Updike's Novels as Illustrations

From Updike's essay/speech, "Remarks Upon Receiving the Campion Medal" in John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace.

"The first, The Poorhouse Fair, carries and epigraph from the Gospel of Luke; the next, Rabbit, Run, from Paschal; the third, The Centaur, from Karl Barth; and the fifth, Couples, from Paul Tillich. I thought of my novels as illustrations for texts from Kierkegaard and Barth; the hero of Rabbit, Run was meant to be a representative Kierkegaardian Man, as his name, Angstrom, hints. Man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of social contract and the inner imperatives, condemned as if by otherworldly origins to perpetual restlessness--such was, and to some extent remains, my conception."