Cyclical History And Predestinate Life

As the winner of the Booker Prize in1996, Graham Swift is one of the masters in thefield of contemporary British literature who has deeply immersed himself into the researchof History and the issue of human history has long been his researchful focus. This thesisaims to analyze the three cyclical relationships hidden in the novel from the perspective ofthe circular narrative: the circle of time, the circle of sentiment and the circle of destiny.This thesis seeking theories of Northrop Frye’s cyclical literature and the postmodernwriting techniques of circular narrative. It seems to lay in bare the struggle andhelplessness of those protagonists under the cyclical rules of the rise and fall.The body of this thesis consists of three chapters: firstly, the second chapter analyzesthe circle of time in the novel. The major plot line of the novel presents the circle of fourseasons and coincides with the main stages in life of protagonists: birth, grown-up, declineand death.The cyclical view of time discloses the paradoxical directions of history(bothprogressive and regressive), thus it deconstructs the teleology of Grand history; Secondly,chapter three examines the cyclical memory of trauma and the transmigration of thetraumatic victims. The fragments and truth of history bring human nothing but deep trauma,and in the process of reminiscing history, Swift thus further dismantles the coherence andunity of grand history. The formal two chapters mainly dissolve the totality and teleologyof the Grand history through analyzing the circle of time and sentiment in Waterland,which try to testify that the progress of history is no more than a self delusion of humanbeing. The forth chapter focuses on the circle of anthropic and natural destiny and thesedestiny circles deepen the atmosphere of the doomed fate in the novel, and endow thenovel much more profound social and practical significance, therefore greatly strengthenthe artistic glamour of it.The writer of this thesis attempts to reveal the cyclical view of history hold byGraham Swift: The human being, during whose whole life, the fight for the grand progressive history is nothing more than a doomed process of making history, reminiscinghistory and finally becoming history. Portraying this concateric story, Swift, as a historyresearcher rather than a writer, endeavors to tell the readers and the common people not toindulge in the past, not to be obsessed in the present and not to look forward to the futureblindly.