Alison. From what is seen in the play, Alison has done extremely little to vex Jimmy: she is faithful to him, attracted to his sexual charisma and intelligence, and sticks by him despite his bad behavior, but Jimmy berates her for the sin of being from the upper class and for being unwilling to break ties with her snobby parents. He even claims that he wishes she would miscarry a child (not knowing she is pregnant) just so she could appropriately suffer and understand his own pain.

One problem with Jimmy is that he does nothing to change his life in any way, small or large. He is not politically active and does not try to engineer social change as an activist would, though his anger and energy would make him suited for that (Helena says he should have been born during the French Revolution for this reason). He stews in his anger, only making himself all the more impotent in making a break.

Another problem is that he is so self-absorbed in his own suffering that he declines to notice others in their suffering, such as Alison in her isolation or Helena in her frustrated dreams of being an actress. He feels that he is the only one to have ever known pain and therefore that he is unable to truly connect with others. He assumes that Alison has had a cushy life and takes her stiff upper lip in the face of his abuse to mean that she must have no sense of feeling or zest for life at all. Ironically, Jimmy is becoming the snob he accuses his wife of being, in that he assumes she is less "alive" than he is.

Jimmy's character in Look Back in Anger is the "angry young man."  

Jimmy is upset at the world around him.  He feels he is denied his rightful place in British society because of his working class heritage.  He finds phoniness repugnant. It is in a world that says that the class system is gone, but still operates under it. Jimmy cannot accept that someone of his talents is left to occupy a sweet stall.  He sees social barriers such as class as the reason why he cannot be more in life, obstacles that prevent him from being able to "make it to the top."

Jimmy rails against the lack of authenticity in human interactions.  This can be seen in his attacks on Alison, in lines such as, “Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.” Jimmy's abuse of Alison is predicated upon the idea that she does not know what it's like to suffer and experience pure pain.  For a large portion of the drama, he sees her as an extension of the false world around him.  

These help to explain how Jimmy feels he is misunderstood.  He believes that no one can fully "get" him.  When he says, "My heart is so full, I feel ill—and she wants peace," Jimmy's frustration is evident.  He believes that his own background of having seen his father die has helped to create a perception of realty that no one is ever going to fully understand: "You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.''  The angry, forlorn condition that Jimmy has carried from his childhood goes very far in defining him in Osborne's drama.

Jimmy Porter is a member of the first wave of working-class people in England that attended university. However, like many of the so-called angry young men of the fifties and sixties, he feels that in retrospect such opportunities have resulted in a loss of his identity. He now feels neither part of the working classes nor the middle classes. As an educated man, he can see the problems with the class system. He can understand how it has been used to oppress and in some ways enslave the working classes, but he can also see how the working classes have sat back and let the exploitation happen. In his eyes, this kind of insight into society should have given him more opportunity to express himself and help instigate change. All it has done, though, is made him an outsider in his own community.

This feeling of resentment and insecurity has manifested itself in his inability to empathize with the plight of the other characters, including his wife and friend Cliff. He believes their personal problems are nothing compared to the lies the British government have fed him and his generation. He even struggles to show his wife comfort when she has a miscarriage.

In addition, Jimmy seems to think that he has let down his own people. Who was he to think he could be better than them? Who was he to think they were doing anything wrong?

Perhaps Jimmy would be calmer if he had somewhere to direct his anger and someone to talk about his resentment with, but unfortunately he seems to have nowhere to go.

Jimmy Porter is the quintessential angry young man. An opinionated, verbose fellow, he seems to point his anger at everyone and everything, from the possibility of nuclear war to his wife Alison. He largely rants about whatever topic is brought up to him or within his presence. He attempts to provoke Alison with cruel words. And he reacts with rage whenever things do not go his way, such as when Alison refuses to join him at the deathbed of a family friend. The idea of compromise never seems to occur to him, and he never seems to think of putting the energy he uses for his rage to good use, such as by dedicating himself to political activism.

Ultimately, Jimmy's profound displays of resentment and cruelty are how he is portrayed as an angry young man. Denied the opportunity to build the sort of life he wants for himself due to class prejudice, he stews in impotent rage. He takes out his frustration on whoever happens to be in the room with him. This rage gives him a sense of power compared to sitting complacently and taking life's injustices in meek submission, though he does nothing with that anger but make others miserable.

Jimmy is an angry young man in that, like many men of his age and class, he feels out of kilter with 1950s British society. He feels alienated from a culture which he believes is stagnant and stuck in the past. Jimmy wants to change all this; the problem is he doesn't know how. He's far too cynical to get himself involved in movements for political change. He'd much rather rail from the sidelines, deploying his sarcasm and invective against those, such as his father-in-law, who he believes to be responsible for Britain's social malaise.

And therein lies the source of his anger. Jimmy has something of a chip on his shoulder about the continued domination that the upper classes exert over British public life. He knows that he's smarter than the likes of Alison's father, but what has that superior intelligence brought him? A sweet stall in the market. No wonder Jimmy's angry.

