(1958), Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, vividly portrays scenes in the life of a young Nottingham factory worker, Arthur Seaton, taking him from rumbustious single life to the verge of marriage. The title indicates not only the pattern of Arthur’s bachelor weekends, from the excesses of Saturday night, “the best and bingiest glad-time of the week”, to the torpor of Sunday morning, the “prostrate Sabbath” (5); it also serves as a metaphor for two phases of his existence: the unruly freedom of bachelorhood and the movement towards the settlement of matrimony. In the context of the 1950s, Arthur is both a new kind of working-class protagonist, and a different sort of existentialist hero; he is presented as neither a victim nor an exemplar of…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 June 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2239, accessed 25 April 2024.]
