History, Fiction, and Meaning: A Study of Graham Swift's Waterland

Abstract

As he continues to write and develop as a novelist, the now-empty niche of Swiftian criticism will undoubtedly fill up quite quickly. In determining to write this thesis on an author so recent and therefore so little written-about, I decided it would be more worthwhile to devote myself to one book exclusively in order to establish a complete critical interpretation than to examine less intensively all of Swift's works. Though his three novels and collection of short stories are clearly related and while one could make the case that Swift demonstrates a very definite development, Waterland, it seems to me, is clearly his best work to date and the one in which his previous themes and techniques achieve their fullest and most successful expression. I have divided the following study into three parts. In the first, I examine Waterland's principal themes and suggest that the novel posits a philosophy of resistance to a naturalistic universe. In the second section, I examine Waterland's structure, style, and point-of-view and discuss the relationship of the narrator to his listener. Finally, in the third section I try to show the way in which the structural and stylistic aspects of the novel reflect its central themes and concerns; in doing this I then develop what I take to be Swift's belief in narration as a creating and ordering action and the keystone of the "resistance" discussed in Part One. [From Introduction]