Jimmy is an angry young man because of personal tragedy and the social era. He also blames his personal tragedy on the social era. Jimmy's father died when Jimmy was ten years old from wounds inflicted while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, a popular thing for social activists to do in the cause of democracy. Jimmy stayed at the side of his father listening to him talk and talk during the six months that it took for his father to die. This leads to Jimmy's entrenched hatred for social ills, and one social ill that Jimmy feels particularly strongly about is that of social class division: the upper class in England versus the lower classes.

Jimmy lives in an era during which England is losing power as an Empire as more and more of its colonies are granted independence and upper classes resist the incursion of political changes, like the advent of a powerful labor party for working class people. It is a time also at which the Church of England is coming under political attack for being itself part of the upper classes (churches are meant to be for all) because the Church has vast and rich landholdings.

In addition, the era following World War II led to realistic fears for the annihilation of all classes through the threats of nuclear bomb attacks, resulting in Jimmy's own form of nihilism and existentialist despair:

If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-noting-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.

Jimmy, the angry young man of Look Back in Anger (1958) by John Osborne, is angry because of death, and because of helplessness in the face of death. He states that he became angry while watching at his father's deathbed for many long months. He tells Allison that she needs the death of a child to give her humanity. His anger is renewed by watching Hugh's mother's death. The first thing he does in relation to Allison when she comes to the apartment after her miscarriage (which occurred while she was staying at her father's home) is berate her for not sending flowers to Hugh's mother's funeral, which was over several months ago. At each instance of death Jimmy explodes and becomes seemingly more angry.

In the Act I remark he angrily makes to Allison stating that the death of a child might make her into a human being defines Jimmy's idea of a human being and explains why he is always railing against the inertia of the working classes and of superior social classes: He defines a human being as someone who is torn and angry at death and at one's helplessness in the face of death (remember that mild comedies and mysteries and such easy-going plays filled London's West End during the more than ten years following World War II, in some ways the ultimate symbol of death). When Allison goes to the apartment after her miscarriage, she is ill and crushed because she was helpless to protect the life of her unborn child. Perhaps this allows Jimmy to see her as a human being now. If so, it may be that she will become angry or it may be that he will feel he now has a world of his own and become civil, which is the more unlikely of the two.

It is not clear that Jimmy Porter himself knows what he wants. Osborne himself observes in his description of Jimmy that to be this vehement is "to be almost non-committal." In other words, if you attack a specific aspect of society, it is clear what you want, but if you attack everything, as Jimmy does, this seems like a general, directionless expression of ill-temper.

Jimmy's anger is often misdirected, particularly at Alison, but his constant railing at her, and her background in particular, does provide some evidence for his particular source of dissatisfaction and therefore what he wants. Jimmy is driven largely by class resentment. He believes that he is more intelligent than, and just as well-educated as, the upper classes who run the country, but he has no power and nothing to occupy him. What he wants, therefore, is a disruption in the social order to allow him and (rather less importantly) those like him to occupy positions of power and influence and to find an outlet for their talents.

This would be a political solution for the sense of inferiority and inadequacy he feels. On a more individual, psychological level, he probably also wishes to stop feeling like such a strange hybrid: poor and working class but also sensitive and highly-educated. However, he is less willing to acknowledge this desire and is only partly aware of it himself.

Look Back in Anger is the first play by playwright John Osborne, which means, of course, that as a play (also called drama) there is no narrator. Therefore the characters' dialogue in combination with the set and costuming and action tell and show all that the narrator in a narrative story (novel or short story) would tell. Jimmy Porter is the central character and is defined by where he is, how he looks, what his actions are (like ripping the newspaper from Cliff's hands), what he says (like demanding another pot of tea be made for him and all his insults).

The play opens in a room where three people, Jimmy, Cliff, and Alison, are passing the time. Jimmy and Cliff are reading newspapers. Alison is ironing. Jimmy is hidden by the newspaper he is reading, as is Cliff. Alison is the picture of impoverished, tarnished, past elegance and wealth. Jimmy's first action is to throw his paper down to reveal a thin man in a worn tweed jacket and flannel slacks, indicating financial limitations.

Jimmy's first words in the play reveal his discontent in life:

"Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews are the same as last week's. Different books--same reviews."

He goes on to insult first Cliff and then Alison, saying Cliff is ignorant and stupid and that Alison hasn't had a thought in years. Oddly, both cliff and Alison humor his ill-treatment of them.

Playwright John Osborne describes Jimmy in the directorial notes preceding the play as "a disconcerting mixture" of many antithetical qualities, few of them pleasant: "of sincerity and ... malice, of tenderness and ... cruelty," and restless, importunate (persistent) pride that is alienating and "blistering."

It is very tempting to treat Jimmy Porter as a whiner and a self-enabler, however, the truth is that the time in which the play develops, was one of post war void. All men who served in India during the War, like Alison's own father, came back just like any other soldier: To find themselves and encounter nobody.

Similarly, Jimmy's pathos is one of desolation and loneliness. He is also trying to find himself, and is in a place in which there is little to grow, challenge, or entice him.

Was he whiny? Yes, but he has enough reasons to be angry as he felt betrayed by the same government that sent him to serve, and now "nobody cares". The sad reality is that he could do nothing: All of England was in the same state, therefore, what else could he do but whine?