n Rabbit Redux, John Updike's first sequel to Rabbit, Run, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's wife, Janice, leaves him for a car salesman from her father's dealership. Besides go- ing some way toward providing Harry with a much-deserved comeuppance for his extemporaneous abandonment of Janice in the first novel, this plot point sets in motion a series of events: Harry, now a stodgy member of the Silent Majority unnerved by the unrelenting social unrest of the late sixties, will share his home with Jill, a young hippie from an affluent family, and Skeeter, a well-read black militant with a messiah complex. Weary after three days of Harry and Skeeter's racially charged wrangling, Jill convinces Harry to sit with her, his liberal-leaning adolescent son, Nelson, and Skeeter for "a struc- tured discussion" that will enable him to better understand both his African American guest and the era's racial turmoil. 2 She explains that "(t)hings that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history" (199-200). Jill's articulation of Harry's need for such a seminar recalls passages from the 1968 report issued by the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon Johnson estab- lished to study and explicate the causes of the era's urban race riots. Not only does Jill's preamble to the novel's initial "teach-in" scene call to mind specific sections of the Kerner

An Interview with John Updike

The Education of Harry Angstrom: Rabbit Redux and the Charge of the Kerner Commission

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An Interview with John Updike

Citations

The Education of Harry Angstrom: Rabbit Redux and the Charge of the Kerner Commission

The functions of myth in John Updike's novel "The Centaur"

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