LITTERATURE BFI anger and revolt

« Key Issue: Anger and Revolt in Post-WWII Writing Introduction After the Second World War, many writers felt a profound sense of frustration with the world that had been left behind.

The war had destroyed not only lives, but also people's faith in authority, progress, and society's promises.

In Britain and the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation faced a world that had survived catastrophe but refused to truly change.

The class system still dominated in Britain, racial injustice was tearing America apart, and individual voices felt powerless and unheard. As a result, many writers began to channel this frustration into powerful expressions of anger and revolt. In this presentation, I will argue that post-war texts present anger as both a necessary and a self-destructive force.

My pathway follows three stages.

First, I will look at anger as a raw, direct response to social injustice.

Second, I will examine how revolt can be crushed into silence by authority and fear.

Finally, I will show how some writers use dark humour and personal defiance to express a quieter but more resilient kind of rage. I will explore these ideas through Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, and through poems by Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Jennings, Anne Sexton, and Adrian Henri. 1.

Anger as a Direct Response to Social Injustice The most open and confrontational expression of anger in our texts is found in John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger.

The protagonist, Jimmy Porter, is a workingclass young man who feels betrayed by a society that educated him but gave him no real future.

He has a university degree yet runs a market stall — and this gap between his potential and his reality fuels an explosive, uncontainable rage. Osborne channels this anger mainly through long, aggressive monologues.

Jimmy barely lets anyone else speak.

His dialogue is relentless and domineering — he attacks the middle class, his wife Alison, and British society as a whole.

This technique creates a suffocating atmosphere: the audience understands Jimmy's anger but also feels overwhelmed by it.

The key tension here is that Jimmy's revolt is loud but leads nowhere.

He stays in the same flat, the same job, the same relationship.

His rage is justified, but it produces stagnation rather than change — showing us that anger alone, without direction, cannot break the systems it attacks. A similar dynamic appears in Gary Snyder's poem A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon.

The speaker reacts to the bombing of Vietnam by turning his fury inward, vowing to destroy the "American" identity inside himself.

Snyder uses brutal, visceral imagery — "burning and chopping, poisoning and blighting" — that mirrors the very violence he denounces.

The direct second-person address — "as you shoot down the Vietnamese girls and men" — implicates the reader directly, making the anger feel immediate and personal.

Yet the poem ends not with political action but with a ritual Ghost Dance — a spiritual gesture rather than a real revolt. Like Jimmy Porter, the speaker is furious, but his rage remains a performance of resistance rather than a force for real change.

Both texts show anger as burning and genuine, yet ultimately trapped within the individual. 2.

Revolt Crushed into Silence While Look Back in Anger and Snyder's poem express anger loudly, other post-war texts show what happens when revolt is suppressed entirely.

In Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, anger does not erupt — it simmers beneath the surface, creating a constant atmosphere of menace. Stanley, the protagonist, is a former pianist who has retreated from the world.

His withdrawal is itself a form of passive revolt — a refusal to participate in society. However, when two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, arrive and begin to interrogate him, this silent rebellion is brutally destroyed.

Pinter's key technique is absurd, threatening dialogue.

The two men bombard Stanley with rapid, nonsensical questions — demanding answers that have no logical basis.

The questions speed up until Stanley breaks down completely, unable even to speak. This technique creates.... »