Conclusion, redemption, insight, or freeze frame: Where is Sillitoe heading?

Arthur finally, and as expected, gets what's coming to him (in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Sillitoe), as the husband of one of the women he's been carrying on with follows him for a few nights and at last catches him unaware outside of a pub and two "swabbies," which I take to be British slang for thugs, beat the crap out of him. He's laid up for a few days, then goes back to work and confronts the rather timid husband of the other woman he's carried on with, Jack, and lays into him for disclosing his whereabouts that fateful night. It's quite impressive how Sillitoe balances our feelings and reactions - in part we like Arthru very much for his spirit and for his devotion to his own family and to (some of) his mates, as well as for his intelligence, sensitivity, and as a hard-luck working-class guy with a dim future unless he watches out - and at the same time we see him as a real shit, who betrays one of his mates and is quite callous to an attractive young girl who's become attached to him - in other words, he's a narcissist, a loser, and a violent, vulgar guy. As Arthur recovers from the beating we enter the much shorter 2nd part of this novel, Sunday morning, much of which so far is taken up with a rowdy weekend in which Arthur's aunt and her enormous clan entertain a visitor from Africa, the Army buddy of one of their sons and the first black man most in Nottingham have ever scene - it's a quite powerful and riotous chapter that could stand alone as a short story and probably has. I keep waiting for some kind of redemption or insight - only about 20 pages left so Sillitoe had better move it along - although am suspecting it will end with an ambiguous freeze-frame, like Loneliness of the Long Distance runner or its French cinematic near-counterpart (though about a much younger protagonat), 400 Blows.