Class Struggle in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

Pages:198-200
Arvind Nasier (Research Scholar, C.M.J. University, Meghalaya)

The central social theme in Look Back in Anger is class struggle. Although Jimmy Porter was born in a working-class family, Look Back in Anger cannot be labelled as a working-class play. Its protagonist Jimmy Porter no longer belongs to the working classes, because he is “first-generation, university-educated, emerging middle-class” (Heilpern 174). Jimmy dropped out of university since he no longer felt at ease with his emerging new social status. He did not want to lose his pure link with the working classes in which he was born but it was already too late. He has arrived in no-man’s land, stuck in-between “the working class, to which he belongs emotionally and the middle classes, to which he belongs by right of education” (Skovmand 86).