A true anti-hero in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Arthur, the protagonist in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958, his fist novel), is a classic anti-hero - and that's a term that you don't see or hear much anymore but was in vogue in the 60s and 70s - the age of Cold War, Vietnam War, and Existentialism, maybe the ultimate example of anti-hero being Camus's Mersault? Or in a comic vein Heller's Yossarian? Sillitoe's Arthur (last name Seaton?, not sure) is a classic in that he's the driving force and focus of the novel, which involves continued bouts of pub-crawling, drinking, smoking, fighting, etty vandalism, and sex - but he does not seem to be learning or growing in any way (compare with the conventional hero, Joseph Andrews, say, who propels the bildungsroman, or novel of education), and though Arthur's story is entertaining and we want the best for him, he's a likable "character" that is, he would not be a likable person: he's someone you'd want to read about but not to know and definitely not to befriend. He thinks nothing of betraying his so-called "mate" and carrying on a long affair with his mate's wife because the man is weak and naive. And he thinks nothing of having another fling with the sister of his wife's mate, also married - in fact, he cares for nobody but himself, a true existentialist, and for nothing but the moment at hand. But we don't dismiss him: clearly, he's representative of a time and place, working class England post-war, when for the first time there were at least some possibilities for success for the returning working-class soldiers but for so many, for people like Arthur, that success remains out of reach - he's comfortable drawing his weekly pay and spending it on cigarettes and beer (and clothes, his weakness) and not thinking about responsibilities to self, family, community, future. He was made by the war - had his first taste of a life outside the factories of the Midlands - and unmade by it. He does have a nascent sense of working-class politics, and maybe in the 2nd half of the book that will develop - I think Sillitoe clearly did develop the political consciousness of his protagonists in later fiction: the iconoclasm of the protag in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and the activism of the somewhat older version Arthur in the story I recently posted on, Isaac Starbuck.