Comment on the title of Look Back in Anger.

The Title of the Play: The title refers to the characters’ attitudes towards their lives in general, but Jimmy’s in particular. It tells us about a complex love triangle which involves an intelligent but disaffected young man, Jimmy Porter, the main protagonist in the whole story, his upper class, impassive wife, Alison and her best friend, Helena, which furthers complicate the entire story. Jimmy Porter, the main character, shows a thought provoking character with immense psychological complexity and interest, dominating the whole play completely with his fueled power of his anger and his language.

“Anger” is the right word to describe his character as he hated a lot of people, including Helena and his wife, Alison, Alison’s mother, brother and a whole lot bunch of friends and always vent his anger and ire on them, sometimes hurling nasty and disturbing insults towards them. He hated them due to their social ranking in the power hierarchy, her social standing and is well brought-up “upbringing”.

“Looking back” is what makes Jimmy so furious and frustrated when he looks back to the past during the Spanish Civil War at World War Two, which he witnessed the horrors and psychological scarring of War. When he was ten years old, he watched his idealist father died due to complications of his wounds for a year during his fight for democracy, so he lashes out his anger on everyone due to his helplessness and his vulnerability.

He also hates the class system in the country, where the built-in preferential for those of the rich and the famous and the top of the world, the higher-ranking people to those people at the lower end which were excluded from all power and privileges and have no say in anything, that makes Jimmy’s existence on earth seems not worthwhile and meaningless.

He also hates his loved ones as they didn’t want to fully commit to love and refuses to have strong feelings with him, preferring to have it “low-key” relationship, and also at the society which doesn’t fulfill promises of windows of opportunity and good fortunes, all the white-lies bastards that Jimmy hate for deceiving the gullible and innocent victims of outrage brainwashing and deception. He also deplored the higher social ranking people in the social and power structure who sits smugly in their sits and whom do not leave a helping hand or a guiding light to the less fortunate and those below them and prefers to be self-centred, caring for their own welfare and not of others.

All the plays outlined above share certain common themes or concerns. The most important among them is the repeated interrogation of the solitary individual and his or her relation (usually rebellious) to various forms of authority, The nature of authority, whether social, political, religious, familial or that of a particular morality, invariably takes second place to the consideration of how it affects the individual. The idea of ‘the authority of a particular morality’ needs some elaboration here and opens up the concern with morality that I think is the other major common one in Osborne’s work.

The major theme of Look Back in Anger is social protest. Osborne probed into personal relationships and bared their social determinants (Weiss 286). Actually, drama is an ideal genre to represent social and individual oppositions: It can simply show what is going on in the society in turmoil at the same time that it allows more than one emotional response to these intellectually unprocessed human facts. It is by nature ironic. Drama is thus ideally the medium of social as opposed to individual negative capability, it can resist irritable reachings [sic.] after fact and theory; and thus carry forward the uneconomical dialogue of self-interpretation that is the cultural role of art which is not merely upholding and disciplining received attitudes.

Heilpern indicated what made Look Back in Anger so thrillingly new in the 1950s: “It was the first British play that openly dramatized bruising emotion and it was the first to give the alienated lower classes and youth of England a weapon.” Osborne saw his play as a weapon with which ordinary people could breakdown the class barriers. The social and individual issues were not Osborne’s only new theme: He gave a sweeping nature to the angry attacks of his protagonist and he also infringed a lot of social and sexual taboos.

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