Don't Look Back in Anger... Or Do! Wider Reading (Drama) 6: Look Back in Anger.

Look back in anger presents post-war youth as it really is. All the qualities are there - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of "official" attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour... the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned...

Though it presents the classic tale of three mismatched housemates, this play is anything but conventional. Jimmy is a restless young man, whose blistering, apparent honesty makes him more enemies than friends. Cliff is his calm, collected counterpart, and is often caught between the violent conflicts which frequently occur between Jimmy and his wife, Alison. Well-bred and downtrodden, she is hiding a secret from Jimmy and cannot find a way to tell him.

Into this eclectic mix is thrown Helena, Alison's uptight friend. These characters are wound up like clockwork, and it is impossible to see where it will end.

The struggle for identity experienced by post-war youth has never been presented as well as it has been here. Similarly to Blache DuBois, John Osborne's characters must find a place in this strange, raw new world, or be lost.

Look Back in Anger - Identity Quotations

What Are Those Blue Remembered Hills? Wider Reading (Drama) 5: Blue Remembered Hills

Dennis Potter's deceptively simple tale relates the activities of seven West-Country seven-year-olds on a summer afternoon during the Second World War.

Easy-going Willie tags along as burly Peter bullies gentle Raymond and is challenged by fair-minded John. Plain Audrey is overshadowed by pretty Angela, and wreaks her angry frustrations on the boys. All of them gang up on the terrified "Donald Duck" who, abused by his mother and ridiculed by his peers, plays his own dangerous game of pyromania which ends in tragedy.

The primary trait of this play is that, although the characters are children, they are all played by adult actors. Childhood is the very epitome of innocence, and the author contradicts this throughout the entire play, as the supposedly guileless children victimise, stereotype, fight and even kill, in their own version of the adult world.

Potter's television play terrifies the audience as they realise what effect their actions have on their young, and gives us a fascinating insight into the benign cruelty of childhood.

Blue Remembered Hills - Identity Quotations

Who Wrote Holden Caulfield? Wider Reading 4: The Catcher in the Rye

Over 250,000 copies of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye are sold each year, with total sales of more than 65 million books. The novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion. It has been translated into almost every language.

It is December, 1949. Holden Caulfield has been expelled from his school, Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania, on account of sub-standard academic performance. After an argument with his roommate he packs up and leaves, in the middle of the night, and takes a train to New York City.

The identity struggle prevalent in this novel is primarily the internal struggle present in our hero (or antihero) Holden. Being an iconic teenage rebel, Holden spends the greater part of the book being victimised or alienated by those around him. He often feels trapped on "the other side" of life and society, and feels he belongs nowhere. He frequently fantasizes about becoming a hermit and living in the woods, and seems to only be liked and accepted by his family, specifically his youger sister, Phoebe.

Loneliness and the pain of coming of age are recurring themes in this book, along with dealing with the death of a family member, which I think is what makes it so accessible for teenagers, both when it was published and even now, sixty years after its first appearance.

Catcher in the Rye - Identity Quotations

To Atone or Not to Atone? Wider Reading 3: Atonement

"On the hottest day of summer, 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge.

"By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone."

Many themes of an identity struggle can be identified here. One is that of the individual. Said crime will rob the three main characters of their identity, and for the whole book they will attempt to get them back. Another struggle is a social struggle. Robbie, being the gardener's son, was always far more likely to be blamed for the crime than its actual perpetrator; a well known chocolate magnate.

With the greater part of the story being set in wartime Britain, class struggle is also prevalent in this book and, in my opinion, the writer Ian McEwan narrates it perfectly. I enjoyed the ongoing mystery of the plot, as well as the shocking twist at the end. It's heartbreaking, and a superb achievement.

Atonement - Identity Quotations

To Kill a Stereotype? Wider Reading 2: Small Island

The racist past of Britain is well known, but I have never encountered it so well observed and honestly put as I have in Small Island.

Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican Lodgers. Her husband Bernard is in hiding, traumatised by the war. Gilbert Joseph joined the RAF, but finds himself treated very differently by the people of London. And his wife, Hortense, disappointed by her marriage of convenience, also finds London far from the city of her dreams.

The struggle for identity experienced by many coloured people living in England is personified in the characters Hortense and Gilbert. Queenie too, lonely without her husband, struggles with her neighbours complaints at her lodgers. As these two women, against all odds, become friends, they also find their lives inexplicably entangled by one man, Michael Roberts.

"Small Island Explores a point in England's past when the country began to change. It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun."

Sexism or Science Fiction? Wider Reading 1: The Handmaid's Tale

"The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one option: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs."

Set in a nightmare future world similar to that of 1984 or The Chrysalids, The Handmaid's Tale tells the story of a police state where women are bought, sold and traded like laying hens, food is scarce and bought with coupons and difference is dangerous.

Offred (Of Fred) lives with the Commander and his wife against her will, in order to give birth and help raise the sagging birth rate, the result of a collossal nuclear war. Due to the radiation stillbirths and deformities are common, and a live, healthy baby is everything. Despite her unhappiness Offred attempts to do her duty. In her attempt to find independence and identity she begins a secret affair, first with the Commander, and then with Nick, the driver.

I greatly enjoyed this book. It is in the science fiction genre, but deals with issues present in today's society, such as women's rights, police states and nuclear disarmament. The totalitarian state in which Offred lives is so chillingly described you find yourself transported to the middle of the action. The sardonic wit with which it is written made it very enjoyable to read, and the drip-feed of flashbacks narrating Offred's past made me want to read on.

The Handmaid's Tale - Identity Quotations

Up next: Small Island - To Kill a Stereotype?