Rabbit rebound: Irresolution and mastered irony in John Updike's 'Rabbit Angstrom'

This study treats John Updike's four "Rabbit" novels as a single, unified "meta-novel" held together by the author's existential, dialectical vision. Borrowing his methodology from Soren Kierkegaard, Updike practices a form of "mastered irony" in which dialectical opposites are not resolved but rather left in sustained tension. Like Kierkegaard, he employs this method in order to preserve the complex, existential, and often contradictory nature of immediate experience. This dialectical, existential strategy allows Updike to accomplish two additional narrative goals. First, it allows him to articulate and embody the hyper-contemporary existential presence of his main character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Second, it allows him to engage his reader in an extended "moral debate" on the nature of goodness that remains unfinished within the book and so relies on the reader's own self-questioning.; Although many previous interpreters have addressed Kierkegaard's influence on Updike's novels--and particularly in the Rabbit series--these readings have by and large concentrated on the Christian/theological ramifications of Kierkegaard's thinking. Building on this work, I wish not only to address the equally significant structural ramifications of Kierkegaard's influence on the form and content of Rabbit Angstrom but also to argue that these structural borrowings constitute Updike's most significant contribution to the program of formal experimentation that has characterized the development of the post-war American novel. In fact, on the basis of these formal and thematic features of Rabbit Angstrom, I argue that Updike should be included among the top ranks of our contemporary practitioners of literary experimentation, a group of novelists, poets and theorists often assumed to belong under the blanket label "postmodernist." For example, Updike's strategy of "mastered irony" evokes such poststructuralist notions as difference and "play." Similarly, the novel's innovative two-part formalistic structure--its paradoxical blending of the "accidental" and the formal, of the open and the closed narrative--puts Rabbit Angstrom in the same company as such contemporaneous interrogations of literary form as John Barth's Letters and A. A. Ammons' Tape for the Turn of the Year. Yet rather than argue for a "postmodern Updike," I simply demonstrate that Updike uses these various formal devices to present a comprehensive ethical and theological vision that, while essentially Christian in scope, is founded on antinomial opposition and existential temporality. In this way I hope to present an innovation-minded Updike who nevertheless remains true to his Lutheran roots.