Filiation and Affiliation in Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow

Abstract

This dissertation explores the notions of filiation and affiliation and aims to analyse the filial and affiliative relationships of the three main characters of Caryl Phillips's novel In the Falling Snow: Earl, his son Keith, and his grandson Laurie. Earl is a first-generation immigrant from the Caribbean who came to England as a member of the Windrush Generation. His immigration ruptured his filial relationship with his family as well as with the West Indies and forced him to find his place in the racist British culture of the 1960s. Furthermore, his silence about his origins and his life ruptured his bond with his son, Keith, who repeated this pattern with his own son Laurie. This dissertation intends to explain why In the Falling Snow can be seen as a postcolonial Bildungsroman which disrupts the preponderant Eurocentric notions of filiation and affiliation.