He employs post-modern features from frame of narration through sequencing of narratives and juxt apposition to symbols and different registers. There is no main narrator – there are six or seven people who tell the story collaboratively which is also a post-modern technique of writing. It would have been very easy for Swift to create vivid, distinctive characters, as he has done before, but his gentle, understated approach is an essential part of the gradual intensifying of atmosphere that he achieves so well. It invites us to contemplate the course of our own lives. And it is also completely consistent with the old butchers' wisdom that Jack Dodds, towards the end of the book, recalls for us, just as he heard it from his father. It is advice which I think Swift intends us all to apply to our lives:

"....You got to keep a constant eye on the wastage, constant.
What you've got to understand is the nature of the goods.
Which is perishable".
/Last Orders, p. 285/


Sources of Literature


Swift, Graham: Last Orders. Picador, London 1996.
Thornley, G. C.: Outline of English Literature. Longman, 1995.