Reverend Updike Rabbit Run Analysis

Updike has carefully tended a dialectic of images and all the little congruences and arabesques within and throughout the novel as Rabbit turns alternatively toward the matrix of family, responsibility, agape, sacrifice and then to the seemingly opposite values of independence, freedom, eros and selfishness.

Rabbit is a family man who breaks one family to begin another, breaks that to reunite the first, and breaks that to run.

It is easy to imagine Reverend Eccles as a kind of adversary to Rabbit, the force for good countering Rabbits misdeeds.

He differs from Rabbits father and Tothero in that he attempts to provide Rabbit with guidance.

Although Rabbit, Run aligns itself with the twentieth century lament for the loss of traditional values,