When Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom returns to Brewer to seek help from his old high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero in "Rabbit Run" by John Updike John Updike, a third person The narrator establishes the scene "Rabbit looks up hopefully at the third story windows but no light show" before we are introduced to Tothero via free indirect speech and made aware of the Rabbit's thoughts without being explicitly placed in his head: "Tothero, if he's in there, he's still sleeping"; this is Rabbit's hypothesis. Tothero is only hinted at and is initially characterized as an abstraction Additionally, the emphasis is more on the importance of Rabbit's need to meet Tothero than on the importance of establishing Tothero as an individual person "[Rabbit] doesn't want to sleep so soundly that he will miss Tothero when. he will come out. ...Tothero must not be missed. Tothero's character is therefore established first through his relationship with Rabbit, before Rabbit even meets Tothero himself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe fact that Tothero is Rabbit's former teacher is not obvious until, once again via free indirect speech, the observation be made that “[Tothero] has the The disciplinarian's trick of waiting a long time while his words gain weight. So far, he's been characterized almost entirely through Rabbit's eyes, but when Tothero speaks, he reveals a deeper characteristic; that is, a calm sense of reason: "That doesn't seem like very mature behavior," he says of Rabbit's decision to leave his home; and of Janice's uncontrollable alcoholism, he says: "Perhaps if you had shared this pleasure [of drinking with your wife], she could have controlled it"; and when Rabbit calls Janice “stupid,” Tothero responds, “Harry, that’s a harsh thing to say. Of any human soul. Despite this apparent level-headedness, Tothero later contradicts his own advice when he makes even worse comments about women. And furthermore, despite the advice he gives Rabbit and the way he chastises him for his decision to leave Janice, he later tells him to "do what the heart commands. ...The heart is our only guide ". However, following his heart is exactly what Rabbit did; which is exactly what brought him to Tothero in the first place. This almost hypocritical contradiction between a sense of reality and a sense of idealism is the essence of Tothero's character, but we don't realize it until we reconcile Rabbit's perception of Tothero with the things that Tothero actually says and does. When he speaks, and we are freed from Rabbit's preconceived perception of him, Tothero reveals the sense of reason and fairness that we understand made him so good at his craft in the first place. But on some level, he considers himself a failure. This perception of himself is revealed through his dialogue, not so much by what he says but rather by what he does not say: "I can't tell you how much it means to me that you are came to me when you needed you. help, [Harry]. ...All these years, all these boys, they pass through your hands and into the blue and never come back, Harry; Although he notes that his former students never return, he tells this to himself, and there is an element of self-accusation in his words, implying that he is incapable of bringing these boys back or to give them a chance. reason to do it; and of course that is the case, because they are a symbol of the past and the past cannotnever come back. Yet he attempts to reclaim an era long gone: "Rabbit waits and then realizes that Tothero wants to see him undress. ...Why watch? Suddenly, Rabbit knows. This takes Tothero back in time." Additionally, Tothero's failed status is illustrated when, in the Chinese restaurant, he attempts to impart his personal philosophy on teaching to Rabbit, Ruth, and Margaret. “The coach is concerned with developing the three tools given to us in life: the head, the body and the heart,” he says. But these words, which are the end product of years of experience in teaching and therefore years of accumulated wisdom, become the it's one of Ruth's jokes, and, worse, they can't even hold Rabbit's attention "Won't you confirm it to me, Harry asks. “Yeah, sure,” Rabbit says, “just yesterday.” "Second, leave it." "I'm finishing, Harry, and then you can talk." Finally, he finishes what he wants to say, but as soon as he finishes, Ruth changes the subject to Rabbit. But there is another side of Tothero: "What is [this girl business], yes, what is it? Asshole." He is a rude man as well as a teacher, and Rabbit, after his escape from Janice, is the product of these Tothero qualities when they work in tandem: he teaches Rabbit to be rude. After his outburst above, "[Tothero] seems surprised to hear himself say such a brutal and ugly thing. Yet he also looks at [Rabbit] as if it were some kind of test." Although he doesn't teach Rabbit to be as crude as in this scene, he familiarizes Rabbit with his habit of seducing women If we don't return to such levels, this is certainly the case with his treatment of women: “I have an acquaintance,” he said, “a lover perhaps, to whom I offer a meal once in a blue moon, but it’s nothing more than that, a little more than that.” , he tells Rabbit that "a young woman has hair on every part of her body...They're monkeys, Harry." All this despite his assertion that "it makes me happy, happy and humble, to have, as I do, this very tenuous association with her." And just as Tothero's feminization is the obverse of his sense of identity, it is for this reason that his physical appearance is also haggard, old - the obverse of his "young at heart" desire to reclaim the past. He looks "stranger than Lapin expected." He looks like a dwarf." He's not quite the image of an athletic trainer in love with his basketball players, but he's quite the image of