Look Back In Anger Character Analysis

Jimmy Porter, in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, is a 25-year old man married to an upper-crust young woman Allison. The central setting is a dank simple flat, itself a character, which, in its simplicity, contrasts with Jimmy’s decadent aspirations and Allison’s posh origins. The couple’s roommate, Cliff, is also from a working class background; although Jimmy has had more education than Cliff, the pair run a candy store. Cliff, throughout, symbolizes Jimmy’s connection to the past and is a more authentic representation of the well-read yet pompous Jimmy’s working class heritage. Jimmy Porter is the nihilistic main character who is stagnant with the emotionality of his past. For Jimmy, the past has sure consequences for the now. Because of a

Sadly, Jimmy’s ire is rooted in his experience as a poor child watching his father, a soldier who had been injured in the Spanish Civil War, die years before. As Allison plans to leave with her friend Helena, Jimmy tells them a provocative story about how he watched his father die when he was ten years old. His father had come home from the war in Spain where “certain god-fearing gentlemen...had made such a mess of him, he didn’t have long to live” (90). Jimmy shares how the family failed to care for his dying father. Therefore, Jimmy had been the only person left to recount “the despair and the bitterness, the sweet, sickly smell of a dying man” (91). He goes on to mock Allison and Helena, “I knew more about love...betrayal...and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know all your life” (91). Later, in Act 2 scene 2, a pregnant and despondent Allison’s father retrieves her from the bare flat. Her father is Colonel Redfern, a soldier of 40 years, also is a remnant from the past; however, Osborne depicts him as a sympathetic yet stern and measured character—a foil to the unstable, seemingly rudderless and emotional Jimmy. As a complicated embodiment of the British past, Redfern represents the lessening of the British stronghold—not disimpassioned, but measured. Osborne’s Redfern views himself as a relic and is nostalgic for an idealized past when he was at the helm of Great Britain’s colonial regime. Contrastingly, Jimmy is angry about the past because to him the present is not dynamic; he is in a rut without a future—a continuation of an ignoble but problematic past. Osborne’s point here is that the past has definite consequences for the