Rabbit (un)redeemed : The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction

This book approaches Updike's oeuvre by illuminating its ongoing, pervasive conflict between faith and doubt.

Concentrating on a trio of Olinger stories, the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, In the "Beauty of the Lilies", and "Rabbit Remembered" and dramatizing most emphatically Updike's career-spanning dialogue with his complexly fragile religious beliefs, Bailey interprets the Rabbit saga as fictionalized spiritual autobiography in which, through imposing Harry Angstrom's perceptual limitations upon his own stylistic gifts, Updike set himself the toughest trial of his ethical and aesthetic creed of the spirit-affirming capacities of human perception and expression.

Between his aspirations to creating a fiction emulative of patterns of transcendent meaning and his apprehension that Howellsian realism is all that he can achieve in prose, Updike has created, and Bailey has documented, one of the preeminent dramas of contemporary American culture and fiction - a literary engagement of the post-Christian with the postmodern.

Peter J. Bailey is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University.