The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner has ratings and reviews. Evan said: I didn’t like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn’t su. A guide to The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. This guide It may also be helpful to the general reader who is interested in the stories of Alan Sillitoe. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” by Alan Sillitoe, was first published in It is a first-person monologue spoken by a year-old inmate of an.
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So, in writing his books, Alan Sillitoe thinks of a youth or adult audience, and his direct purpose is to entertain perhaps while his indirect purpose is to make enough money to keep writing. There is an almost childlike innocence to him; when he meets two young girls at a diner, obviously poor and hungry, he offers to buy them something to eat. At others, we hardly know what they are thinking. Smith dreams of a revolution, as in Hungary, in which the policemen will have the tables turned on them.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
Portrait of a discarded marriage and a coveted picture over the years. For I’m seventeen now, and when they let me out of this—if I don’t make a break and see that things turn out otherwise— they’ll try to get me in the army, and what’s the differ- ence long-ditsance the army and this place I’m in now?
Theft in these stories is not so much out of need or even out of the envy for glitzy consumer goods we hear about in America today, but for matters that are not forward-looking– candy or a ride at the carnival. Ghe capture time, place, and character so well. One sat at a table, but the second and elder stood at the counter.
So there I am, standing in the doorway in shimmy and shorts, not even a dry crust in my guts, looking out at frosty flowers on the ground. But we tell him not to bother, that he’s a good bloke even if he is a copper, that we know a short cut anyway. There is a part of the jungle that the scalpel loneliiness never reach. For when the governor told me to be honest it was meant to be in his way not mine, and if I kept on being honest in the way he wanted and won my race for him he’d see Akan got the cushiest six months still left to run; but in my own way, well, it’s not allowed, and if I find a way of doing it such as I’ve got now then I’ll get what-for in every mean trick he can set his mind to.
Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. And when the dough ran out I didn’t think about anything much, but just roamed the streets- looking for another job, I told mam— hoping I suppose to get my hands on another five hundred nicker so’s the nice life we’d got used to could go on and on for ever.
I have a very good feeling that I will refer back to Smith and the first story on many a future training run. I hate to have to say this but something bloody-well made me cry, and crying is a thing I haven’t bloody-well done since I sillotoe a silliteo of two or three.
And now the governor talks to me when he comes on his rounds, almost as he’d talk to his prize race horse, if he had one.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – running blog book club
And it’ll always be there, I’ll tell you that now, because I haven’t finished making all my false moves yet, and I dare say I won’t until I kick the bucket. Well, even with all this long-distance running I haven’t yet been able to decide what he means by this, although I’m just about beginning to— and I don’t like what it means. He didn’t twig it was foggy at first and cleaned his glasses every time I pulled him back from a lamp-post or car, but when he saw the lights on Alfreton Road looking like octopus eyes he put them in his pocket and didn’t wear them again until we did the job.
Oh yes, it’s all right me telling myself it was me, but the truth is that I’ve never known whether it was Mike or not, because I do know that I didn’t see the open window until he stabbed me in the ribs and pointed it out. Because when on a raw and lonwliness morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the loneloness and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say.
The elder girl, about twelve years old, was dressed in a brown coat that was too big for her, and though she was talking and laughing most of the time he noticed the paleness of her face and her large round eyes that he would have thought beautiful had he not de- tected the familiar type of vivacity that expressed neglect and want.
The title story is about a young man Colin who robs a bakery and is sent to a borstal, a sort of part youth prison, part reform school.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Because I heard a roar and saw the Gunthorpe gang throwing their coats up in the air and I felt the pat-pat of feet on the drive behind me getting closer and closer and suddenly a smell of sweat and a pair of lungs on their last gasp passed me by and went swinging on towards that rope, all shagged out and rocking from side to side, grunting like a Zulu that didn’t know any better, like the ghost of me at ninety when I’m heading for that fat uphol- stered coffin.
He got up in bed to throw them out and even followed them down the stairs in his shirt though he was no more than skin and stick.
Sillitoe lets Smith tell his own story: Baker’s shops as well. I scrambled into my trousers and wondered why he’d come— knowing it was a copper because ‘a man to see you’ always meant just that in our house— and if I’d had any idea that one had gone to Mike’s house as well at the same time I’d have twigged it to be because of that hundred and fifty quid’s worth of paper stuffed up the drainpipe alqn the back door about ten inches away from od plain-clothed o boot, where mam still talked to him thinking she was doing me a favour, and ,oneliness wishing to God she’d ask him in, alah on second thoughts realizing that that would seem more suspicious than keeping him outside, because they know we hate their guts and smell a rat if they think we’re trying to be nice to them.
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorerthen a left mouse-click will open the file in its associated program, and a right mouse-click will give you a menu, from which you can choose to save the file. Does Smith’s distinctive voice capture the agony and ecstacy of running for you? Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots, while main was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered, and I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got hhe the money we needed.
Quite how this person would get such an account published is not clear.
Life is bleak, with little prospects for a decent future, and after long-disstance caught stealing from a bakery he is sent to a borstal Reform School. At other times none of these things would matter a bit, and I suppose the only reason why I was pals with him was because I didn’t say much from one month’s end to another either.
Be dead, like me, and then you’ll have no more pain of leaving your nice slummy house for Borstal or prison. I stood back and waved silllitoe inside like I was a butler. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. They kept tapping and pottering around the big aspidistra gunner that grandma had left to mam, lifting it up from the table to look under the cloth, putting it aside so’s they could move the table and get at the long-ditsance under the rug—but the big headed stupid ignorant bastards never once thought of emptying the soil out of the plant pot, where they’d have found the crumpled- up money-box that we’d buried the night we did the job.