Look Back in Anger: Jimmy Porter-As a representative of Angry Young Man/ Title of the play

In the wake of the Second World War human life turned into a mere debris of the traditional values. The royal glory of the British nation had almost evaporated; degeneration came at all the levels- political, religious, moral, conjugal etc.-of life . Besides, the evils , say,class-distinction, middle-class morality, stark materialism , sexual violence etc. cropped up. The conscious and intellectual British people , who had the sound memory of the past glory and the awareness of the present damnation and yet had no power to do  something philanthropic, could not live as passive witness to the ‘panorama of futility’ or the wasteland to which their civilization was reduced, but started to vent vitriolic anger upon those they were related. This generation of perceptive men that included the young men , come to be identified as ‘Angry Young Man’. John Osborne , Kinsley Amiss, Nigel Dennis, and John Wain have created central characters who are generally anguished and angry.

Jimmy Porter , the protagonist of John Osborne’s archetypal play of the “ Angry Young Generation”, Look Back in Anger is the typical representative of Angry Young  Generation of the post Second World War period. An intellectual misfit, he is dissatisfied with the status qua and rebels against it. He debunks at the ruling Conservative Party through his criticism of his brother- in- law,Nigel Redfern, the budding Tory politician. In the play Jimmy’s above- the – average consciousness is used as the veritable screen through which float diverse images of futility, damnation, degeneration, darkness, slovenliness and barbarism. Jimmy constantly revolts against the lowliness and beastliness of human existence. Others do not feel so. They are ,as it were , confined in the narrow cocoon of peripheral consciousness. There lies a huge gulf between the consciousness of Jimmy and that of the average men and women .This accounts for why Jimmy is so angry at everybody.

Jimmy fervidly strikes at the upper class and condemns their ‘hostage’ , Alison particularly the smugness and ideal of the stiff upper life. He cannot forget the upper middle class origin of his wife and constantly rails at her , her friends and relatives as “ Dame Alison’s mob”. He banters Alison for her virginity before marriage and defies the conventional sexual code that heralds the death of the middle class- morality. Alison fails to give him the perfect solidarity, the working class traits. Jimmy cannot trust women and therefore, Alison and Helena are seen wearing Jimmy’s shirt thus partly got transvestite. The women also symbolize the status qua , the boredom Jimmy hankers to come out from.

As representative angry young man, Jimmy voices his invective against the existing irritation torpor. He wants to hear just a warm thrilling voice that cries out “ Hallelujah”. Everybody including his wife wants peace, which is nothing more than a deathly coma or narcosis. We cannot fail to recognize Jimmy when he utters that he is one to whom the miseries of the world are his misery. Imaginative suffering is a profoundly solitary experience.

Psychologically considered Jimmy is not the epitome of the Angry Young Men of his generation. He is rather like Hamlet, an exceptional individual, a tortured soul who finds the ‘ time’s out of joint’ but has not the capability to usher in a golden millennium.

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Mother Maurya: Development and Conversion of Maurya to a Spiritual Status

Among the concourse of tragic character through the eons, the portrayal of Maurya, the protagonist of the play Riders to the Sea is one of the rarest achievement of the dramatist. It is seldom that a woman is projected as a tragic protagonist. If one ransacks the history of world literature, the only identical examples that are found are Sophocles’s Antigone and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Beginning as a miserable peasant woman, Maurya turns to be a visionary; an epitome of serenity; a stoic resigner to the will of Almighty.

However , with Maurya’s character we are confronted to a mother who suffers not because of any Hamartia or error of judgement but because of the buffets of the uncanny destiny. In her life miseries have piled up one over the other- her grief is unfathomable; suffering immeasurable, yet she remains unconquered. As the play opens , we find the bereaved mother, almost undone by a series of tragic mishaps, is in deep mourning for her fifth son Michael who is reported to have been drowned in the sea nine days back. Therefore, her obsessive concern is now for her last surviving son Bartely who has resolved to undertake a voyage to the sea.She initially hoped that  the young priest would certainly deter Bartley from this dangerous sea voyage. But when Bartley pays no heed to her solicitude , she makes a mourning comparison: “If it was a hundred horses , or a thousand horses you had itself , what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?” Here Maurya transcends her poverty , her love for physical comforts and requirement in her love for child.

However , as an illiterate lady she believes in all superstition which are common in Aran Islands hence the distraught mother to whom blessing is almost a ceremonial custom comes to the Spring well with a stick in hand bought once by Michael- the way she bursts into an emotional muttering on the incongruity of the situation moves the audience into tears.

But soon afterwards the wretched mother returns back home and explains that she had seen the ghost of Michael riding on the grey pony following Bartley riding on the red mare. This may have been the figment of her own overwrought nerves. But this vision is good enough to intensify the tragic torn state of the heroine. At last all her fears, anxiety , and prayers end with a bitter conclusion- the fear of Bartley’s death so stirred her that it makes Maurya fall in a reverie and she being absorbed in the thought of dead Patch is suddenly surprised by the body of Bartley, but along with this death , she gains the tragic wisdom.

The death of Bartley leaves her to a contemplation of the predicament of death, the death which tolls her away from her sole self to all humanity.Like Oedipus Maurya surrenders to the will of God. Hers is thus an evolution through successive stages of being a keening woman, a woman selfishly happy and finally a unique woman who can accept all death including her own with certainty.

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