Characters

Jimmy Porter is the anti-hero: Anti-hero. A man of contradictions. His complexities, inner conflicts, violent speech have become a myth for the young generation.His protest is confused and indiscriminate. Motionless: he protests but doesn’t do anything to change the situation. Alienation and Loneliness. Anger for his life experience: he saw his father dying. At the end he understands the meaning of pity for another person, his wife: he’s tender with her: “Don’t. Please dont’… I can’t (…) you’re a very beautiful squirrel.”

Alison the anti-heroine: Upper class girl who left her privileges. Sick and tired of the situation. “I can’t think what it was to feel young, really young”. Criticized by Jimmy because she doesn’t express her feelings: “Oh, my dear wife, you’ve got so much to learn. 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 (…) she hasn’t her own kind of passion. She has the passion of a python. She just devours me whole every time”. Feels lonely. (to Helena) “I was on my own before”. Influenced by Helena: “You’ve got to fight him. Fight, or get out. Otherwise he will kill you”. “All I want is a little peace”. Anti-heroine: “I’m a conventional girl”. Finally she takes a decision by herself, she comes back and cries out her pain to her husband

Cliff: Forms a comic duo with Jimmy. Cliff is the stooge (besúgó).

Calm and apathetic: Helena “And all the time you just sit there, and do nothing!”. Cliff “ That’s right I just sit here”. At the end of the play he decides to leave and do something: have his own family.

Helena Charles: Upper class like Alison but can’t share Jimmy’s world, except for a short period. To Cliff “I don’t understand him, you or any of it. All I know is that none of you seems to know how to behave in a decent, civilised way”. Active “ I had to do something, dear” vs passive Jimmy who protests but doesn’t do anything to change things. She betrays her friend but she feels guilty: “Suddenly I see what I have really known all along. That you can’t be happy when what you’re doing is wrong or is hurting someone else. I can’t take part in… in all this suffering. I can’t!”

Colonal Redfern

Together with Jimmy he represents the contradictions of post-war England: generation gap.