an elderly athletic trainer in love with a player who came back to him Tothero is therefore characterized by the contradictions between reason and passion, between the past and the present, between the reality of his existence and the way Rabbit sees it, and between reality and the way he sees himself. reveals a wise man even in the words he uses are undeniably harsh; his actions reveal a man of tolerance and temperance even though he has immersed himself in petty indulgences and pleasures; hasn't aged gracefully even though he still thinks about the boys he taught and insists on watching him undress as if he were in a locker room; Rabbit's early admiration for Tothero gives way to him; weariness with the man, even though Tothero happily gives advice to Rabbit as if he were still a teacher. Tothero is characterized as much by what he does as by himself. it is by what he once did, and as much by the reason he does it as by the reasons Rabbit thinks he does it. His characterization arises from the discrepancies between his words and actions, and the way Rabbit reactsto these words and actions. He's a mentor to Rabbit - or he was, but now he's corrupt, and he's teaching Rabbit lessons and fostering behavior that isn't appropriate to fix Rabbit's failed marriage. Reverend Eccles has more or less the same effect on Rabbit, although he at least tries to help Rabbit with his problems rather than transplanting him into an entirely new situation in which he must face a whole new set of problems. obstacles. “You never knew what Eccles really meant,” we are told, once again via free indirect speech from Rabbit's point of view; “you had to take what you wanted.” Eccles, like Tothero, is characterized by Rabbit's perception of him, but to a lesser extent. It is more often characterized by his wife's perception of him, as well as his own actions and his own dialogue, than by anything else. Yet because other characters, including Rabbit and Lucy Eccles, do not understand or understand some of Eccles' more eccentric actions, he is able to maintain an air of mystery, and therefore an air of superiority. "[Eccles's] whole game is to get [Rabbit] out into the open where he can be manipulated." Therefore, if his motivations remain obscured, he is superior to those who cannot understand them, that is- that is, to everyone except Fritz Kruppenbach, to whom he turns for advice, and even then, Eccles regains a kind of superiority when he refuses Kruppenbach's invitation to pray, for reasons of anger and. , therefore, "hypocrisy." However, when we are privy to Eccles' own thoughts, we realize that his confident and cheerful facade belies his essence of doubt: "With his white collar he forges the soul of God. name on every word he speaks. He steals the faith of the children he is supposed to teach. He murders the faith in the minds of everyone who actually listens to his chatter. service, pronouncing our Father when. his heart knows the true father he is trying to please, has tried to please all his life, the God who smokes cigars. Indeed, the only other person to whom this "inner Eccles" is visible is Lucy, who, although she does not understand why her husband does the things he does - for example, why he prefers to play golf rather than telephone members. of his congregation - at least understands that some things are important to him. She tells Rabbit that Eccles' help in resolving Rabbit's marital problems "is the first constructive thing he thinks he's done since he came to Mount Judge" and that "to hear him talk, everything rested on his shoulders. Eccles works according to his own agenda: he has no set schedule, he enters and exits people's lives as he pleases, and he works for his own goals, even if they are always well-intentioned. It seems, at first glance, to be perfect. However, almost all his faults, such as they are, are embodied in his wife. She notices his physical stature: that he has gained weight and lost hair, that he is getting older since he helped Rabbit. She criticizes his behavior around their daughter Joyce, reading her poetry that she considers inappropriate. If Eccles himself appears to the outside world as a man without faults or apprehensions, then his wife reveals these faults to Lapin and to us, while Eccles's own thoughts reveal his apprehensions to us, but not to Lapin; even though we eventually learn the motivations that drive him to do what he does, to wear a mask of joviality, to fight for good and to help others, he still retains his air of mystery and therefore his superiority over the world which surrounds it. thus, Eccles is characterized both by what he does and by how andwhy he does it. But, although Rabbit can easily see the ways in which Eccles is helping him - by getting him a job with Mrs. Smith and focusing so much attention on his family in order to arrange Rabbit's marriage - his motivations are only hints in the observations. made by Lucy, then filtered down to Rabbit from Lucy's point of view, with her bias against Rabbit fully controlled. We are never given a completely accurate portrait of Eccles: he is half the product of his own work and half the product of his wife, characterized as much by his actions as by his wife's account of possible motivations of these acts. While we could have a fair and balanced view of Tothero by comparing what he said and did with the intentions behind what he said and did, we cannot have such a view of Eccles because he is characterized in such a way that its true nature is tainted. by his wife's biased view of his character, who wishes he would focus less attention on Rabbit. Eccles' characterization is a puzzle of obvious actions and less obvious interpretations of those actions, of impressions he makes on Rabbit and impressions he makes on others who then share them with Rabbit. Eccles, in essence, is semi-real