thus lives on the Kierkegaardian level of the ethical (between the aesthetic and the religious): a commitment to morality and a sense of personal duty.

If his new granddaughter represents another nail in Rabbit's coffin, as the book's last sentence indicates, she also represents the hope of exception (a grandson would imply another Nelson). Janice offers a precedent, for Janice seems a stronger person than she was at the start of the trilogy. She is much healthier than either Rabbit or Charlie, and even Rabbit admits that Janice has learned more from life than he has. Pru is strong enough to tell off Nelson, have the baby, and let Nelson go back to college, and Ruth steadfastly denies Rabbit's claim of paternity in order to protect Annabelle.

In spite of the gloomy naturalistic determinism in the Rabbit trilogy, Updike implies that his characters have freedom of choice. If some characters, like Nelson, seem doomed to make bad choices others, like Rabbit, have at least the opportunity to be less earthbound, while Annabelle suggests a possible escape from the round of futility. The chronicle of Rabbit Angstrom thus fits Donald Pizer's description of an ambiguity in nineteenth-century American naturalism: “The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life.” Jonathan Edwards erects a theology on Newtonian determinism but asks his auditors in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to give up their sins and turn to God; John Updike shows Rabbit ensnared but offers hope through his resilient interior life, as when he senses that “to be rich is to be robbed, to be rich is to be poor.” In order to force Rabbit to such insights, Updike puts him in a naturalistic trap.