He is, as Sanford Pinsker says, 'an early instance in the long line of church failures who populate Updike's fiction.' 4 But we may question what there is about his failure that induces his creator to confront him once again.Įccles first appears in that scene in Rabbit, Run when Harry Angstrom returns to the cheerless apartment he has shared with his wife, Janice, and two-year-old son, Nelson, and then abandoned in his search for something as 'first-rate' as his glory years of high school basketball. 3 More importantly, though, the inclusion of this scene, coupled with minor changes made to Rabbit, Run for its re-release in 1996, causes a rethinking of the purposes of Eccles in the context of both the 1950s and the 1990s.

You are in danger of losing the music, or the thread, in that way.' 2 In some ways, the three-page insertion of 1996 does have that feeling: that there is a different kind of dictional weave to it, a musicality, perhaps, lacking the same tones as the rest of the text.

In a 1992 letter to Stanley Trachtenberg, Updike writes, 'I have never made it my habit to skip a scene and then come back to it. Eccles vanishes, that is, until a re-release of Redux in 1996, when he is patched back into that novel. The one notable exception to this is the Reverend Jack Eccles, who, along with his wife, Lucy, and his two daughters, vanishes from Harry Angstrom's world after playing a central role in the moral battlefields of Rabbit, Run.

By braiding and re-braiding major and secondary characters, Updike gives the works- Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) and the novella Rabbit Remembered (2000)-the sense of an ongoing present unthreatened even by the death of the title character at the conclusion of the fourth novel. Part of the resonance of John Updike's Rabbit saga comes from the cast of characters that continues to reappear in the novels, either directly or through flashback. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

John updike rabbit redux