Editing John Updike (section)

===Death===
Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.<ref name ="bellis" /> In ''[[The Poorhouse Fair]]'' (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.

For [[Rabbit Angstrom]], with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of ''Rabbit at Rest'' (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In ''[[The Centaur]]'' (1963), George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer.<ref name = "bellis" /> Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence".<ref name="bellis" />

Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed

<blockquote>many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: [[Henry Bech]]'s concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'<ref>{{Citation | first = Michiko | last = Kakutani | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28appr.html | title = An Appraisal: A Relentless Updike Mapped America 's Mysteries | newspaper = The New York Times | date = January 27, 2009}}.</ref></blockquote>

Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):

{{poemquote|
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...<ref>{{Citation | first = John | last = Updike | author-link = John Updike | contribution = Perfection Wasted | title = Collected Poems: 1953–1993 | year = 1995 | publisher = Knopf}}.</ref>}}