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 Time magazine. She begins it with her witness assessment of Sillitoes 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 sure 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 calorie-free 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 charge autobiographical compulsion (Roskies 172). The critic tempers that remark in the next sentence saying that, Its virtueis its splendid recreation of hand-to-mouth subsistence living in Nottinghamthe industrial North as a whole (Roskies 17 2)Sillitoe grew up in the same kind of environment as his characters do. Born in 1928 and raised in Radford, a working single out 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 strengthen 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 drove much of the work of the Angry ... ...Lessons of the long-distance runner. The New Criterion (2008) 23-28. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Daniels, Stephen, and Simon Rycroft. subroutine the Modern City Alan Sillitoes Nottingham Novels. Transactions of the In stitute of British Geographers 18.4 (1993) 460-480. JSTOR. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Mayer, Catherine. Alan Sillitoe. Time 10 May 2010 35. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Penner, Allen R. Human self-regard and Social Anarchy Sillitoes The privacy of the Long-Distance 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.