Look Back in Anger

“If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”

Jimmy pities Colonel Redfern, but his pity suggests that it is easy to identify and sympathize with someone else’s sadness when you cannot empathize with it.

“The only way to keep things as much like they always have been as possible, is to make any alternative too much for your poor, tiny brain to grasp.”

Jimmy ridicules Alison’s brother Nigel, and suggests that those incapable of thought or conviction go to great lengths to ensure that they are unbale to understand a more constructive path than the one they are on, in order to protect their own comfort.

“Trouble is—Trouble is you get used to people. Even their trivialities become indispensable to you.”

Jimmy’s greatest annoyance regarding Alison is that she appeases everyone. She has no conviction, which is, he believes, almost like not being human.

“If only something—something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! … If you could have a child, and it would die.”

This horrible “what if” by Jimmy foreshadows later events, as Alison does in fact lose their child. With this loss, she comes to understand Jimmy’s worldview.

“She’ll go on sleeping and devouring until there’s nothing left of me.”

Jimmy plays the victim here and says that a soulless Alison will consume him with her thoughtlessness, like quicksand.

“It’s what he would call a question of allegiances, and he expects you to be pretty liberal about them.”

Jimmy expects loyalty, and this loyalty must extend to his beliefs, his friends, and his family. It is an all-or-nothing sort of loyalty.

“I couldn’t believe that two people, two educated people could be so savage, and so—so uncompromising.”

Alison was appalled at the lack of civility from two men who claimed to be more civilized than the middle class, thus exemplifying the irony of their beliefs.

“They both came to regard me as a sort of hostage from those sections of society they had declared war on.”

Though Alison married a working-class man, both Jimmy and Hugh regarded her as a member of the middle class and abused her as such.

“Jimmy seems to adore her principally because she’s been poor almost all her life, and she’s frankly ignorant. I’m quite aware how snobbish that sounds, but it happens to be the truth.”

Alison’s middle-class beliefs peek through as she defines Jimmy’s love for his mother-like figure based solely on her poverty.

“You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry—angry and helpless. And I can never forget it.”

Jimmy watched his father die slowly. The anger that experience created in him has defined his character, and defines his outlook on life as well.

“The England I remembered was the one I left in 1914, and I was happy to go on remembering it that way.”

Colonel Redfern admits that he would rather live in a dream than be faced with the new, modernized England. He is stuck in the past.

“You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it?”

Alison highlights the alienation and helplessness that people are feeling by showing how both her father and her husband are hurt but for different, conflicting reasons.

“That old bastard nearly ran me down in his car! Now, if he’d killed me, that really would have been ironical. And how right and fitting that my wife should have been a passenger.”

Jimmy’s irony here is in the fact that the old, Edwardian ways are dead and have given way to a new modernization, yet he was almost killed by Colonel Redfern, the embodiment of the past. As always, in his view, Alison is passive—a passenger.

"She made the great mistake of all her kind.”

Jimmy always lumps Alison in with his disgust for the middle class, despite her wanting to get away from her past and her parents. He faults her for thinking less of others based on their social status.

“It’s not awfully difficult—giving up something you were incapable of ever really wanting.”

Jimmy’s remark suggests that he never really wanted Alison to begin with. His desire for her when she returns indicates the opposite of this, however, and that it is difficult to give up what you want.

“Today’s meal is always different from yesterday’s and the last woman isn’t the same as the one before.”

Jimmy tries to tell Cliff that nothing can be the same. Though he loves Alison, she is by nature different that Helena, in character, thoughts, and beliefs.

“And all because of something I want from that girl downstairs, something I know in my heart she’s incapable of giving.”

Jimmy knows that Helena cannot truly love him or give him what his heart desires, which is love and understanding.

“But then, when people put down their weapons, it doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily stopped fighting.”

This wise assessment from Jimmy foreshadows Helena’s leaving, and suggests that just because people do not appear to be on guard, they are still thinking of ways to win whatever is at stake. In this metaphor, life itself is a war.

“Do you know—I have discovered what is wrong with Jimmy? It’s very simple really. He was born out of his time.”

Helena makes the astute assessment that Jimmy’s pains come from the fact that he cannot be the type of man he wants to be in modern England. His alienation stems from this fact, and he will most likely make nothing of himself because of this fact as well.

“I believe in good and evil, and I don’t have to apologize for that. It’s quite a modern, scientific belief now, so they tell me.”

Helena realizes she does not want to continue her affair with Jimmy, and that she still believes in the rules of her middle-class upbringing. She equates her beliefs with science, indicating that they are more than just whims or dreams.

“Oh, I know I’m throwing the book of rules at you, as you call it, but, believe me, you’re never going to be happy without it.”’

Helena tells Alison that though she might try to live a life without rules, she is governed by them and incapable of completely doing away with them, as if these rules were in her blood.

“They all want to escape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love.”

Jimmy makes the case that women want to be mindless and numb to reality, and to run from the reality of loving others.

“Was I really wrong to believe that there’s a—a kind of—burning virility of mind and spirit that looks for something as powerful as itself?”’

Jimmy’s shell is cracked, and the reader sees that he yearns for someone who sees the world as he does, who is as passionate about life as he is. He wants Alison to be that person.