| Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 106 === From Rabbit, Run to Rabbit Redux. John Updike’s Rabbit is a self-centered person, concerned about his own need, desire and assumed truth. Rabbit’s stories are like a series of anthropocentric, chronological plays in which Americans have gone through various changes in lifestyle, economy and even landscapes, representation of American development. In series of the novels, readers see American natural landscapes decaying and eroding with the industrialized America. Not being able to adapt to the rapidly-changing, urban environments, they sought an escape or a hope by exploring to the West, the symbol of uncivilized and undestroyed Nature. Harry Angstrom was depicted as an observer and witness to changing America.
In Rabbit, Run, in a series of changes and transformations, Harry didn’t accept the duty of being a husband and father but he chose to run away to the West. Nevertheless, Harry got lost in the West and gave in to the civilization. In this novel, the relation between culture and nature is temporarily coexistent. Entering the sixties of the second novel, readers can perceive the atmosphere of violence and anger, which is contrary to the title “redux.” Under the circumstance of the Cold War is the social and cultural atmosphere a little bit conservative. The uncertainty urges Americans to search for identify in life. Rabbit is set as an example to justify this uncertainty—in pursuit of something. The relations between man and man, and human and environment have been changing. In the second novel, Rabbit is not an active character in search of something out of his instinct or desire. Instead, he is a passive or motionless one, spiritually isolating him from the outside environment. In this turbulent sixties, Rabbit is one of the “silent majority.”
How can literary theory be accommodated with literary works? Literary works can be considered a good way or a vehicle for us to get close to observe what is happening to the world. The characters in the works may be the representatives of “everymen” we may be one of them or we confront. The problems in Rabbit’s novels are catalyst for us to reflect on our concern in life and our relations with nature and environment. Rabbit’s relations with the physical environment and with
other people are changing. The directions of the dissertation are application of ecological thinking concept to reading Rabbit’s changing relationships with the outside world. In such a human-centered, the relationships are biased and anthropocentric. Ecological thinking is to dismantle biased, unequal relations out of the traditional linguistic conventions, to reflect on anthropocentric ideology through Michel Foucault’s Heterotopia, and to rethink and reconstruct people’s position within the physical environment.
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