Just as Updike helps us to understand Rabbit, accept his leaving his pregnant wife and child, he throws in the inevitable twist: his wife is having the baby.
It didn’t sit well with the reader that Rabbit just drove off that day and yet we came to understand his motivation–he’s not a bad person, he just felt hemmed in and hopeless and seeing an opportunity, broke out. Like most of the characters in the books I’ve read recently, he receives help from friends–his former coach, and then Ruth. (Hum: I get by with a little help from my friends) The problem I see here is that it weakens the character; the perk, I suppose, is that it makes them more real. Such a huge difference between these protagonists (Updike’s Rabbit, Ruiz’s Daniel, Murakami’s Kafka) and those of the fantasy genre in which they are kings, princes, (or queens, princesses) and lead armies. These characters face no wars, just the daily battles that wear us down. The outcomes don’t lead to treasure and acquired lands, but more towards a realization, an understanding, often resigned acceptance.
He feels the truth; the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. (p. 208)
Rabbit, having decided his path once again on the spur of the moment when visiting his wife at the hospital having their baby, is still thinking not of her, not of Ruth–whom he has also left without notice, laying in bed in the middle of the night when he rushes off to the hospital–not even of his three year-old son, Nelson, but of himself.
We’ve come to expect parents to give up themselves for their children; Rabbit, who hasn’t, may have just seen what is expected of him.
In the meantime, the reader, who has come to reverse his own thought pattern of expectations and truly sympathize with Rabbit’s choices if not in agreement with them, is left to wonder how futile it is to fight against expectations. Self versus society. Society versus Self.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology