Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

First published: 1958

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Nottingham, England

Principal Characters:

• Arthur Seaton, the twenty-one-year-old protagonist, a lathe operator in the Raleigh Bicycle Factory
• Brenda, his lover, the wife of Jack, who works with Arthur at the factory, and the mother of two children
• Winnie, Brenda’s married sister and also Arthur’s lover
• Doreen Greatton, a young and single factory worker whom Arthur eventually decides to marry

The Novel

In this story’s opening scene, Arthur Seaton is described as having immersed himself in “the best and bingiest glad-time of the week,” Saturday night. One of “the fifty-two holidays . . . of the year,” this night is noteworthy in Arthur’s life only because he has consumed eleven pints of beer and seven small gins in a drinking contest with a sailor at the White Horse Club. Although he wins the contest, he ends his binge by falling down a flight of stairs in the club and lying unconscious at the bottom until he is awakened by Brenda, who is his lover and the wife of one of his coworkers at the bicycle factory. He accompanies her to her home (her husband, Jack, is out of town until Sunday), where he spends the night in bed with her. They are awakened in the morning by one of Brenda’s two children, who jumps up onto the bed to play with “Uncle Arthur.” Although Arthur experiences brief moments of regret over cuckolding Jack (“It’s a rotten trick, he argued to himself, to play on your mate”), such moments are easily subsumed by Arthur’s amoral view of life as a “jungle,” wherein self-interest counts most—especially during his weekend “holidays,” which, although brief, are hedges against “Black Mondays” and the “treadmill” of his factory work.

The novel’s first chapter may be seen as illustrative of the entire novel’s organization, insofar as the chapter begins during a Saturday night and ends the following Sunday morning. The novel itself is divided into two parts, “Saturday Night” and “Sunday Morning,” the former comprising the first twelve chapters and the latter the last four. Part 1 is a detailed account of—besides Arthur’s riotous “holidays”—the nature of his monotonous work at the bicycle factory and his adulterous affairs with Brenda and her younger sister Winnie. As a result of these affairs, Arthur is attacked and beaten in the twelfth chapter by Winnie’s husband, Bill, and one of his friends; thus, part 1 ends with Arthur’s symbolic death as he “slipped down in a dead faint, feeling the world pressing its enormous booted foot onto his head....”

The physical beating Arthur endures is a crucial turning point in his approach to life, and many readers might justifiably view this beating as proof that, contrary to Arthur’s amoral mode of being, in his world there does exist a strong belief in and a distinction between right and wrong. Brenda herself says to Arthur at one point, “You never know the difference between right and wrong,” but he claims it “don’t pay” to know the difference—that is, to know the difference and live according to that knowledge would cost him, among other things, his concupiscent liberties. In fact, before his beating the person who pays the highest price for their adulterous affair is Brenda herself, specifically after Arthur impregnates her and she is forced to induce a miscarriage by taking a painfully hot bath while drinking a large amount of gin. Arthur thinks, “She wants me to feel guilty about it, but I don’t feel bad at all.” After all, according to him, “It’s her fault for letting such a thing [as the pregnancy] happen....The stupid bloody woman.”

By blaming Brenda, and by including her in his grouping of women as “whores, all of them,” Arthur seems better able to prevent any feelings of responsibility or guilt from entering his own mind and heart. Although he does consent to be present in Brenda’s home during the evening of the hot bath, gin, and consequent abortion (Jack is working the night shift at the factory), the most he suffers is weariness and mild depression over the ordeal; then, after helping drunken Brenda into her bed and leaving the house, he walks to the Peach Tree, a local club, and is still uncertain whether the bath and gin would be successful in emptying her womb. At the tavern he encounters Winnie, Brenda’s sister, buys her a few drinks, learns that her husband is with the army and stationed in Germany, woos her into inviting him back to her apartment and there spends the night in bed with her. “Whether Brenda’s trouble had been resolved or not did not matter,” the narrator says, but what does matter to Arthur is his “sense of relief” at having encountered Winnie, the relief itself making him “unquenchable in his tenderness” to the younger woman. The evening of the depressing abortion thus ends with the beginning of his affair with Winnie: “Never had an evening begun so badly and ended so well, he reflected....” Yet Arthur’s affair with Winnie does not end his affair with Brenda; he carries on with both for several months until Bill returns from Germany, discovers he has been cuckolded, and—with information from Jack about Arthur’s whereabouts—accomplishes the punitive beating that ultimately ends both of Arthur’s affairs.

