Am I supposed to like Rabbit Angstrom?

April 18, 2009 6:13 PM

Am I supposed to like Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit, Run?

There's plenty of reasons not to, but is the reader meant to dislike Rabbit or like him in spite of it all? I ask because I spent most of the novel disliking him, and it wound up affecting my opinion of the book itself. Not because I think a main character has to be likable, but because it read like Updike intended him to be. Did he? Do people who enjoy Rabbit, Run and the rest of the series tend to like the character?

posted by learn to read to media & arts (13 comments total)

I didn't like him or dislike him, exactly. Or rather, I disliked him but felt some sympathy for him, at some times more than others. I kept reading because I found the tension between responsibility and freedom/culpability and innocence kind of fascinating, and also because the series is so full of period detail. Your readership may vary.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:04 PM on April 18

I think he's meant to be taken as naive and to elicit sympathy, but I can't say I particularly liked him. I think what makes him work is that everyone knows someone like him. The person you knew might have started out forgetting his/her lunch money routinely, but as s/he got older the scope of the damage due to their bad decisions grew as well.
posted by plinth at 7:35 PM on April 18

I think you are supposed to like him if you are a sad middle-aged dude who has urges to cheat on his wife. Essentially, if you are John Updike.

This is the flaw for me in pretty much all of Updike's writing: skilled as he was, so many of his characters are like this and at some point I start actively rooting against them.
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:50 PM on April 18 [4 favorites]

I find him loathsome and likable all at once, somehow. He is sometimes all selfishness and id but somehow also a bit of Huck Finn. He's that friend you have that always screws up and can't be trusted, but you can't seem to say no either.
posted by Lame_username at 7:51 PM on April 18

Sure I liked him, even though his moral failings are pathetic. He has a need for his life to more than it is and I felt for him.
posted by Kirklander at 8:20 PM on April 18

I found him likable, though I wouldn't want to be his wife. Or his girlfriend. Maybe Nelson—I wouldn't mind being his Nelson.

I think it's too simple, though, to say that what's going on in Rabbit is that he wants to cheat on his wife—that seems to be the consequence of something deeper, a dissatisfaction that comes not out of smallness but out of an ability to keep a (sometimes childish) bead on the possibility of fullness, rather than just drinking in a cheap suit and making miserably funny comments about how your wife turned into a lizard one day. I do think he's like Updike, but more because I think Rabbit's love for beauty is purely Updike's sensibility. If Rabbit's infidelities are Updike by proxy, I think a better account is to say that they come out as an effect of that shared feeling—that his feeling for the possibility of beauty everywhere is the bright side of his inability to stay in any situation that has grown ugly for him.

I wrote a long bit about the splendor and the loss in Rabbit Angstrom's life some time ago, but it's through comparing him with Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, so it isn't really a stand alone analysis. If you're interested and know both books let me know and I'll memail you.
posted by felix grundy at 8:46 PM on April 18

I found him interesting and could kind of see where he was coming from in terms of the fear and discontent that runs through his life, though I didn't like him or identify with him at all. I think it's kind of like watching Real Housewives or some other show where you feel superior to the characters in certain ways but also end up halfway rooting for certain ones. You certainly can get caught up in the drama and appreciate the stories without liking a character.
For me, Rabbit became familiar and a character I knew and could somewhat predict, so I wanted to see what would happen to him next. I didn't think he deserved a happy ending, and I didn't like him all that much, but I became involved and a little invested in his story.
posted by rmless at 9:33 PM on April 18

You might like to compare Rabbit, Run to Sinclair Lewis's Babbit from a generation before.
posted by JackFlash at 9:55 PM on April 18

Funny you should ask this today - just finished the series this morning. I liked Rabbit in the end. I feel he's not necessarily honorable, but he is honest (well, with himself, anyway) and human. Not to your question, but I liked Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest much more than the first two. Keep going.
posted by xiaolongbao at 11:18 PM on April 18

I really despised Rabbit, enough to not enjoy the book and not read the other Rabbit books, even though I thought the writing was stunning. I'm not sure how much of this was personal. He really reminded me of my ex-husband.

I enjoyed Lolita very much, and that narrator was quite unlikeable as well, so it's hard to tell exactly where the response comes from, but in the end my feeling was life is too short to spend it with childish, selfish people.

I feel like that's a failure of understanding of what art is and means on my part, or maybe it's not so much a failure as blowing off the concern entirely. I'm almost forty, and at this point in my life, I don't give a shit -- I no longer believe that suffering teaches people things or makes you a better person or whatever. Now I take Tylenol when I have a headache, and I don't read books that bore me or annoy me.

YMMV.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:51 AM on April 19

I didn't like Rabbit, and worse, since I read the first few Rabbit books as a young woman, I felt the books were degrading to women and they depressed me. However, I think the books were supposed to be about America and what it meant to be an American man at a certain time and place. And looking at it that way, Updike got it right, and the books have a value beyond whether you feel a kinship with Rabbit or not. Women had a raw deal in that time and place, but so did Rabbit, and, especially, so did his son.
posted by acrasis at 7:44 AM on April 19

I concur with xiaolongbao. I'm about halfway through the final book in the series (Rabbit at Rest), and I didn't start to really like Rabbit until Rabbit is Rich. I think you have to look at Rabbit not as a single character but as one part of an entire system of characters. The most interesting part of the series of books is how life changes, and how people react to it. You really do need to read all four books, I think. It's a lot, but there's a reason two of them won the Pulitzer.
posted by bibbit at 3:07 PM on April 19

Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one to walk away from Rabbit, Run affected more by the main character's assholishness than by the prose itself (which was pretty phenomenal). I might continue on to the rest of the series, but I doubt I'll feel any differently. Does Updike ever discuss this in interviews, his opinion of Rabbit and his actions? Are there any reviews that deal with the issue? I know all us good little modern readers are supposed to be unconcerned with authorial intent, but the book/Updike seem to celebrate Rabbit because he's a selfish jerk, not in spite of it.

A Terrible Llama, I also thought of Lolita when I wrote this question. Humbert Humbert is way worse of a person (in terms of harming others and loutish behavior), but he still didn't bother me the way Rabbit did. I think a big part of that is that the distance between Humbert and Nabokov seems much greater than the distance between Rabbit and Updike. Plus, Humbert is simply more fascinating a character.

felix, thanks for the offer, but I'm not familiar with Revolutionary Road, so I doubt it'd do me much good.
posted by learn to read at 10:23 AM on April 22