O istorie posibilă a realităţilor alternative
A Possible History of Alternative Realities

Summary/Abstract: Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1983) is a book deeply concerned with human destiny, discussing this issue within the general context of a postmodernist metafictional biography of Tom Crick, a history teacher. This essay stresses upon the notions of fate, individual responsibility and historical narrative, as well as the literary form of a detective novel. It turns out that as Swift’s writing questions the interrelated notions of self and (hi)story in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, at the same time that it draws upon them, Waterland appears a late-twentieth-century postmodernist rewriting of each. In attempting to relate his own story, Crick begins by questioning the purpose, truthfulness and limitations of stories while at the same time making clear that he believes history to be a special form of story-telling.

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