Character Analysis (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Character analysis
Introduction to Waterland
Waterland by Graham Swift presents a complex web of characters whose lives intertwine across generations in the Fenland region. The novel centres on an unreliable narrator who weaves together family secrets, historical events, and personal tragedies. Swift's characters embody key themes including the tension between progress and cyclical history, the conflict between rationalism and mysticism, and humanity's attempts to impose order on natural chaos.
The Fenland setting is crucial to understanding the characters—this liminal space between water and land serves as a physical manifestation of the novel's thematic concerns with boundaries, instability, and the impossibility of permanent order.
Tom Crick
Tom Crick serves as the novel's central narrator and protagonist. He is a history teacher facing dismissal from his position, and his narrative emerges through a series of O-level 'lessons' he delivers to his students. Through these lessons, Tom explores both grand historical narratives and intimate family secrets.
Character development and background
Tom's character is shaped by three major tragedies that haunt his past: the murder of Freddie Parr in 1943, the suicide of his brother Dick, and the revelation of the Atkinson family's incestuous relationships. These events occurred during his adolescence and continue to influence his adult life. As a young man, Tom was a timid adolescent lover, but his experiences transformed him into a passive husband who struggles with his own complicity in past events.
Role as unreliable narrator
Tom functions as an unreliable narrator, presenting what Swift describes as a 'story-telling animal' approach to understanding history. His narrative style directly challenges Headmaster Lewis's futuristic worldview and rigid historical frameworks. This unreliability is not a weakness but a central feature of the novel's exploration of how we construct and understand historical truth.
Through Tom, Swift explores epistemology—the study of knowledge and how we know what we know. His teaching position becomes a platform for questioning the very nature of historical knowledge and its relationship to personal experience.
Metafictional aspects
Tom's narrative includes metafictional asides, particularly his repeated reflection 'Children...' which masks his guilt over Mary's sterility and abortion. His famous formulation 'History = herstory = stories' reveals his postmodern understanding that all historical narratives are essentially stories shaped by those who tell them, rather than objective truths.
The metafictional elements serve a dual purpose: they remind readers that they are reading a constructed narrative whilst simultaneously demonstrating Tom's self-awareness about his own storytelling role. This creates a sophisticated commentary on the nature of both fiction and historical writing.
Thematic significance
Tom embodies the theme of postmodern doubt, questioning grand narratives and absolute truths. His role as a teacher allows Swift to explore how we construct meaning from chaotic events and how personal history intersects with broader historical patterns.
Mary Metcalf Crick
Mary Metcalf Crick, Tom's wife, undergoes a dramatic transformation that mirrors the novel's exploration of rationalism versus mysticism.
Character transformation
Mary begins as Tom's Catholic sweetheart but evolves into what can be described as a delusional visionary. Her mental state deteriorates following the 1974 supermarket baby-snatching incident, where she claims 'God told me' to take a child. This act leads to her institutionalisation and represents the culmination of decades of psychological trauma.
Past trauma and fertility themes
A pivotal event in Mary's past is her 1943 pregnancy, which results in an abortion. The novel suggests this may have been Freddie Parr's child (Martha Clay), though paternity remains uncertain. This abortion triggers Mary's subsequent sterility, creating a profound loss that haunts both her and Tom throughout their marriage.
The abortion represents not only personal trauma but also a symbolic severing of connection to natural cycles of fertility and renewal—cycles that are central to the Fenland landscape and the novel's broader thematic concerns.
Symbolism and thematic role
Mary symbolises repressed female sexuality and nature's fertility, standing in direct opposition to Tom's rationalism. Her visions counter his logical explanations, and she embodies the mystical recurrence of the Fens landscape. Through Mary's degeneration, Swift explores how trauma can manifest across time and how the suppression of natural forces (fertility, sexuality, emotion) can lead to psychological breakdown.
The tension between Tom and Mary mirrors the novel's central conflict between rational control and natural forces. Where Tom seeks to impose narrative order and rational explanation, Mary represents intuitive, mystical knowledge that resists logical frameworks.
Train-stopping miracle
Following the abortion, Mary experiences what she perceives as a miraculous train-stopping event. This episode becomes institutionalised in her personal mythology and represents her need to find meaning and redemption for her loss.
Dick Crick
Dick Crick, Tom's brother, serves as a Gothic figure whose presence disrupts the narrative's attempts at rational explanation.
Background and identity
Dick is revealed to be the product of an incestuous relationship between Helen and Ernest Atkinson. This makes him Tom's half-brother rather than full brother. Dick's intellectual disability is described through the euphemism 'idiot brother', reflecting the novel's historical setting.
