The loneliness of the long distance runner (narration)

Alan Sillitoe (2009)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Engl .: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner ) is the cover story of a narrative tape of Alan Sillitoe .

The stories published in 1959 were the author's second book after the first novel " Saturday Night and Sunday Morning " from 1958. Sillitoe himself wrote the screenplay for the 1962 film adaptation of the story by Tony Richardson .

content

The book consists of the first- person story of young Smith (in the film: Colin). He is a very intelligent boy, but after his father died he broke and was arrested.

He was sent to an educational institution where the director quickly noticed him because of his ability to run long distances . The director quickly sees Colin as a potential winner of the annual sports competition. Due to his professional ambition, the home manager is enormously focused on Colin winning this competition, so that he even allows him training runs without guarding.

On these training runs, Colin can leave his social class behind and gain insight into his situation. It becomes clear to him that if he wins the race, this would be an acceptance of the rules of the game of the director and thus of the whole established order. He decides to train for himself so that he can outrun his competitors in the upcoming competition. Nevertheless, he wants to be overtaken shortly before the goal.

He wants to prove that he is a really free individual. Although the police and the home manager can lock him up, he remains in control of his running skills. He prefers the role of the outsider to a loss of freedom.

people

There are two mutually exclusive concepts of society.

Smith (Colin)

Describes the conflict using the terms "in-laws" and "out-laws" (inside and outside the law) and describes it as a war waged with all consistency. The director's normative requirement that he should be honest in the institution is countered by his own ideas of honesty.

"I think my honesty is the only true one in the world, and he thinks the same, his is the only true one in the world."

- Smith

From this arises his consideration that under no circumstances should he win the race for the director. He has to show society, especially the director, that he alone is master of his talent for running and that he is a free person. He prefers the role of an outsider to a loss of freedom.

Colin is determined by his vitality and strong will with which he goes against the authority of the director.

"The only way to fight the plague is through honesty."

- Albert Camus

He realizes that his honesty is the only way to stop the director and stand up to him. For him, an “honest” life in the sense of the director would be synonymous with death. Colin can only maintain his vitality and his self-confidence by revolting against the representatives of social power and resisting all attempts to rehabilitate him.

The home manager

Represents the questionable values ​​of conventional society. By giving Colin some permission and sympathy, he tries to control him and show who makes the rules.

Structure and narrative design

In terms of content, Sillitoe's story gets its tension right from the start due to the sharp contrast between the world of the seventeen-year-old protagonist and the representatives of social power who surround the first-person narrator and are repeatedly summarized by him as "them". The external course of action, on the other hand, is hardly pushed forward or changed and essentially serves to illustrate this polarity. In the end, the decision of the first-person narrator only concretizes the basic situation that already existed at the beginning. The protagonist does not give up his opposition to the representatives of the society that dominates him, who for him represent the embodiment of authority par excellence. He decides to forego any personal benefits from a victory and to purposely lose the long-distance run that he could gain with his performance. In this way he fails the attempt of the social authorities to induce him to adapt to the existing social norms and rules. This decision is the highlight of the action in the longer short story and is the result of the first-person narrator's own thoughts, associations and fantasies, which are mainly presented in the form of an inner monologue . This inner monologue of the first-person narrator is only occasionally interrupted by addressing the reader directly.

The narrative structure of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is accordingly characterized by a superimposition of the external structure, ie the course of the plot in the narrated time , by the internal, thematic structure. The presentation of the external events runs towards the climax, the description of the long-distance run. After the initial situation Description of stay in the educational institution ( "borstal") in the first part of the narrative follows a flashback of the narrator to the theft, which provided the basis for its introduction; in the last section, the narrator again follows on from the first section and envisions the day of the long-distance run in his inner monologue. In contrast to the external structure of the course of the plot, this internal structure of the narrative does not appear as progression, but as cyclical: the antagonism between the protagonist and his environment dominates the first and third sections equally; The middle section does not constitute a retarding moment either , since only the theme of the other parts varies and is broken down into a sequence of actions and dialogue passages.

The middle part of the story forms a kind of "story within the story" with the description of a longer episode from the protagonist's past and the presentation of his family background, the death of his father, the story of the break-in into the bakery in Nottingham and its investigation the police. In the flashback, the first-person narrator and his monologue take a back seat, so that the narrative position creates a greater distance from the story. Stylistically, this creates a contrast to the two narrative parts that frame the flashback: the first-person narrator's free associations and evaluative comments are replaced by a direct report with detailed scenic dialogues, often in a humorous form.

The connection of the middle part of the narrative with the roughly equal length of the opening and closing sections is made through a thematic link: the policeman who convicts the young protagonist of the theft is just as much a representative of authority as the head of the educational institution. At the same time, the death of his father, which is presented in detail in the middle section, takes on its real meaning for the first-person narrator during the long-distance run, since his father's refusal to accept medical help is the model for his own rebellion against social norms and values sees.

The narrative perspective also unifies the inner and outer structure of the narrative: the first-person narrator reports from a point in time after the narrated plot has been completed; in his consciousness the remembered action and the basic theme determining the narrative come together. In this respect, the first-person narrator has a static function: the person who ultimately ponders his or her opposition to society does not differ significantly from the character in the past whom the narrator reported.

Accordingly, this short story does not develop its narrative effect primarily through the course of action or character development, but predominantly through the spread of central metaphors and motifs , which are accentuated in the associative stream of memories and thoughts of the narrator.

