In a 1992 letter to Stanley Trachtenberg, Updike writes, "I have never made it my habit to skip a scene and then come back to it. Eccles vanishes, that is, until a re-release of Redux in 1996, when he is patched back into that novel. The one notable exception to this is the Reverend Jack Eccles, who, along with his wife, Lucy, and his two daughters, vanishes from Harry Angstrom's world after playing a central role in the moral battlefields of Rabbit, Run. By braiding and re-braiding major and secondary characters, Updike gives the works- Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) and the novella Rabbit Remembered (2000)-the sense of an ongoing present unthreatened even by the death of the title character at the conclusion of the fourth novel. Part of the resonance of John Updike's Rabbit saga comes from the cast of characters that continues to reappear in the novels, either directly or through flashback. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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