A Nietschean Interpretation of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.337How to use a DOI?

Keywords

contiguity, succession, inner calling, alienation, deformation

Abstract

The paper is on the light of Nietzsche’s interpretation on cause and effect, in which the usual sequence of cause and effect is inverted because the so-called “cause” is in fact the cause of the exploration on the perceptible phenomenon. According to Nietzsche, the perceptible phenomenon should be the cause, while the usual exploring “cause” should be the effect. With Nietzsche’s understanding of cause and effect, the paper, taking Rabbit’s confusing running as the cause in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, situates Rabbit’s running to explore his inner calling from the horizontal perspective, i.e. the contiguity of Rabbit’s running between two spaces formed by two women — his wife and his mistress, and from the vertical perspective, i.e. the succession of Rabbit’s running away from, firstly, his job, and then, from the capitalist industrialized society. Through the situation of Rabbit’s running, the paper gets conclusion that what Rabbit is running from is the oppression of the social class, which is the effect of capital oppression in the society. In the capitalist industrialized society, money rule penetrates in every corner of the society and deforms everything including the individual personality, the familial relation and the social norms.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ling Jiang
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/18
TI  - A Nietschean Interpretation of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 244
EP  - 249
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.337
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.337
ID  - Jiang2020
ER  -