Such subversive trends, typical of post-war British literature, permeate a wide spectrum of working-class ethics ranging from mere industrial dissent to more life-enhancing assent. The purpose of this paper is to study the various aspects of the anti-hero’s dissenting action, assess the limits of his rebellion and eventually relate the complexity of the narrative to a larger corpus of literature that is more likely to be dubbed “literature of dissent” rather than “literature of exhaustion” (John Barth 70 – 83) although Sillitoe’s novel may partake of both. The sweeping assertion “ONCE A rebel, always a rebel,” soliloquised by Alan Sillitoe’s character Arthur Seaton in SNSM published in 1958, echoes the dissent of the Angry Young Men of the late fifties and sixties in Britain and functions as a binding theme and narrative strategy yoking together the different fragments of the novel.
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