and semi-mythical - which is what Tothero once was, but is no longer the case. If the novel is essentially about the decisions Rabbit must make regarding two possible lives - a life of simple but imprisoning domesticity represented by Eccles and Janice, and a life of complex but liberating impulses represented by Tothero and Ruth - then Rabbit is a combination of the two men and the product of the two women, alternately domestic and impulsive as circumstances require. Rabbit himself is characterized not only by his own actions and by the impressions that other characters have of him, but also by the actions of other characters and his impressions of other characters, and by the way in which these actions and impressions are relate to his character. in foreshadowing Rabbit's final choice between these two lives, he is twice characterized in terms of similarities and differences between himself and between Tothero and Eccles, respectively. "Hit me", he orders Ruth, "come on. You want to, don't you? Really pound me", to which she replies: "That's what poor Maggie has to do for your old bastard friend [Tothero]." Later, Lucy Eccles tells him: "It's the differences between you [and Eccles] that I notice. ... Like the fact that you're not afraid of women." But of course he is, in a certain sense, afraid of women; he runs away from Janice three times, the last time being when she "hits" him - not physically, but nevertheless she hits him in a way that really hurts him, when she kills their daughter. And if Rabbit is drawn from one side of these choices to the other, and is attracted in another way by the other choice, then his character is revealed by contrast in his environment: we observe how he behaves in a environment, then observe how it behaves in the other, and compare and contrast the two. When he first leaves the house, gets in the car and drives, it seems like an act of stupid impulse - but as Rabbit becomes more and more comfortable in his solitude, away from Janice and from home we realize that this is something he had to do and that it makes perfect sense given the circumstances he found himself in. Even Eccles agrees with this: “If I had to leave my wife,” he says, “I would get in a car and drive thousands of miles. ". However, when Rabbit returns to Brewer and Tothero and leaves his solitude in the past, we realize that he is making a choiceillogical based on what he assumes he should do - "That's what I did!" he told Eccles, before adding: "I drove to West Virginia. Then I thought about it and came back. ... It seemed safer to be in a place I know. " This withdrawal from a life away from domesticity, however, is the same kind of safe and complacent choice he made when he was with Janice - even if, this time, he does what he assumes he must do in terms of impulsivity. rather than being complacent. This contrast between two environments - and between a person behaving in two different ways in these two environments, although with the same goal of finding some sort of meaning in both - ultimately reveals a character who cannot be happy in one environment. which does not change, to the point where it will consciously modify this environment, even to the point of sabotaging it. "I played first-rate basketball," he told Eccles, "And once you're first-rate at something...it kind of takes the fun out of being second-rate. And that little "Nowhere is this self-destructive impulse more evident than in Rabbit's behavior at Club Castanet: 'Come on, Ruth,' he says, and he suggests they leave. She protests: “I’m happy.” “Come on,” he insists, and he heads for the door with Ruth in tow, with complete disregard for her happiness, just as he headed for the door of his own house with complete disregard for happiness of his wife. And earlier, in a completely calm and serene moment when he and Ruth are on top of the mountain overlooking Brewer and "he holds her tighter and feels better", he breaks the spell between them with an inappropriate question "Were you really a hooer? - no doubt the product of Tothero's re-education of a boy he says is "so innocent". Rabbit even goes so far as to take his new life and compress its essence into a slogan that sounds like wisdom but is, on the contrary, only characteristic of his hedonism: "If you have the courage to be yourself," he says, "others will pay your price." Rabbit is therefore characterized primarily by his actions when placed in unfamiliar circumstances - his desperation for something meaningful brings out his character, for the better or worse regardless of these circumstances He is rarely characterized directly through his dialogue, as he rarely expresses what he thinks although when he expresses what he thinks, as in the comment above; , this is all the more powerful for his otherwise reserved words He is also rarely characterized by the other characters' comments about him "You're so smug, that's what attracts me," Ruth tells him, but. he simply remains silent and stares at her, and it is this action, rather than Ruth's comment, that characterizes him: at this point we know he is enough. , but we have yet to see how he will react to someone calling him smug. He responds, again through free indirect speech, with the thought that "the blue of his irises has deepened and darkened with a richness which, singing truth to his instincts, disturbs him." This characteristic response is developed later in the novel with the third-person narrator's observation that Rabbit "hates being hated." But such comments and observations are rare. Rabbit is more of a man of action than a man of words and explanations, characterized first by what he does and then, when his motivations are revealed or hinted at, he is characterized more by why he does it. More than that, it is this “why” that pushes Eccles to help Rabbit, and it is this notion of “.