“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike (post 3): Part I on the meaning of his protagonist’s name, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom

Updike chose the name “Angstrom” to represent the angst of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “Updike once described Harry Angstrom as a ‘representative Kierkegaardian man’: Man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives” (1, pp. 197-198).

1. Adam Begley. Updike. New York, HarperCollins, 2014.

Kierkegaard’s influence on 20th Century Writers (including Updike), and his Well-Known, Pseudonymous, Alternate Personalities

From Wikipedia

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…

“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…

“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

— Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

— A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

— Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

— Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

— Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

— Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

— Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

— Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

— Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

— Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

— Unscientific Postscript

— Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

— H.H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

— Anti-Climacus, author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.”

Kierkegaard Said:

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

John Updike, and the other writers mentioned above, evidently identified, to one extent or another, with what Kierkegaard said.

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.