This revelation about Dick's parentage is crucial because it demonstrates how buried family secrets inevitably resurface and how the consequences of past actions extend across generations.
Character traits and symbolic role
Dick is characterised as an 'eel-gutting savant' whose connection to the natural world contrasts with human civilisation's artificial structures. He embodies phallic fertility and renewal through his association with eels, yet also represents the dangers of unchecked natural forces. His character parodies human progress—whilst people build windmills and dredgers to control the Fens, nature (represented by flooding) ultimately proves more powerful.
Dick and the Eels: Natural Knowledge vs. Civilisation
Dick's intuitive understanding of eels and their migration patterns represents a form of knowledge that cannot be taught or rationalised. Whilst his brother Tom seeks understanding through books and logical analysis, Dick possesses an instinctive connection to natural cycles. His eel-gutting expertise demonstrates practical, embodied knowledge that exists outside formal education and rational frameworks—yet this same connection to nature makes him dangerous and ultimately tragic.
Murder of Freddie Parr
Dick murders Freddie Parr by hitting him with a bottle, motivated by jealousy over Mary. The novel presents this through ale bottle imagery, connecting it to the Atkinson family's brewing heritage. This act catalyses the narrative's central mystery and drives much of the guilt that haunts Tom.
Suicide and revelation
Dick commits suicide by drowning himself upon learning the truth about his parentage. His eel-gutting skills become grimly ironic as he turns violence upon himself. The revelation about his lineage triggers family collapse, demonstrating how buried secrets inevitably resurface.
Gothic and natural symbolism
Dick functions as a Gothic innocent, a character who exists outside conventional morality and rationality. He represents natural force resisting narrative control, and his idiocy parodies human attempts to impose order on chaos. His character embodies the novel's suggestion that nature—whether biological, sexual, or environmental—cannot be fully controlled or rationalised by human systems.
Henry Crick
Henry Crick, Tom's father, represents stoic endurance in the face of life's challenges.
Background and role
Henry serves as the lockkeeper of the Fens and is a veteran of the First World War. His occupation is deeply symbolic—he literally controls the water levels, attempting to manage the boundary between land and flood. This role metaphorically represents humanity's ongoing struggle to control natural forces.
The lockkeeper position is particularly significant in Swift's symbolic scheme: locks are mechanisms designed to regulate and control water flow, yet they acknowledge that water cannot be eliminated, only temporarily managed. Henry's daily work thus embodies the novel's central theme of humanity's attempts to impose order on fundamentally ungovernable natural forces.
Alcoholism and character
Henry's alcoholism is eventually cured through what Mary perceives as her 'miracle'. His drinking can be understood as a response to the traumas of war and the challenges of his life. The novel presents him with 'aqueous humour'—a phrase that suggests both his watery environment and his stoic, phlegmatic temperament.
Teaching and mythology
Henry raises Dick following Ernest's suicide and teaches Tom about Fenland myths, particularly the story of the eels and Sargasso Sea. These myths privilege cyclical patterns over linear progress, suggesting that history repeats rather than advances. Through these stories, Henry passes down a worldview that emphasises endurance and acceptance rather than change and improvement.
Symbolic significance
Henry's signalling duties embody the theme of futile human order against chaos. Despite his efforts to maintain control through the locks, the Fens remain fundamentally wild and ungovernable. His character suggests that the best humans can do is endure and adapt rather than truly conquer natural forces.
Freddie Parr
Though Freddie Parr dies early in the chronology of events, his presence haunts the entire narrative.
Identity and death
Freddie is the son of a signalman and becomes Dick's rival for Mary's affections. His drowning, caused by Dick's violent rage, sparks the inquest and verdict of 'accident', though the truth is far more sinister. This legal verdict contrasts sharply with the moral reality, highlighting how official narratives can obscure truth.
Freddie represents innocent youth crushed by adult secrets and jealousies. His death demonstrates how the younger generation becomes victim to the sins and complications of their elders. The novel suggests that children inevitably pay for their parents' transgressions—a theme that resonates throughout the Atkinson family history.
Symbolic significance
The gap between the official verdict of 'accident' and the reality of murder parallels the novel's broader concern with how official histories can sanitise or misrepresent actual events. What appears in records may differ significantly from lived experience and moral truth.
The corpse and liminality
Freddie's corpse resurfaces as an uncanny reminder, blurring the boundaries between living and dead in the Fens' liminal space. The Fenland setting, caught between water and land, becomes associated with this ambiguous state. His physical remains serve as evidence that the past cannot be buried but will always resurface, much like the Fens themselves resist permanent drainage.
