John Updike And Soren Kierkegaard

John Updike is a famous novelist and poet of United States. Graduatingfrom Harvard University in 1954, he began to write for New Yorker. And then hepublished multiple works, including novels, poems, novellas, essays and literarycritiques. Updike is well-known on the stage of literature in the world. In his nearly ahalf century's writing career, he has won many literary prizes. Rabbit is Rich and Rabbitat Rest—the third and fourth volumes of Rabbit tetralogy which was created in a longtime of 30 years, won Pulitzer prize of novel respectively in the year of 1982 and 1991.Rabbit tetralogy brought Updike great reputation, and various criticisms frommany critics as well. There are many scholars both in China and abroad researchingUpdike's works, especially researching his masterpiece Rabbit tetralogy—someexamined one of the four, and the others took the tetralogy as a whole to examine. Theresearches are abroad and comprehensive, including those from the perspectives offeminism, theme, writing technique and comparison. Many mentioned the intimaterelationship between Updike and Denmark theologian and philosopher SorenKierkegaard, the influence Kierkegaard has on Updike, but there is none analyzingUpdike's Rabbit novels systemically related to Kierkegaard's existentialist thoughts.Under the rationale of Soren Kierkegaard's existentialist thoughts, this presentauthor analyzes Updike's reflection in his Rabbit, Run to Kierkegaard's existentialistthoughts and his own understanding of existence, and affirms the instruction thatUpdike's existentialist quest has on the people of that time and nowadays.This thesis is composed of three sections: introduction, body and conclusion.In Introduction, the life and works of John Updike is introduced, and themethodology and the structure of this thesis also.There are three chapters in the body section. In Chapter 1, Kierkegaard'sexistentialist thoughts is introduced. After a brief introduction of the generalcharacteristics of existentialism, Kierkegaard's existentialist thoughts are mainlyintroduced as faith beginning from the end of reason, three stages—aesthetical, ethical and religious—on life's way, and severe criticism on the secularized religion. Chapter 2discusses the ideological environment for the writing of Rabbit, Run. The main contentof the novel is generalized first in this chapter. And then with the analysis of the westernworld's spiritual crisis as the starting point, this chapter explores the writer's ownspiritual crisis when writing this novel, and Kierkegaard's influence and help on him.Chapter 3 is the detailed analysis of the existentialist elements in the novel. Comparingwith Kierkegaard's existentialist thoughts, Updike's acceptance and disagreement withKierkegaard's thoughts reflected in the novel are analyzed. The essence of Rabbit's runshows the conflict of ethics and faith; Rabbit's persistent pursuit of faith is theagreement of Updike to Kierkegaard's necessity of faith. At the same time, Updikecriticizes the secularized religion too, with Reverend Eccles as the main subject of hisattack. The novel ends with Rabbit's still running, which reflects the writer's differentidea from Kierkegaard.Then comes the conclusion: under the conditions of the whole western world'sspiritual crisis, John Updike presented, like the other writers, in Rabbit, Run, hisexistentialist thinking. Rabbit, Run shows fully the influence from Soren Kierkegaardand points out some different ideas as well. Conflict between ethics and faith isreflected in the novel. He accepted Kierkegaard's idea that faith is necessary in one'slife, and criticized the secularized religion after his mentor, but did not follow himindiscreetly in believing without reason. In front of the paradox of ethics and faith, he isstill thinking and questing.