The Cycle of Selfhood in Sillitoe

The Cycle of Selfhood in Sillitoe

Preface

After Alan Sillitoe’s death in 2008, journalist and author Catherine Mayer wrote Sillitoe’s obituary for Time magazine. She begins it with her own assessment of Sillitoe’s work. Mayer asserts that Sillitoe “possessed a rare ability to identify the lovable qualities in characters his readers might shun in real life” (Mayer). It is true; he did. That ability can, of course, be attributed to talent, hard work and strong writer’s intuition, but it can also be said that perhaps it was easy for Sillitoe to identify those qualities in those characters, because he identified with those characters. One critic goes so far as to say that Sillitoe is “too 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 virtue…is its splendid recreation of hand-to-mouth subsistence living in Nottingham…the industrial North as a whole” (Roskies 172)

Sillitoe grew up in the same kind of environment as his characters do. Born in 1928 and raised in Radford, a working class suburb in western Nottingham (Daniels and Rycroft 461), Sillitoe was son to Christopher Sillitoe, a tannery laborer—illiterate, frequently out of work and sometimes abusive—and Sylvia Burton Sillitoe, a lace 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 Sillitoe’s, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”

Introduction

Contemporary working class fiction from the British Isles is fraught with class struggle and it’s a topic that drove much of the work of the Angry ...

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