The Cycle of Selfhood in Sillitoe Essay -- Literary Analysis

The Cycle of Selfhood in Sillitoe PrefaceAfter Alan Sillitoes death in 2008, journalist and author Catherine Mayer wrote Sillitoes obituary for clip magazine. She begins it with her own assessment of Sillitoes deform. Mayer asserts that Sillitoe possessed a rare office to identify the lovable qualities in characters his readers might shun in palpable life (Mayer). It is true he did. That ability can, of course, be attributed to talent, hard work and strong writers intuition, but it can also be said that perhaps it was easy for Sillitoe to identify those qualities in those characters, because he determine with those characters. One connoisseur goes so far as to say that Sillitoe is as well as close to them for his own good, he abdicates to an outpouring autobiographical compulsion (Roskies 172). The critic tempers that remark in the next sentence saying that, Its virtueis its gauzy recreation of hand-to-mouth subsistence living in Nottinghamthe industrial North as a whole (R oskies 172)Sillitoe grew up in the same kind of environs as his characters do. Born in 1928 and raised in Radford, a work class suburb in western Nottingham (Daniels and Rycroft 461), Sillitoe was son to Christopher Sillitoe, a tannery laborerilliterate, frequently out of work and sometimes abusiveand Sylvia Burton Sillitoe, a plait factory worker (Aspden). At 14, Alan Sillitoe left school to work a string of factory jobs, one as a lathe operator at a bicycle factory (Daniels and Rycroft 464), just like Arthur Seaton, the protagonist of Sillitoes, Saturday night and Sunday Morning.IntroductionContemporary working class fiction from the British Isles is fraught with class struggle and its a topic that cloud much of the work of the Angry ... ...Lessons of the long-distance runner. The New Criterion (2008) 23-28. academician Search Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Daniels, Stephen, and Simon Rycroft. Mapping the Modern City Alan Sillitoes Nottingham Novels. legal proceeding of the I nstitute of British Geographers 18.4 (1993) 460-480. JSTOR. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Mayer, Catherine. Alan Sillitoe. Time 10 May 2010 35. schoolman Search Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Penner, Allen R. Human Dignity and Social Anarchy Sillitoes The Loneliness of the Long- withdrawnness Runner. Contemporary Literature 10.2 (1969) 253-265. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Roskies, D. M. Alan Sillitoes Anti-Pastoral. The Journal of Narrative Technique 10.3 (1980) 170-185. Print.Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. New and Collected Stories. New York Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. 1-35. Print.