From Alienation To Integrity

John Updike is an outstanding writer in contemporary American literature. He is also a versatile and prolific writer. His works include novels, short stories, poems, essays and literary critiques. Many of his works won the prize and fame for him, including his Rabbit novels Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest-the third and fourth volumes of Rabbit tetralogy which won Pulitzer Prize of novel respectively in the year of 1982 and 1991.Rabbit tetralogy brought Updike great reputation and various criticisms from many critics in China and abroad. The researches are wide and comprehensive. Some cover themes, writing techniques and the study of comparison. Others explore it from the new perspectives of feminism, post-colonialism and new-historicism and so on. Many researches have discussed the intimate relationships between Updike and Soren Kierkegaard, forefather of existentialism and the influence Kierkegaard has on Updike, but none of them has discussed systemically the relationships between Updike and existentialism and analyzed the themes of Updike's Rabbit novels with the thoughts of Sartre and Heidegger.In Rabbit at Rest, Updike sets the major characters in a dehumanized society and disintegrated family in which people are faithless and only busy seeking money, instant pleasure, and traditional morality and values are decaying while new ones have not been established. In such surroundings people are confronted with the loss of the self or split of the self-hood and suffer from the alienated relationships with each other and with the society. The protagonist Rabbit has also experienced the split of self-hood and alienated relationships with others and the society. Although he has stubbornly revolted against the situation where he is, it turns out futile and useless. Any choices he makes can not at the same time satisfy both sides of the opposites—personal freedom and social responsibility, flesh and spirit, self and others and life and mortality. It seems that there is no outlet for him to reconcile within these tensions and conflictive relationships. The Present thesis is composed of three sections: introduction, body and conclusion.In introduction, the thesis introduces Updike's life, works and literature achievements besides the literature review, methodology and the structure of the thesis.There are two chapters in the body part. In chapter two, the thesis briefly introduces the rise, influence, common themes of existentialism and existential ideas of Sartre and Heidegger, and then discusses the relationships between Updike and Existentialism. In Chapter three the thesis analyses the alienated problems reflected in Rabbit at Rest under the existential thoughts of Sartre and Heidegger. Based on Sartre's existential views about the three dimensions of the individual existence—being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others, freedom and bad faith, and Heidegger's ideas about death, the analysis of the thesis devotes to the alienated problems of the major characters, particularly Rabbit's problems of self-alienation, alienated relationships with others and the society. Rabbit has fruitlessly revolted against the alienated situation where he is, to remain true to the self and restore his social ties and self-integrity, but all his efforts prove futile and useless eventually. When realizing it, Rabbit willingly chooses his own death to end those alienated situations he has to encounter in existence and eventually restores his self-integrity.Then the thesis comes to conclusion in chapter four. In Rabbit at Rest, the alienated problems Updike presented not only belong to Rabbit but also to Updike and they are likewise the problems for all those in the same situation in the society. Rabbit's experiences of alienation reflect the reality of the individuals' existence in disintegrated and dehumanized American society. Rabbit, through willing choice of death terminates his alienated situation and eventually actualizes his self-integrity. Through Rabbit's experiences, Updike seems to suggest that the alienated problems can be eventually dissolved away only through mortality—the most authentic way of an individual's existence.