John Updikes fiction

My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in the middle that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. Updike defines thus his literary choice in an interview to Jane Howard. He extracts his fictional power out of the conflictual energy emanating from the anxiety of a man caught in between his ideals and the reality he is forced to live in. Updike captures the restlessness and struggle of the soul on the verge of making decisive choices.

His characters are middle-class individuals who are never content with their condition.

They are questing heroes in the sense that they are permanently seeking to depass their condition.

In modern America the tradition of pragmatism and individualism has mostly degenerated into obscene manifestations of narcissism and egotism. The few who still dare go on a quest for meaningfulness and spirituality are more often than not bitterly disappointed and forced to accept the mutilating pattern of the general social system. This is when the misfits appear and their struggle to adapt or to fit in is the most dramatic. Updike s characters are often social and moral misfits. He depicts their evolution towards conformity or disaster dissecting their mental and environmental triggers.

The present analysis attempts to reconcile two rather opposite critical trends that characterize Harry Angstrom, the protagonist of the Rabbit series, either as a spiritual nullity, as Robert Detweiler, Tony Tanner, Pierre Brodin, Monica Bottez, or as a modern saint, an absurd hero, such as David Galloway pictures him. Galloway spectacularly rehabilitates Harry as an absurd hero rebelling against the wasteland into which he is born. He is determined by the angst of young man striving for perfection he used to be. Harry s quest is for that environment in which he can give his best where he can experience again the sacredness of achievement. Galloway justifies his categorizing him as a saint by his permanent struggle, not necessarily his success. He justifies Rabbit s saintliness as being the fidelity to a standard of good by which he attempts to live, and the intensity of his loyalty to this standard, which can only be described as religious. On the other hand, R. Detweiler qualifies him as a weak-willed conformist, not a rebel, who is pitifully content to identify his Grail with sex, athletic success, the ambiguous praise of a friend. However, he admits that Harry s whole existence is a contorted effort at discovering love - which is his moral salvation, although he never becomes the initiate. Monica Bottez characterizes his attitude towards life as emblematic of his nickname: the skilful eschewing of setbacks spontaneously, and always driven by anxiety. Tony Tanner grasps in Harry Angstrom the underlying romance pattern of male flight from social conditioning and he reads him as one of the many Huck Finns wanting to quit society and avoid growing up, but with no territory to light ...

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BACHELARD G. - "APA SI VISELE" - TRADUCERE IRINA MAVRODIN, EDITURA UNIVERS, BUCURESTI, 1999

BACHELARD G. - "PAMINTUL SI REVERIILE VOINTEI" - TRADUCERE IRINA MAVRODIN, EDITURA UNIVERS, BUCURESTI, 1998

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GALLOWAY D. - "THE ABSURD HERO IN AMERICAN FICTION" - UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN & LONDON, 1996

GIRARD R. - "MENSONGE ROMANTIQUE ET VERITE ROMANESQUE" - EDITURA BERNARD GRASSET, PARIS, 1961

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