From Flight, Fight To Fantasy

The novel Rabbit Redux is the second one of John Updike's literary masterpiece, the Rabbit quartet. Rabbit the hero is a runner, as well as a quester. He runs and quests through his whole life. He tries to run away from the sterility of life, the established order and the mechanized society. All his efforts eventually result in failure: he runs, but retreats again, he quests, but "quests" in a circle. Various conflicts nevertheless exist in Rabbit's life. He wonders till his death why these conflicts exist and are characterized by the inevitability. Lots of critics have examined this problem and analyzed Rabbit the character in terms of existentialism.This thesis tries to make a new attempt at analyzing the conflict met by the character and its doomed failure of his pursuit with the theory of Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian scholar on mass media. McLuhan claims that "the medium is the message", that is, the communication technology shapes the current social culture and each medium has a bias which influences the way people communicate. The appearance of the new technology would bring about the confrontation with the old one, which leads to the conflict between different social cultures. In addition, McLuhan's theory on the nature of media "the extensions of man" also provides this analysis the theoretical basis. Different media create a very particular way of organizing the custom and belief about the world. As a technology of communication, the printing press Rabbit has worked for for ten years helps him to create a culture characterized by linear thought and sequential perception, which is very different from that of multidimensional perspectives based on electrical technology. The differences between different cultures and perceptions cause the conflict between Rabbit the individual and society.The author believes that Updike's creation is to some degree influenced by McLuhan' s Media Theory, but Updike also keeps his own thoughts on the relation between technology and culture, and in his writings, the possibility of McLuhan's "the global village" and "retrialization" seems fragile.