Updike's Rabbit Saga as a Cultural Critique of American Ideology

John Updike's five Rabbit novels portray extensively and almost exhaustively the social and cultural milieu of America during the 1950s-1990s. These novels are often regarded as a fictional chronicle even more pertinent and realistic than history books themselves in displaying the changes and evolutions of American society in the latter half of the twentieth century. The novels dramatize in the fictional life of Rabbit Angstrom a great variety of topical events and controversial issues whose number mounts up to many dozens. Few contemporary novelists have provided so comprehensive and multifarious a scope of thought-provoking, even forbidden, subjects as Updike does in these novels, and few American readers can deny their compassion with the bewildered Rabbit Angstrom under such miscellaneous cultural impacts. In these novels, Updike has offered a panorama of American society, a survey of American culture, and a critique of American Dream ideology, not in the manner of a sociologist or a historian, but literally or metaphorically or allegorically through the pilgrimage of an American Adam figure.