John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) - is the most sustained theological novel sequence in twentieth-century American fiction. Through the life of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star in the fictional town of Brewer, Pennsylvania, Updike traces four decades of American Protestant culture with the eye of a theologian and the ear of a novelist of extraordinary gifts.
The Work
The four novels follow Rabbit from age 26 to age 56 - from his impulsive abandonment of his pregnant wife in 1959 to his death of a heart attack in 1989. Each novel is set in a specific historical moment: Run in the late Eisenhower years; Redux during the Apollo moon landing and Vietnam War; Rich during the Iranian oil crisis; Rest at the end of the Reagan era. The social and political background is not decoration but theological argument: Updike is mapping how Protestant America's spiritual condition correlates with its historical condition. The four novels together span approximately 1,500 pages and constitute one of the most ambitious novelistic projects in American literary history. Both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Biblical Engagement
Romans 7:18-19 - 'For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do' - is Rabbit's permanent psychological condition. He knows what he should do - stay with his wife Janice, care for his children, behave responsibly - but finds himself compelled by desires and impulses he cannot govern. Updike read Karl Barth extensively and absorbed from him the Lutheran insight that human beings are not free in the Pelagian sense: the will is bound, not free; the 'flesh' (in Paul's sense of the self organized around its own needs) systematically produces the opposite of what the spirit desires.
Job 3:11 - 'Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?' - enters the novel through the death of Rabbit's infant daughter Becky, who drowns when Janice, drunk, drops her in the bathtub. This event - the death of an innocent through adult failure - raises the Job question at the center of the Lutheran tradition: how does divine grace operate in a world where innocents die as a consequence of adult sin? Updike does not resolve the question; he lets it remain as a permanent weight on Rabbit's conscience throughout the subsequent novels.
Philippians 4:11 - 'I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content' - represents what Rabbit cannot achieve. Paul's contentment - the acceptance of whatever God provides - is Rabbit's perpetual aspiration and perpetual failure. He cannot accept the life he has; he is always running toward something else, some sense of transcendence, grace, or escape that the next thing will provide. His name - 'Rabbit' - captures this: he is always running, always eluding, never resting in the contentment Paul describes.
Lutheran Theology
Updike absorbed Lutheran theology first through his Dutch Reformed upbringing in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and later through his intensive reading of Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard. The theological framework operative in the Rabbit novels includes:
The theology of the cross (Luther's theologia crucis): God is revealed not in triumph and glory but in weakness, failure, and suffering. Rabbit's repeated failures are not simply moral defects but occasions for the kind of grace that only appears in brokenness.
Simul justus et peccator ('simultaneously righteous and sinner'): Rabbit is neither simply bad nor simply good. He is capable of genuine tenderness and genuine cruelty; he is a loving father and an unfaithful husband; he is spiritually serious and morally evasive. This simultaneous righteousness and sinfulness is Luther's description of the justified Christian - not purified but declared righteous while remaining sinful.
Divine absence: The God who might transform Rabbit is felt as absence more often than presence. The Lutheran God who hides himself (Deus absconditus) behind the ordinary surfaces of experience is the God Rabbit occasionally glimpses - in the motion of a good golf swing, in the memory of a great basketball game, in moments of unexpected tenderness - and then loses again.
The Series Arc
Rabbit, Run establishes the existential pattern: flight from responsibility, guilt, grace-seeking, failure. Rabbit Redux immerses Rabbit in the social upheavals of 1969 - he hosts a young Black man and a hippie girl in his home, with disastrous consequences - and engages the civil rights movement's biblical prophetic tradition through Skeeter, the Black Vietnam veteran who reads the Bible as a revolutionary text. Rabbit Is Rich traces Rabbit's unexpected prosperity and midlife spiritual emptiness. Rabbit at Rest follows his decline, his heart problems, his final run, and his death - and the ambiguous grace of the final scene.
Author Context
John Updike (1932-2009) was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, to a family of German and Dutch Reformed background. His father was a schoolteacher; his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer, had literary ambitions and encouraged his writing. He studied at Harvard and spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford before joining the New Yorker, where he became a staff writer in 1955. He published prolifically - novels, short stories, poetry, criticism - throughout a fifty-year career. His theological seriousness was consistent: he read Barth, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Niebuhr throughout his life and integrated theological reflection into his fiction more systematically than almost any other major American novelist.
Legacy
The Rabbit tetralogy is regularly cited as one of the greatest achievements in American fiction. Its combination of social specificity (Updike's portraits of American consumer culture at each decade are unsurpassed), psychological depth, and theological seriousness place it in the tradition of the great European Catholic novels (Bernanos, Mauriac, Greene) while remaining distinctly American and Protestant. Its treatment of grace as operating through, not despite, failure and ordinariness has influenced a generation of subsequent American novelists who take the spiritual dimension of ordinary life seriously.