Rabbit motif

The Rabbit motif gathers images of prey, spectacle, and uneasy recognition around Bunny’s journey. Rabbits appear as oversized entertainment figures and as a shape Bunny finds in a soaked newspaper; between these sightings, his performance of a hunter gives predation a human face. The motif does not settle into a single meaning. Its movement from screen to paper to poolside makes the familiar figure seem at once comic, ominous, and entangled with memory.

Predation and the hunter’s performance

The motif’s predatory register is established alongside Bunny’s glimpse of the Horned Killer. In a small maisonette in Newhaven, Bunny thinks he can make out CCTV footage of the killer driving through a crowd of shoppers with his trident. Sunlight has washed out the image, so he cannot be certain of what he sees; what he does recognize is the terror of the crowd. For a moment, he wonders how close the danger is to Brighton, then continues his beauty-product sales pitch to Pamela Stokes. The scene places public violence at the edge of an ordinary commercial encounter: the frightening image is partly obscured but remains present in Bunny’s attention.

Later, Bunny explains hunting through a story about a warrior stalking prey. Bunny Junior supplies the word patience when his father pauses, and Bunny turns the account into a physical performance, beating his chest and bringing his hand down on the dashboard for emphasis. The prey in this anecdote is not a rabbit, but the scene contributes to the motif’s larger pattern: Bunny imagines pursuit as a matter of stealth followed by a forceful strike. His son’s small correction punctures the theatricality. When Bunny notices his son’s feet moving, the boy points out that Bunny has left his tie behind. The exchange shifts from the father’s dramatic hunter persona to the practical detail he has overlooked.

Rabbits as spectacle and warning

The novel places rabbits within the visual world of television and commercial display. In one scene, Bunny watches a television showing Po and Dipsy holding hands in a bright green field populated by oversized rabbits. The image is playful and artificial, its huge rabbits part of a children’s entertainment landscape. Yet the same room contains a newspaper bearing a black-and-white CCTV image of the Horned Killer and a headline announcing his arrival. The cheerful screen and the crime report occupy Bunny’s attention together, bringing harmless fantasy and public menace into a single domestic scene.

When Bunny throws the newspaper onto a puddle of urine, water begins to soak through it. He watches the spreading stain and tries not to take it personally when its shape becomes that of a rabbit. This is more than another oversized image placed in the landscape: it is a shape produced by accident on the very paper carrying news of the Horned Killer. Bunny’s response gives the motif a private, ominous charge. He does not explain the rabbit or establish what it means; instead, he registers it as something that seems pointed at him. The image remains materially ordinary—a stain spreading through a discarded newspaper—while his effort not to take it personally suggests how difficult it is for him to treat it as ordinary.

The rabbit at Butlins

At night in Bognor Regis, Bunny watches a crowd of women pass the swimming pool on their way to the Main Hall of Butlins Holiday Camp, Bognor Regis. Beside the pool stands a giant fiberglass rabbit, described as goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, near the water-slide. It is a fixed attraction in a route of amusements: the pool, fun fair, playground, and other features the crowd passes on its way indoors. The rabbit belongs to a world arranged for leisure and display, but Bunny sees it at a moment when the night and the gathering have acquired an unusually magical atmosphere. The figure’s scale and placement make it more uncanny than a small, incidental decoration.

The setting also brings the image into contact with Bunny’s own past. He remembers visiting the camp as a child with his father, including the electric children’s train circling the pool, whose engine bears a clown’s face he recalls from that earlier visit. The train, the poolside rabbit, and the other attractions place childhood memory within the same landscape now watched by an adult facing his own journey with his son. The evidence does not make the rabbit itself a direct recollection from Bunny’s childhood; rather, its presence among attractions and remembered rides lets the contemporary scene carry both present observation and older family memory.

Repetition and unease

Across these scenes, the rabbit changes scale and setting without becoming a straightforward emblem. On television, oversized rabbits belong to a children’s program; on the newspaper, a rabbit shape emerges from a stain beside an image of the Horned Killer; at Butlins, a giant fiberglass figure stands beside the pool as Bunny recalls coming there with his father. The repetition connects mass entertainment, an accidental mark, and a remembered leisure landscape, but the images do not resolve into one explanation.

That instability is part of the motif’s force. Bunny’s hunting story presents pursuit as a performance of control, while the rabbit images repeatedly appear outside his control: within a television picture, in the shape of spreading water, and as a stationary attraction watched from his chalet window. The motif therefore places his self-dramatizing appetite and the threatening news around him beside images that are at once familiar and difficult for him to dismiss. At Butlins, the rabbit is not a revelation or an answer. It is one detail in a landscape where childhood memory, spectacle, and the present crowd briefly occupy the same view.