Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, to working class parents. Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.The novel is heavily focused on one character, Arthur Seaton. Where we see reflections of the authors own personality and behaviour, through his later understandings of humanity and oppression of the working class.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is an unapologectic novel in it's presentation of real life. It demonstarates how the protagonist, Artur Seaton could teach contemporary binge-drinkers a thing or two: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the topmost stair to the bottom’. He then drinks another pint and then vomits in someone’s face before fighting his way out. Arthur works at a lathe in a bicycle factory, making just enough money to drink his way through the weekend. He fishes, fights, sleeps with other worker’s wives, goes to the pictures, drinks and works. He has no ambition to speak of other than to look after himself. He hates anyone with any good authority, and only looks out for himself and, with a struggle, his family.
It isn't until he is badly beaten by soldiers he reflects on the emptiness of his existence, and comes to terms that for the first time that 'no place existed in all the world that could be called safe' as there had 'never been any such thing as safety, and never would be, the difference being that now he knew it as a fact, whereas before it was a natural unconscious state’.
After this event has taken place, it is no longer that he has told the truce about his affairs to the girl that he is dating. Despite his dishonesty they stay in a relationship and make plan's to marry.
The novel was inspired at a time when youth culture and adolescent anger were beginning to dominate the media, and in which some can refer to in this present day.
I think you are right to describe SNASM as unapologetic - this is really a warts-and-all depiction of what Britain was like after the war. Another fantastic piece of prose from the opening pages...
ReplyDelete“For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy,' kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.”