The image of Freddie's corpse rising from the water is one of the novel's most powerful symbols of how the past refuses to stay buried. In the Fenland environment, where water constantly threatens to reclaim the land, nothing can be permanently concealed. This physical reality mirrors the psychological reality that suppressed memories and buried secrets will inevitably resurface.
Atkinson ancestors
The Atkinson family history provides a generational backdrop that illuminates the novel's themes of progress and decline.
Key family members
- Thomas Atkinson: A brewer whose industry represents the Jubilee boom of the 19th century
- Ernest Atkinson: A Parliamentary failure whose suicide parallels the decline of the family's fortunes
- Helen Atkinson: Dick's mother, whose incestuous relationship with Ernest produces Dick
- Sarah Atkinson: Ernest's wife, who is driven to madness, possibly by the knowledge of Ernest's assault on Sarah
Historical parallels
The Atkinson family embodies 19th-century industrial expansion and subsequent collapse, paralleling the chaos of the French Revolution. Their brewery represents the boom-and-bust cycle of progress—initial success followed by inevitable decline. This family history demonstrates Swift's argument that history is cyclical rather than linear.
The Atkinson Trajectory: A Microcosm of History
The Atkinson family's rise and fall exemplifies Swift's cyclical view of history:
- Thomas Atkinson builds a successful brewery during the industrial boom, representing human ambition and the promise of progress
- Ernest Atkinson fails in Parliament and commits incest, representing moral and social decline
- The brewery burns, destroying the physical manifestation of the family's achievements
- Dick, the product of incest, represents biological degeneration
- The family line effectively ends, completing the cycle from rise to fall
This pattern challenges Victorian notions of inevitable progress, suggesting instead that success contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Incestuous degeneration
The revelation of incest within the Atkinson family represents biological and moral degeneration. This degeneration parallels Swift's broader critique of the idea of progress; rather than advancing, the family declines across generations. The biological consequences of incest (Dick's intellectual disability) serve as a physical manifestation of moral corruption.
Symbolic fire
The brewery fire symbolises progress's capacity for self-destruction. What was built to represent advancement and prosperity ultimately burns, suggesting that human achievements contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Headmaster Lewis and Price
These characters represent contrasting philosophical positions that Tom's narrative navigates between.
Headmaster Lewis
Lewis embodies a 'Science of Life' futurism that embraces Thatcherite ideology. His worldview privileges scientific progress and forward momentum, denying the relevance of history. Lewis's decision to sack Tom represents the institutional rejection of historical thinking in favour of future-oriented, utilitarian education.
Lewis's futurism reflects 1980s political ideology that emphasised forward-looking efficiency and dismissed the value of historical study. His character allows Swift to critique the notion that we can simply abandon the past in favour of the future, when the novel demonstrates repeatedly that the past inevitably returns to shape the present.
Price
Price represents nuclear apocalypse anxiety and 'whiteface' rejection of the past in favour of 'end of time' thinking. His perspective contrasts with Tom's cyclicality, instead seeing history as moving toward a definitive conclusion or catastrophe.
Thematic significance
Together, Lewis and Price represent different forms of historical denial—Lewis through his futurism and Price through his apocalyptic thinking. Tom's narrative, with its emphasis on cyclical patterns and the persistence of the past, offers an alternative to both positions. Where Lewis sees only progress and Price sees only endings, Tom recognises the eternal return of patterns and the impossibility of escaping history.
Remember!
Key Takeaways:
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Tom Crick functions as an unreliable narrator whose metafictional 'lessons' explore how we construct meaning from history, embodying postmodern doubt about grand narratives
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Mary Crick symbolises repressed female sexuality and mystical connection to nature, with her mental breakdown revealing how past trauma (abortion, sterility) resurfaces across time
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Dick Crick serves as a Gothic figure representing natural forces that resist rational control, with his incestuous origins and murder of Freddie demonstrating the consequences of buried family secrets
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The Atkinson ancestors illustrate cyclical history through their boom-and-bust trajectory, challenging the notion of linear progress through patterns of degeneration
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Characters embody key oppositions: rationalism vs. mysticism (Tom vs. Mary), nature vs. civilisation (Dick vs. human progress), cyclical vs. linear history (Tom vs. Lewis/Price), with the Fenland setting serving as the stage where these conflicts play out
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The novel demonstrates that the past cannot be buried—secrets resurface, traumas return, and history repeats in cycles rather than progressing linearly