Rabbits

Rabbits recur in the novel as images and objects, not as active animal characters. Their forms shift from a conspicuous gift and a holiday-camp attraction to television imagery and an accidental pattern, making them a small but persistent motif in Bunny Munro’s surroundings and perceptions.

Forms and Appearances

At a sales visit, Bunny Munro notices a giant baby-blue rabbit wrapped in cellophane on Pamela Stokes’s mantelpiece. Its improbable presence catches his attention just before Pamela turns the conversation back to the hand lotion. The ornament sits among the ordinary furniture, but its scale and wrapping make it difficult to overlook.

In an advertisement for Butlins Holiday Camp, Bognor Regis, a giant fibreglass rabbit stands beside the swimming pool among the resort’s many attractions. Later, Bunny watches a crowd pass another such rabbit, described as goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, beside the water-slide. In these scenes the rabbit is a manufactured landmark: part of the holiday setting and a fixture in the procession of attractions.

Television, Print, and Perception

In a room shared with Bunny Junior, a television advertisement presents the holiday camp through photographs and attractions, including the giant rabbit by the pool. The image helps prompt Bunny’s sudden recognition of Butlins as the place he wants to go, joining the rabbit to a larger catalogue of childhood entertainment and resort spectacle.

Elsewhere, television shows the children’s characters Po and Dipsy holding hands in a field filled with oversized rabbits. Bunny’s attention moves between this screen image and a newspaper carrying a black-and-white CCTV picture of the Horned Killer. As liquid spreads across the paper, Bunny watches its shape become rabbit-like. The motif here is neither a decoration nor a planned image: it emerges from his gaze at the overlap between television, newspaper, and the room around him.

Memory and Recurrence

At Butlins Holiday Camp, Bognor Regis, the electric children’s train carries a circus-clown face that Bunny remembers from a visit with his father when he was a child. The rabbit beside the pool belongs to the same landscape of attractions, though the memory specifically attaches to the train. Together, the present-day crowd, familiar amusements, and remembered childhood setting make the holiday camp a place where Bunny encounters both what has endured and what he recalls.

Across these scenes, rabbits move between commercial ornament, resort spectacle, broadcast image, and fleeting pattern. Their recurrence does not establish them as creatures with independent action; instead, the novel places rabbit forms among the objects Bunny notices, remembers, and reads into his surroundings.