ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the post-war era, spanning a new generation of fiction writers in Britain, the prose of Samuel Beckett and the emergence of Existentialism in the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. English 1950s fiction tends towards working-class realism. Its equivalent in painting is the kitchen-sink school epitomised by the work of John Bratby and Jack Smith. Post-war British fiction champions working-class life, then, but the values it represents are self-serving. Not too much connection should be read into its closeness to the author's own experiences, either, and Alan Silitoe has stated that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is not autobiographical. Existentialism has longer-lasting effect than British working-class men's fiction. Beckett, meanwhile, speaks for what might call the hole in the twentieth century, or the post-war, post-Holocaust, post-atomic bomb world of fracturing: irreparable, it is a recovery as fraught as trying to make sentences of rags and bones.
