User:Marxismforthewin/sandbox

Plot summary
Rabbit is a former high school basketball star who acquired his nickname when he was a boy because his facial features and the nervous twitches under his nose reminded others of a rabbit.

Theme
Updike used the theme of broken and imperfect marriages to send a message that “individuals do not always measure up to the ideals of piety, family, and cohesion.”

Characters
The novel is the study of a “non-hero’s quest for a nonexistent grail”

Adaptations
The novel was adapted to a major motion picture that was released in 1970 and starred James Caan as“Rabbit” and Carrie Snodgrass as Janice.

Reception
The novel, which sold over 200,000 copies within two years of it's release, “spoke clearly to people” who were drawn to Updike’s declaration that “the most ideal marriages were not providing all the sexual satisfaction needed by men.” A quartet of novels written by Updike known as the "Rabbit Angstrom Novels" provide “an accurate, absorbing, and aesthetically satisfying social history of middle-class America from the 1950s into the 1980s”

Background
Updike believed that “high school shapes the character of people” and this premise was reflected in the character Rabbit. Updike used golf as a “social barometer” to describe how well Rabbit managed his life. He stated that “Most of us don’t really know how well we’re doing in real life, and image we’re doing not so bad. Only on the golf course is the feedback instantaneous and unrelenting.”

Style
The narrative style applied was a novel with alternating narrators. The novel was almost completely in the narrative present tense with “occasional shifts in point of view.”