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 whitethorner wrote Sillitoes obit for Time magazine. She begins it with her own assessment of Sillitoes prepare. Mayer asserts that Sillitoe possessed a lofty 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, herculean work and strong writers intuition, but it can withal 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 arrange that Sillitoe is too close to them for his own good, he abdicates to an outpouring autobiographical unavoidableness (Roskies 172). The critic tempers that remark in the next sentence saying that, Its rightfulnessis its splendid recreation of hand-to-mouth subsistence living in Nottinghamthe industrial ne wton as a whole (Roskies 172)Sillitoe grew up in the same physique 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 laborerilliterate, frequently out of work and sometimes abusiveand 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 actor at a bicycle factory (Daniels and Rycroft 464), just like Arthur Seaton, the help of Sillitoes, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.IntroductionContemporary working class manufacture from the British Isles is fraught with class struggle and its a study that drove much of the work of the Angry ... ...Lessons of the long-distance runner. The New touchstone (2008) 23-28. Academic inquisition Complete. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.Daniels, Stephen, and Simon Rycroft. Mapping the Modern City Alan Sillitoes Nottingham Novels. T ransactions of the Institute 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 Dignity and Social lawlessness Sillitoes The Loneliness of the yen-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.