The Widower's Son is … a novel about two generations of one family, and much of its main narrative covers … the period just after the war, which seems, for a great many English writers writing today, in its paradox of victory and decline, its upset hierarchies and devaluation of sacred trusts, to be a recognizable parallel for the aging and disillusionment of the individual. Certainly that is true of Sillitoe's novel, which traces the rise of William Scorton, grandson of a miner and son of an army sergeant, to the rank of Colonel, cuckold and madman on the easy path of the age.

Sillitoe … often writes about the isolation of the individual from society, and in a way The Widower's Son is about traveling too far and too fast from one's own origins…. The army, for Sillitoe, is the emblem of everything which tears men away from the earth...