The Role of Water in Graham Swift’s "Waterland"

In conclusion, the time and history can be viewed in various ways; however, the most essential in literature are the cyclical and the linear time. The novel makes the reader perceive the story in the cyclical way by going back and forth between the past and the present events in Tom Crick’s life, and by introducing the environment of the Fens, where the protagonist and his family live, so as to highlight its fairy-tale nature and the relation with such concepts as history, time and the place of people in relation with them. While the nature, therefore also the water and time, is presented as a powerful and timeless entity, people are shown as powerless, mortal and inferior to it. At the same time the novel suggests that the cyclical time is not the only one present in the world, and events have an end, like Tom is the end of the Atkinsons and Cricks. Therefore I came to conclusion that both linear and cyclical times are complementary and they do not exclude one another. Besides, even if the linear time is not presented as having explicit relation with the water in the novel and even if at first it may be attributed to other aspects, it has the implicit relation, because all events in the novel occur by the water and the water witnesses everything. Thus, it influences events either directly or indirectly, because everything in the world is connected.…