Work context and impact history

In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , Sillitoe deals with topics and motifs that recur in his further work in ever new variations: different forms of class antagonism, the socially justified failure of individual people, human alienation, the rebellion against repressive power relations and social institutions and the frustration in the Work process as well as in free time.

Almost all of Sillitoe's short stories, like The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, are about marginal figures or victims of bourgeois society. Above all, by addressing the unbridgeable gap between the ruling social classes and the lower working class, Sillitoe ties in with a rather sparse and discontinuous tradition of English workers' literature, such as that found in the works of Robert Tressel, Jack Common or Jack Lindsay finds. DH Lawrence and the early George Orwell had more decisive literary influences for Sillitoe's naturalistic design in this narrative .

Sillitoe himself said in a conversation that the story of this young person from the working class of Nottingham is also about asserting his own integrity as an artist ("This story of a working-class youth is at the same time the statement of my artistic integrity" ).

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was regularly reissued and served as the template for the equally successful film adaptation of Richardson. The story was also performed as a radio play and as a stage play and translated into numerous languages. In the literary-critical reception of the narrative, the political issue was initially in the foreground, as long as Sillitoe's literary significance and position in the criticism was still uncertain. While in the literary criticism of the former GDR the loneliness of the long-distance runner was understood as a reflection of the "attitude to life [s] capitalist alienation", which represented a preliminary stage for the author's turn to socialist realism , the conservative side, for example in the Times , the supposed One-sidedness and socio-political partiality of the author criticized, which is expressed in particular in the “seemingly unfounded rejection of normal values” by the youthful hero of the story.

Gradually, however, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Sillitoe's first significant story, met with a mostly benevolent or at least neutral criticism, in which the expansion of realistic prose to describe the living conditions of the lower social classes was welcomed. In the later literary studies of the narrative in both the English and German-speaking countries, the problem of literary-aesthetic evaluation was increasingly brought to the fore. Despite all objections, for example against stylistic weaknesses, the loneliness of the long-distance runner is now considered one of the “best works” of Sillitoe and “representative of his entire oeuvre”.

Awards

The story was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1960 .

Adaptations

In 1962, the English director Tony Richardson filmed the material under the same title as a black and white film with the then 25-year-old Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave in the leading roles. The film was extremely successful with both the audience and the film critics and is considered exemplary of English free cinema .

Titles and quotes from the book were used several times, especially by pop groups.

Examples from pop music

• 1983 title of a song by the British Oi! and punk band Angelic Upstarts on the album Reason Why?

• 1986 The British heavy metal band Iron Maiden adopted quotes from the story in the song of the same name on their album Somewhere in Time . The album achieved gold status in the UK and Germany.

• 1995 The American post-hardcore band Fugazi quotes the title for their song Long Distance Runner in the album Red Medicine .

• In 2001 the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian varied the title for their song Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner , on the B-side of their single Jonathan David .
• 2004 The British psychobilly band The Meteors varied the title as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Killer for a song on their album These Evil Things .
• 2005 The Canadian rapper Buck 65 quotes the title as "Lonely like the tight rope walker, hitchhiker, long distance runner." In one line of his song Blood of a Young Wolf in his album Secret House Against the World .

• 2009 The American grindcore band Agoraphobic Nosebleed parodies the title of the story as "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Drug Runner" in their album Agorapocalypse .

• 2012 The hardcore punk band This Routine is Hell titled a song on their EP Repent. Repeat. The Loneliness Of the Long Distance Runner .

expenditure

• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Allen, London 1959. Paperback Pan Books, London 1961.
• The loneliness of the long-distance runner and other stories. From the English by Günther Klotz u. Hedwig Jolenberg. Diogenes, Zurich 1967. German first edition. Paperback edition dtv, Munich 1969; with a comment by H. Biester (Ostberlin 1969).

literature

• Sonja Bahn: Alan Sillitoe. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 207-223.
• Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02222-0 , pp. 327-336.
• Manfred Pfister / Rebekka Rohleder: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . 3rd edition, J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, pp. 144-145, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8
• Tony Richardson: The loneliness of the long-distance runner. Nouvelles éditions du film 1966. (The little film art series. 56)

Web links

• Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner . Original English text on Community Books . Retrieved November 13, 2014.
• Information on the loneliness-of-the-long-distance runner especially for schools on the SwissEduc education server . (English)
• Rob Nixon: Pop Culture 101: The Lonleyness of the Long Distance Runner

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. P. 333
2. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 328 f.
3. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 329 f. See also Sonja Bahn: Alan Sillitoe . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in individual representations. P. 217 ff.
4. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 330.
5. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 330 f.
6. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, pp. 328 and 334. See also Sonja Bahn: Alan Sillitoe. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in individual representations. P. 219.
7. ↑ Quoted from Sonja Bahn: Alan Sillitoe. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in individual representations. P. 217.
8. ↑ See Bernd Lange: Sillitoe · The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In: Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann (eds.): The English short story. August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, p. 334 f. See also Sonja Bahn: Alan Sillitoe. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in individual representations. Pp. 217-219.
9. ↑ Text ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
10. ↑ text
11. ↑ Martin Bate: Fugazi Red Medicine (Dischord) ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
12. ↑ Text ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
13. ↑ text
14. ^ Buck 65, Blood of a Young Wolf, lyrics
15. ↑ text