Rabbit, Run | Style

Rabbit, Run Style

Updike's Use of Metaphor

As Hermione Lee pointed out in the New Republic, in Updike's work, everything becomes a metaphor: every ordinary object and event can be seen as signifying something else, often a larger truth. "This is the most metaphorical writing in American fiction, except for Melville's," she wrote. Rabbit sees everything as meaningful but also as strange. Lee commented on Updike's comparisons of Rabbit's heart to many things: it's described as "a fist, an amphitheater, a drum, a galley slave, a ballplayer waiting for the whistle." In Updike, she noted, "no object, no creature, is too ordinary or too technical to be subjected to metaphor."

Rich Detail

Updike's work is notable for its rich, precise, and accumulated detail of ordinary life. Lee quoted other reviewers, who loved Updike's "meticulous taxonomy" of "the material nature of the world," and admire his "saluting and memorializing American superabundance." Updike spends the same amount of energy on...
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