Updike, Harry Angstrom and Me :: essays research papers

This is a prose-poem on Updike. It follows Updike through his Rabbit Tetralogy._______________________________UPDIKEJohn Updikes Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first-class honours degree had contact with the Bahai Faith back in 1953. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Bahai in October 1959. The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one(a) Harry Rabbit Angstrom, from a small townsfolk in the USA. The book concerns Harrys attempts to escape the constraints of life. In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits. I was only too well apprised of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits. By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from lifes, from societys, constrai nts. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life. Had I read Updikes book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced. The Bahai Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a exact stage in my life, my mid-teens. This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updikes work.When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970. Rabbit Redux, Updikes sequel to Rabbit, Run came discover four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia. Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere. Updike s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak hideaway and old age. The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harrys. Ron Price with thanks to Articles on John Updikes Works, in The New York Times on the Web.