Postmodern Sisyphus

When the Booker Prize in 1996 was given to Graham Swift's (1949-- ) Last Orders, it was considered an overdue acknowledgement. The young writer with his name-earning Waterland has competed for the Booker Prize in 1983, and finally lost to J. M. Coetzee, whose works have twice Won the Booker Prize. G Swift develops a unique style in his traces of tradition and in his expression of heavy postmodern oppression. Repetition is a characteristic writing feature in Waterland. The narrator's language is incoherent as if he is lost in a labyrinth. This feature also increases the readability of Waterland, hence the fever of reading G Swift. However, it takes long time for the work to draw massive critics' attention. The research of the work did not come to its climax until the Canadian professor Linda Hutcheon put forward the conception of historiographic metafiction when she analyzed Waterland in her monograph. In recent years, all the research on Waterland develops from the theme of nihilism, because the saying frequents the work that "One step forward, one step backward". So Waterland is considered as a book about men's retrospective thinking about their history, morality and society as a whole, whereas according to the research of this thesis, Waterland does not only picture the nothingness of presence, but also seeks to find a spiritual lifeboat for postmodern men after the retrospection. The originality of this thesis also lies here.One theme of Waterland is history. A history teacher, Swift is familiar with drawing social pictures by depicting the family history. He uses realism in a paradoxical and subversive way, incorporating complicated narrative strategy to reflect the multiplicity of reality, especially the relations between personal experience and historical events, thus revealing the fact that novels can exhibit the essence of men's existence through the combination of imagination and fabrication. From the Booker Prize winner Last Order to Waterland, the name-establishing work, his works all exhibit the political and cultural milieu of a certain historical period. It follows that there is a necessity to take...