Stories as Silt in Graham Swift’s Waterland

The essay analyses Graham Swift’s Waterland and shows that history and identity are subject to a process of reconstruction within stories which evince their author’s power to build on the past based on his vision and cultural experience. We associate the process of recreating the world of the past through stories with the process of recreating a new world through siltation. The same as silt develops land and a new world on the already existing pieces of land reclaimed from water, stories reconstruct history and the past. Both silt and stories reconstruct the past.