This betrayal is even doubled because Amy is Jack’s wife and Ray is his best friend. Because of this affair, Amy neglects her regular visits to June, which can be interpreted as Amy’s betrayal of June. And Ray is betrayed as well by his wife who leaves him because of another man. All other men feel betrayed by their daughter who somehow did not fulfil their fathers’ expectations. But if we turn this idea around, it can also be seen as a failure of a father to raise his daughter up to his desires. Jack also failed, he failed to have changed in Amy’s eyes and he failed to make her happy. Amy connects this failure of Jack’s to his unwillingness to visit his daughter:
“ So what was true of you, girl, was true of him. And maybe that’s why he never came to see you, because he’d already visited himself, looked in on himself somehow in that little room where his own body lay, knowing he wouldn’t alter. Maybe that was his sacrifice for your sake: no hope for you so none for him. His sacrifice of all those other Jacks he might have been. But pull the other one. Maybe Jack Dodds, my husband, was really a saint and I never knew it, I never cottoned on. And I was the weak and selfish one. “
/Last Orders, p. 275/

All other male characters fail to get things in order with their daughter, as well. And as far as betrayal is concerned, Jack’s last orders are betrayed, at last, by his son Vince. Jack’s original wish was to have his ashes chucked off at the end of Margate Pier. But not all the ashes were chucked off there. Vince had previously chucked a bit of Jack off at Wick’s Farm.
The author closes the novel with another discourse. It is the finiteness of a man. What are we compared to the infiniteness of the wind? What is one man’s life worth compared to history?
“ Then I throw the last handful and the seagulls come back on a second chance and I hold up the jar, shaking it, like I should chuck it out to sea too, a message in a bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our souls, and the ash that I carried in my hands, which was the Jack who once walked around, is carried away by the wind, is whirled away by the wind till the ash becomes wind and the wind becomes Jack what we’re made of. “
/Last Orders, p. 295/

To conclude, Last Orders shows Graham Swift writing at his best, and he well deserves the nomination for the Booker Prize. The atmosphere he builds up as the book progresses is one of thoughtful reverie, he uses the frame of narration so wisely that he keeps the reader attentive.