The Quintessential Rebel

The Quintessential Rebel

In Allan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, we are introduced to Smith, a man with his own standards, beliefs, values, and battles. As we are taken through the story of a period of his live, we come to understand what Smith really stands for. He is a diehard rebel that is destined to always stick to his beliefs, and is willing to sacrifice all in a battle against his greatest enemy and opressor, society.
Throughout the book Smith gives us a chance to get to know him. He willingly shares his thoughts with the reader, and often times his thoughts develop as he is telling his story giving us an up-close look at the inner workings of Smith’s mind and personality. Smith belongs to a group of people he calls the Out-Laws. It is the underprivileged lower class poor street criminals. Crime runs in Smith’s family, and being born into poverty he nether sees, nor is even willing to contemplate a life without crime. At a point he hints on having some communist views, and perhaps suggests that his father had communist friends, if he wasn’t one himself. Fatally inflicted by cancer, Smith’s father died a painful death. We later find out that it was Smith who found his father breathless in a pool of his own blood, and to this day has a great deal of respect for him. The first time Smith’s family gets a taste of a financially comfortable life is when the factory his father worked in gave them a lump of cash upon his father’s death. “…a wad of crisp blue-back fivers ain’t a sight of good” (Sillitoe, 20) says Smith as the one break his family got was only due to his father’s death. Smith is not money hungry, he steels simply to get by. He knows exactly where he stands in the world- in direct opposition of the In-laws, the “pig-faced snotty-nosed dukes and ladies"”(Sillitoe, 8). He realizes that he is a poor nobody, a petty criminal, an outcast of society.
Smith by nature is a rebel. He puts himself and his fellow Out-laws in direct opposition of the rest; for him it’s “us versus them”. As we are getting to know Smith, he is spending his time in a Borstal after having been caught for a bakery robbery. He has no regrets about doing what he did in the bakery shop, and has a big enough heart to be happy for his accomplice, Mike for getting off.