In these novels, Updike takes a comical and retrospective look at the relentless questing life of Rabbit against the background of the major events of the latter half of the 20th century.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, formerly a high school basketball star, is now 26 and has a job selling a kitchen gadget named MagiPeeler.

Harry attends church one morning and, after walking the minister's wife Lucy home, interprets her invitation to come in for coffee as a sexual advance.

At Rebecca June's funeral, Harry's internal and external conflicts result in a sudden proclamation of his innocence in the baby's death.

In the novel the norms of Modernism are being replaced with those of a new era with a desiccated view of spirituality and a revaluation of eroticism, things previously held constant and in some cases repressed in traditional American thought.

He is taken with Ruth because she "feels right" as long as she doesn't use a "flying saucer" (a diaphragm), and even compels her to fellate him during a particularly intense bout of physical desire.

For Updike, the particular etiology of Rabbit's sickness can be perceived as his distance from God, illustrated by his cavalier conversations with Eccles.

The existing framework of religion and ethics should support his devotion to his marriage, job, and life, but he finds it utterly unsatisfactory.

[9] Rabbit is clearly a sinner and in some ways he is aware of that, but he still quests for some kind of religious meaning in his life, “Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you.

I do feel, I guess that somewhere behind all this... there's something that wants me to find it!”[10] Rabbit has a crisis of faith and doesn't know what to do and calls his local pastor for help with the issue.

Some readers might ponder, along with Updike, whether grace penetrates not only sinful incorrigibility, but also theological confusion, genetic predisposition, and mental illness (Crowe 82).” Rabbit is faced with human challenges in his marriage with a drunken wife, an overbearing mother, the death of his newborn daughter and the pregnancy resulting from his infidelity.

But his religion is not strong; he just treats it as a kind of spiritual sustenance to escape from the reality and a tool to solve practical problems.

[11] Rabbit hungers for something more than what he has, for a return to the golden era of his youth, for the sexual comfort of his relationship with Janice, and for a worldview that fits his tumultuous emotions.

“If we are to understand Rabbit's identity crisis as emerging from Updike's Christian apologetics, the important critical task is to recognize the combination of sin, agitated depression, and simple worldliness in Rabbit, and to detect and describe the particular form of irony with which Updike hints at alternatives to his character's acts.

These alternative acts will be Christian works of love that, in Kierkegaardian fashion, transcend the ethical and epitomize a genuine faith and sanguine identity.

The Eisenhower era, apart from offering tremendous consumerist possibilities, urged Americans to reorient themselves to the postwar reality.

The cultural atmosphere of the 1950s, charged by the politics of the Cold War, thus necessitated the phenomena of self-definition at all levels and in all areas of life.

[12] This involves his rejection of certain traditional aspects of American life in search of a satisfactory place in the world that is never really found, as the book ends with his fate uncertain.

But while at times he finds himself enthralled with people, like his relationship with Ruth, his conversations with Eccles, and his initial return to his family, in the end Rabbit is dissatisfied and takes flight.

In The New York Times he was praised for his “artful and supple” style in his “tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.”[16] American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” Updike himself said Rabbit, Run was the novel with which most people associate him, even though other novels in the series won Pulitzer Prizes.

Though it had been done earlier, as in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Albert Camus' The Fall, Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early uses of the present tense.

[20] The philosopher Daniel Dennett makes extended reference to the Rabbit novels in his paper "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity".

[25] Burhans, Clinton S. “Things Falling Apart: Structure and Theme in ‘Rabbit, Run.’” Studies in the Novel, vol.