The interest of Updike as a moral fabulist is that his judgments are never univocal. By his own avowal, he has too much tenderness for his characters to condemn their follies. On the other hand, his sense of humor and his ethics do not permit him to let their foibles go unnoticed. He himself acknowledges this duality when he affirms that all his work says "Yes, but." We find the same ambivalence in the definition he gives of the people he considers as spiritually alive: "I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation." Most of the charm of Updike's protagonists in general, and of Harry Angstrom in particular, is that, close to them as we may feel, we can never really anticipate the inconclusive ending to which their contradictions will lead them. We do not even know where Rabbit is heading at the end of Rabbit, Run. Perhaps it is because of this ultimate ambiguity that his existence leaves such a lasting impression on our inner sensibilities….
Ten years later, bringing him back to life in Rabbit Redux, Updike poses the critic another problem: must he consider this book as a continuation or just as another step in the novelist's itinerary? In recent years, as a reaction against the excesses of critical biography and literary history, there has developed a tendency to regard a novel as a self-contained unit producing its own logic, its own reference system. And indeed Rabbit Redux can be pleasurable and exciting even if one has not read the first book, Updike providing enough data to enable us to have a fair understanding of the factual links between the two works. Yet it is obvious that there exist shades of meaning perceptible only to those who are already familiar with Rabbit, Run. Elements of the decor such as the iceplant, the park, the quarry, images like those of the web, the net, the hole, carry latent connotations that the newcomer cannot grasp. He can neither fully enjoy the comical zest of the inversion of roles—epitomized by Harry's complaint: "Everybody now is like the way I used to be"—nor be aware of the similarities between the two novels, similarities in structure but also in tone since Updike returns here to the present tense he had almost completely abandoned after Rabbit, Run. Besides, through a series of echoes, reminders, and private jokes, he establishes with the initiated reader a complicity which greatly contributes to his pleasure. Mirroring scenes and motifs from the first book, even going to the length of repeating complete sentences, the author plays on an intertextual shuttle which modifies the separate meaning of each book. Following his example, one can imagine that it may be instructive to juxtapose or superpose fragments of his prose and either other passages of his books or the production of another writer used as external reference. The purpose of this article is to work out a number of variations on the character of Rabbit, concentrating primarily on his apprehension of "the poetry of space" … and on the metaphors which express it. (p. 95)
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