History, Author And Fiction: A Historical And Cultural Criticism On Rabbit Trilogy

John Updike (1932-) is one of the most eminent American writers popular in the postwar years. Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist in Rabbit Trilogy~1, is his supreme creation, and the trilogy that bears his name is the author's commanding achievement. These Rabbit novels depict the experience and angst of an ordinary American middle-class—Harry Angstrom, with the nickname Rabbit, in the postwar years, and how he searches for the authentic self in his passive way. Even he eventually struggles in failure; he glimpses the truth of existence, and then makes his life meaningful.Through the depictions of Rabbit's everyday middle-class life and the stifling atmosphere of marriage he lives in, these novels vividly capture the "emptiness" of American middle class life, as well as the social landscape of America through the lens offered by Rabbit. In this way Updike creates an American postwar panorama, speculates upon the American postwar spirit and thus launches a debate with readers about how to search the meaning of life in an age of questing, uncertainty, and doubt. It is an American chronicle, as George Hunt, an American critic, explains that the novels "become a single epic about a whole generation born in the depths of Depression and surviving...