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Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 in Nottingham, whose parents Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina were both workers. Just like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero in his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan’s father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company factory. His father was an illiterate and brutish man, and he was unsteady with his jobs; the family was often on the edge of starvation. When Sillitoe was 14, he left school after having failed at the entrance examination to grammar school and then worked at the Raleigh Bicycle company factory like his father for the next four years, spending his free time on reading and being a serial lover of local girls. After those four years, he then joined the Royal Air Force, although it was too late to serve in World War II. During the emergency, he served as a wireless operator in Malaya . Unfortunately, he was discovered to have tuberculosis and spent 16 months in a Royal Air Force hospital after returning to England.
At age of 21, he went to France and Spain and lived there for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in Mallorca with American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959, Sillitoe started to write Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway, the book delivered the attitudes and living situation of a young factory worker faced with the unavoidable end of his vigorous and youthful philandering. As with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and John Braine’s Room at the Top, the real argument of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the disenchantment of postwar Britain, and the absence of occasions for the working-class. It was adapted into a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe. Then he wrote tremendously for half a century: novels, short stories, poetry, and autobiography. The poems were infirm, and the stories that followed his two revolutionary works were inclined to tell, less well, the same legend of every man who was against the system.
21 -year-old young worker Arthur Seaton works for a bicycle factory in Nottingham, the central plateau in England. His daily life is full of tedious work and the noisy sound of the machine. As long as he can catch an opportunity, he is ready for making trouble and treating the foreman both in tough and soft ways. Furthermore, he has a set of roguish approaches for self-protection. He shows a great deal of dissatisfaction and resentment towards the social system, institutions, and even the workers’ organizations and the social welfare system because he has to regularly draw money from wages to pay for these agencies. However, he does not like his cousins who become soldiers and dare to openly fight against the national laws. Although deep in his heart, his determination to rebel is stronger than his cousins’. He does not accept the code of ethic and code of conduct which are imposed on him, acting only according to the principle of happiness. Therefore, he hooks with a married woman who is his colleague Jack’s wife, Brenda. And he still unsatisfied with just this lover. After her pregnancy which is caused by his carelessness, he seduces Brenda’s sister Winnie who is a soldier’s wife and finally he pays the price in blood. As time goes by, he slowly becomes mature and feels the happiness of being loyal to just one woman. And he begins to find some kind of balance between blind and reasonless revolt and the reality principle he faces. Consequently, he no longer indulges in the pleasure of alcohol and the pursuit of flirting with women, and finally goes to angling by the waterside; therefore, he feels the joy of pure love; and then, three months later, he marries Doreen, which suggests he has compromised to the society he always feels rancorous and disgusting.
1.2 Existentialism and Anti-hero
Existentialism is originated from the Latin “existenia”, which means existence, survival, real existence and spiritual existence. The existentialist philosophy began in the 1930s and has gained popularity after World War II. It considers fear, loneliness, disappointment, disgust and a sense of abandonment as basic human feelings and tries to put this psychological awareness of people on the opposite side against the social and inpidual existence. As the founder of existentialist philosophy and the master of the theory of existentialism, the French philosopher Sartre critically inherited and developed the philosophy of predecessors, and then formed his own set of philosophical ideology that is atheistic existentialism. The abbreviated form of the name is existentialism.源/自:优尔:;论-文'网www.youerw.com