Vol. 68 No. 4 (2020)
Research Article

“Harry, You Must Stop Living in the Past:” Names as Acts of Recall in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom

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  • Peter Backhaus
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00277738.2020.1794248

Published 2020-07-30

Keywords

  • United States,
  • college athletics,
  • athletic conference names

Copyright (c) 2020 American Name Society

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper studies the function of names as a stylistic device in literary fiction. The data are taken from John Updike’s Rabbit series, which depicts the life of US American Everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Special focus is on Harry’s peculiar habit of calling people and places by names that are no longer up to date: former nicknames, maiden names, names of shops that have gone out of business. It is argued that, in so doing, Harry is recurrently invoking memories of his own past. Updike’s use of names here reinforces, on an onomastic level, one of the major motifs of the novel: the protagonist’s infatuation with a former version of himself.

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