At Schlemiel Theory, subtitles “The Place Where the Laugh Laughs at the Laugh,” Menachem Feuer published a piece titled “The Rise and Fall of American Dreams: On John Updike’s ‘Rabbit, Run’.” In it, he considers the opening scene in Rabbit, Run where an older Rabbit plays basketball with young men and notices a “natural” among them. Then he realizes that his own basketball fame has faded:  “They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”

“What Updike manages to do in this passage is to show the contradictions at the heart of the American dream. It may lift you up but at a certain point you may have to realize that you’re just one-in-a-million. But, to be sure, the struggle between being someone and being no-one is at the core of modernist art, literature, and philosophy. The question we have, as readers, is how Rabbit deals with his sinking into significance. Will he give up, will he try to be someone, or will he just . . . run away? Will he hurt people along the way?