Although before his beating Arthur’s “weeks and weekends were divided between Brenda and Winnie,” he still finds the time occasionally to see Doreen Greatton, a nineteen-year-old factory worker who lives with her mother. Arthur’s several attempts to seduce Doreen are unsuccessful, however, as she wants a courtship; in the light of “the pleasure and danger of having two married women,” his interest in her is relatively minimal—until, that is, he comes to see that “he should have kept to the safe and rosy path with Doreen....” Before he can see the benefits of such a “path,” he must suffer a symbolic death and rebirth: the former occurring as a result of his beating, and the latter occurring on the day of Christmas, when he suddenly realities that “he had been living in a soulless vacuum since his flight.... He told himself he had been without life since then, that now he was awake once more, ready to tackle all obstacles....” This symbolic rebirth occurs at the end of the fourteenth chapter, and it should come as no surprise to the reader when the narrator asserts at the beginning of the fifteenth chapter that “Arthur became Doreen’s young man.” Indeed, by the end of this penultimate chapter, Arthur confesses to Doreen that he would like to live with her, and he promises that she will be “well off” with him because “I’ll look after you all right.” To a significant extent, then, Arthur seems to have outgrown and abandoned his libidinal, self-serving attitude toward life and others, and “he was good in his heart about it, easy and confident, making for better ground than he had ever trodden on before.”

The Characters

Although the protagonist Arthur Seaton is the impelling force in this novel, Alan Sillitoe makes it quite clear that Arthur’s character is grown out of his working-class environment: All of his moral and social standards are the products of his milieu. With the exception of a two-year stint in the army, Arthur at twenty-one has worked in the bicycle factory five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, since he was fifteen. His broken down, alcoholic father works in the same “monster” factory, which swallows them because their work consists of “actions without thought.” While Arthur’s Saturday nights might seem to be evenings of escape from the “monotonous graft in the factory,” even these “holidays” are spent “within breathing distance of [the factory’s] monstrous being,” and Arthur proves himself to be an extension of this monster as he frequently drinks alcohol until he is set “into motion like a machine” and bursts into fights “as if he were a robot....” Indeed, the bicycle factory circumscribes Arthur’s entire existence, and he believes that his life is comparable to that of an animal’s in a jungle: “a good, comfortable life if you didn’t weaken....” Yet, despite the fact that he is controlled by his anger toward his generally mechanical existence, Arthur thinks of himself as essentially free of the world wherein men and machines are indistinguishable, and he implicitly believes that his affairs with Brenda and Winnie, two married women, serve as proof of his exceptional freedom, for such affairs are his exercised “right.”

Brenda’s husband Jack, like Winnie’s husband Bill, is “daft” for being married, according to Arthur, and even though he views Jack as a “good bloke,” in “such a cruel world” as theirs a man should feed his various appetites whenever he can, loyalty to friends and ethics be damned. While Jack is simple, satisfied with his two-valued orientation toward life (“I know things in black and white,” he says to Arthur), and therefore prone to accept or reject everything at its face value, Winnie’s husband Bill is portrayed as a fierce predator, one of the “big heathens who had no brains and couldn’t listen to argument....” Of course, that Arthur has been Winnie’s lover and that Bill finds it out precludes the need for any verbal “argument”; indeed, Bill and his friend pursue Arthur as the “forces of righteousness,” intent upon “spoiling the fangs and blunting the claws of his existence” with bigger, sharper fangs and claws. Noteworthy is the extent to which both Jack and Bill serve as foils for Arthur, as they represent two possible modes of being within the contexts of marriage and society: Jack is satisfied with his existence to the point of complacency and a seemingly willful blindness to duplicity and human complexity, while Bill is a man of action who believes in taking and protecting what is his through physical force, and who is himself as duplicitous and cunning as Arthur (Winnie learns, for example, that Bill has a mistress in Germany). Of the two men, Arthur is most like Bill, for he reflects, “If I ever get married . . . and have a wife that carries on like Brenda and Winnie carry on, I’ll give her the biggest pasting any woman ever had. I’ll kill her.”

