In the opening paragraph of John Updike’s novel
Rabbit, Run, the main character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, comes
upon a group of boys playing basketball. Rabbit himself played basketball when he was a
boy, but now he is a grown man with a wife, a small child, a job, and various other
adult responsibilities. As he looks at the boys enjoying their ballgame, he thinks to
himself,
the
kids keep coming, they keep crowding you
up.
Rabbit realizes that he
is no longer young. He realizes that he becomes older each minute of his life and that
his youth is receding. He misses his youth, but he realizes that there are always new
“kids” who “keep coming.” In other words, new generations of young people are always
appearing, making the preceding generations feel older and older. Updike here presents
Rabbit engaging in a moment of sober reflection about his past, his present, and his
likely future – a future in which he will inevitably grow older, less young, than he
already is.
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