The Character of Jimmy Porter

Jimmy Porter is the male protagonist in Osborne Kitchen Sink Drama Look Back in Anger(1956). He is the representative of the Angry Young Generation that the post-world –war-second socio –political ethos generated. Jimmy is strongly conscious of the present condition of human life- that human existence has been degenerated even far below the bovine standard. Other men and women, who, as it were, sleep in the den of ignorance, unconsciousness and lowliness, cannot realize it. Standing on the debris of utter damnation Jimmy continues trumpeting to wake up his generation to consciousness. Unfortunately, others, for whom”April is the cruelest month” are not conscious of the Status qua and what is more they are unwilling to be conscious.This accounts for why Jimmy unleashes vitriolic anger on the heads of those whom he confronts in due course of reading newspaper, taking tea, hearing the music of Vaughan Williams and playing on the trumpet. Besides his wife Alison Porter , his friend Cliff, Helena, his wife’s friend, his mother-in-law, Nigel, his brother-in –law, Colonel Redfern, his father- in-law-all are the scapegoats of his anger. Endowed with apocalyptic vision , Jimmy intends to burn the existing condition to ashes by the fire of his anger. Jimmy’s anger is, therefore, more redemptive.

One understands that Jimmy’s is a highly tragic predicament, for he is entrapped in the labyrinth of his own consciousness. He can neither come out of his consciousness , nor those , who live with him can enter into it.It is his consciousness that destroys him and, therefore, he has become destructive to others .His trumpeting suggests his endeavor to summon people for waking up and his cry for salvation. It is synonymous with Hallelujah. Thus, Jimmy’s ‘over consciousness’ is his hamartia, if he is analyzed as a tragic protagonist. This metaphysical consciousness , that alienates Jimmy from those who crowd in his surrounding world, turns him into an above- the –average character.  It makes him Prophet –like , for a prophet only properly realizes the damnation of an era and sets out to usher in a golden millennium.

To identify Jimmy with a prophet exclusively is to commit a great blunder, for he is not led by the prophetic motto, amo vincit omnia, meaning love conquers over the universe. In other words, though Jimmy has the palpable perception of the rottenness of the status qua, he does not know the means of heralding a golden millennium. Therefore , he is called a ‘frustrated messiah’.

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger dramatizes ‘the panorama of futility’ that became contemporary history. Jimmy’s consciousness in the play serves as the presence of the blind prophet Tiresius in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The play gives us a temperature of social protest and the weather is blisteringly hot.Jimmy, who embodies the Lutheran rebelliousness, is the fuming British malcontent. One knows that the post-fifties sociopolitical an economic ethos has given birth to Jimmy Porter who embodies the spirit of every young man of the time.He is a social rebel and an intellectual misfit.