The Nothingness Of Reality In Waterland

Graham Swift is one of the most famed contemporary British novelists. His sixth novel, Last Orders (1996), won him the Booker Prize for Fiction and firmly established his place among the top writers of the age. However, Last Orders is not the first book that drew the world’s attention to the author; the masterpiece that did so was titled Water land and published as early as1983. The book was so warmly embraced by the academia that some critics even believe that its complexity and depth overshadow all of the other works of the author. Swift was also nominated as one of the20"Best of Young British Novelists" in the Book Marketing Council’s promotion in1983.Yet, strangely, although abundant criticism on the novel has been produced by Western and Chinese scholars, the critics tend to confine themselves in the discussion of history related topics and the characters’ reactions to it. History writing, or historiography, is undoubtedly among the book’s central thematic concerns, but its humanistic depth extends far more than that. Although existing researches interprets the text also from perspectives of the fall of the empire, life in the postmodern society, and the dialogue and intertextuality between the book and other literary texts, none of them has analyzed systematically the book from the perspective of the fictional world that Swift creates.Against this background, this thesis is focused on the nothingness of reality which is represented throughout the novel. By resorting to the concept of "nothingness" in Sartre’s existentialist theory, this thesis analyzes the reality’s resistance of meaning and recording as well as various failed methods in confronting it, and argues that by deny the passive methods of reality confrontation, Swift actually proposes the sense of responsibility and the everlasting human curiosity as strategies of human existence.The conception of the reality featuring nothingness appears many times in the process of the narrator Tom Crick’s "story-telling." The nothingness of reality entails not only its rejection of human endeavor but the connection with the traumatic "Here and Now." This thesis finds the connection between the reality that Swift depicts and the environment for human existence in Sartre’s philosophical thinking. Sartre holds that the world which human beings dwell has no meaning or purpose. Nor does it provide any chance for humans to comprehend its truth and essence. Similarly, the novel is penetrated by an atmosphere of melancholy. As the stage of most of the stories in the book, the Fens district impresses its dwellers with the permanent monotone and invariability. Moreover, it rejects any human endeavor to endue the land with purpose or meaning. In spite of the various attempts made by different characters to endure the reality, this reality still keeps coming at the characters due to their improper methods of reality confronting. Some even lead to catastrophic results. Swift denounces these passive methods and suggests responsibility be the hope for human existence in such a reality.