Paper Summary:

This paper deals with the motive of continuity and discontinuity in Graham Swift's novel "Last Orders", focusing on postmodernism and intertextuality. The recollections of each character are related and utilized to demonstrate the underlying theme of continuation and discontinuation.

From the Paper:

"The reader, because he bears the role of voyeur and intruder in those streams of consciousness, progressively happens to own more knowledge than any isolated enunciator. The reader is like the private eye of a detective story, slowly watching the truth unfold. This very precisely worked-out reorganization of time makes him the only omniscient instance of the discourse. For instance, in Vince's soliloquy of page 136 to 137, the photograph of Ray and Jack in the desert - a recurring object that participates in the dimension of continuity - wouldn't have the same effect if we had not known before that it was taken after both of them came out of the Egyptian brothel. Vince's mentioning of Jack appearing "all by himself, with his shirt undone, chest bare, holding a ciggy" or "grinning, still alive, like he knows you don't know who he really is" bears then another meaning, only accessible through our experience as intruders."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bex, Tony & Watts, Richard J. Standard English: the widening debate (London: Routledge, 1999)
• Brooker, Peter, Modernism / Postmodernism (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1992)
• Cooper, Pamela, Graham Swift's Last Orders (London: Continuum, 2002)
• Faulkner, William, As I Lay Dying (Arrow/Vintage, 2004, First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 1935)
• Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York & London: Routledge, 1988)

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