SOURCE: "'Unconfessed Confessions': The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes," in The British and Irish Novel since 1960, edited by James Acheson, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1991, pp. 174-91.

In the following excerpt, Higdon offers stylistic and thematic analyses of The Sweet-Shop Owner and Shuttlecock.

Graham Swift's first novel, The Sweet-Shop Owner, establishes the topics, themes and techniques that dominate his later first-person narratives. In all his novels we see Swift exploring difficult relationships between parents and child, between private and public histories, between past and present, as his memory-lines loop and coil, and as his characters find symbols through which to communicate in their streams of consciousness both the unsaid and the unsayable. Over all, though, towers Swift's interest in his characters' confessions, his concern for chronicling their moments of recognition, and his deep commitment to viewing them within the historical ties linking past and present. When...