As fictional characters, both Brenda and Winnie remain essentially flat throughout the novel, partly because Arthur sees them as one-dimensional sex objects through which he can satisfy his animal appetites, and partly because Sillitoe expends his best and most incisive talents upon the portrayal of Arthur’s character and that of his working-class milieu. Sillitoe intends for Doreen to seem different from the other two women in Arthur’s life, intends for her to seem deeper as a character; thus he breaks his narrative concentration upon Arthur’s anger-filled day-to-day life and begins the eleventh chapter (Arthur met Doreen at the end of the tenth chapter) with a long expositional passage about Doreen’s life and how, at nineteen and unmarried, she “was afraid of being ’left on the shelf.’” Yet, besides the fact that she rebuffs Arthur’s sexual advances through most of the novel, that she is not as hard or streetwise as Brenda and Winnie seem to be, that she is looking for “a good husband,” and that she intends to reform Arthur and put an end to his heavy drinking and wild ways, Doreen remains less a dynamic and believable individual than an instrument Sillitoe needed to accomplish the psychological transformation he had conceived for Arthur. And even though Arthur and Doreen plan to marry, their union seems very similar to Jack’s with Brenda, as Doreen sees life in black and white.

Critical Context

Regarded by most critics as Sillitoe’s best novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has been frequently read as a proletarian version of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), and Sillitoe himself was consequently grouped with writers who, when his novel was published in 1958, were labeled “angry young men,” including Amis, John Braine, John Wain, and John Osborne.

In terms of the intensity of his anger, Arthur Seaton is less like Amis’ Jim Dixon, of Lucky Jim, than like the characters created by the other, above-mentioned “angry young” writers: Dixon, for example, while rebellious (in a humorous and bungling way) against middle-class values and the various pretensions he views as germane to academia, is only mildly angry. Whereas Joe Lampton, of Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), certainly seems as angry as Arthur, in his disdain for the working class into which he was born he is more similar to D. H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel, of Sons and Lovers (1913), especially since he, unlike Arthur, desires to be a part of the upper classes. Charles Lumley’s anger, in Wain’s Born in Captivity (1953), is as intense as Arthur’s, even though it is directed against the educated middle class of which he is a part. And Jimmy Porter’s sadistic anger, in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), makes no class distinctions and is directed at everyone.

Besides their rebelliousness and the varying degrees of anger which they direct at their respective classes in Britain, all these “angry young” heroes have something else in common: Each in his own way ultimately, albeit usually unintentionally, adjusts to the society he disdains and at least partially accepts its values insofar as he stops fighting against them. Even Jimmy Porter, the only one of the five protagonists who is not financially and domestically secure by the end of his story, comes to see his anger and rebellion as futile: “I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer,” Porter says. “We had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids.” By the way their stories end, Seaton and Dixon and Lumley and Lampton would all seem to agree with Porter’s defeatist note concerning the impossibility of individual heroism significantly changing anything in the technological, post-World War II world. Indeed, as these men’s egocentric anger and rebellion diminish in their respective stories, so too does their individuality. Thus, whereas Hemingway’s post-World War I generation was called the “lost generation,” Sillitoe’s might accurately be called the “assimilated generation.”

Bibliography

Maloff, Saul. “The Eccentricity of Alan Sillitoe,” in Contemporary British Novelists, 1965. Edited by Charles Shapiro.

Osgerby, J. R. “Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” in Renaissance and Modern Essays, 1966. Edited by George Richard Hibbard.

Penner, Allen R. Alan Sillitoe, 1972.

Staples, Hugh B. “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: Alan Sillitoe and the White Goddess,” in Modern Fiction Studies. X (Summer, 1964), pp. 171-181.