Discuss some of the connections which you have been able to make between Engleby and Larkin

proportion” which can be seen as Larkin’s distaste of a standard soul destroying 9 to 5 6 day a week job. On page 48 of Engleby, when the titular character is reminiscing about his dad while he lays on his deathbed, the only thing he can remember of his dad is him coming home from work with his grey envelope and saying “Another week. Make sure you never end up here, Mike” and the paragraph ends with Mike looking on as his dad passes “And I though, I’ll make sure I never end up here, either.” This can be interpreted in two ways; one way is that he does not want to end up in a dead end job working to just make the ends meet until he dies, like his father before him, and another way that it can be seen is that he does not want to end up like his father, dying slowly and painfully. Both Larkin and Engleby show their dislike for a regular mind numbing job, and this is indicative of their characters, both are well educated men who would rather do something more stimulating than working in a factory or a cubicle. In Larkin’s This Be the Verse, He writes about how the parents are the one responsible for the wrong doing that their children have done “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. On page 19 of the book, Engleby says that “I didn’t think I’d like my life to be restricted by the consequences of what my parents had done” sort of sharing the view that Larkin has. In the novel, Engleby mentions that when he was younger, he parents just gave him a key and told him to cook his own dinner. This could have been why Engleby is such a peculiar fellow, from the activities he describes in the book, it paints as sort of an introverted loner, and this could have been caused by the constant solitude he had when he was a child, linking back to the Larkin quote, on how the parents are responsible on the outcome on their children, Engleby is a product of the neglect he suffered as a child.