On Ideology In The Works Of Angry Young Men

This thesis is intended to underline the ideology of British writers labeled as "Angry Young Men", whose works are greatly affected by the existential attitude. A study on the two classics of "Angry Young Men" is employed as the first step. John Wain, in Hurry On Down, his first novel, attempts to revive the picaresque, a tradition appropriate for his rootless hero leaving the university to survey the contemporary world. Kingsley Amis uses a good deal of farce in his first novel, Lucky Jim, deliberately making his humor obvious and his incongruities ridiculous as a slap against a society in which humor is too delicate and genteel. Then the thesis outlines the Existentialism movement in European Continent in the 1950s. Those prominent figures are Sartre, Camus and Heidegger. The principal foundation of existentialism is the idea that existence is prior to essence. Man is free, says Sartre, and he must accept his freedom and live it out, even though his life is a "useless passion". Man's existence is "absurd", says Camus, but he must accept his situation just like Sisyphus. Man's being is radically finite and contingent, says Heidegger, but he must accept his finitude and even rejoice in it. The influence of Existentialism on those contemporary writers is examined in such aspects as education, class structure, identity and experience. Contemporary man is often involved in a search for his identity. He desires the security a specific affiliation can give him, while he finds that the complexity within both himself and his world cannot be easily expressed through any definable affiliation. In this way, heroes of the works of Wain and Amis examine the class structure of contemporary Britain, although they are usually unable and unwilling to become a part of it. In the twentieth century the class structure has become markedly more fluid and individuals have moved from one designation to another with somewhat greater ease and rapidity. The heroes of the novels are frequently young men attempting to refuse to be limited by class or background, hoping to find a world with fewer distinguishing marks. They hold the existential attitude-the insistence on the personal and the physical, the skepticism about an established truth, the belief that survival is mostly a matter of luck. By combining the works with existentialism, it is found that the existential attitude , satirizing essences or fallacious abstractions, provides freshimages for contemporary British fiction. The antiheroes, who are not heroic in the sense of being admirable and effective leaders of society of new causes, in the novels are self-centred, liberated from social responsibility. They mock and despise social conventions, class limitations and educational system which has helped to shape them, and determine not to act in the way 'they' might expect them to. Thus they can be regarded as rebels of the status quo, irreverent outsiders puncturing the existing structure of British society. In their work, the writers using a meaningful perspective with which to examine the events and attitudes of their time, demonstrate an existential attitude toward experience. It offers the possibilities of freedom and responsible choice and prevents man from regarding his truths as sacrosanct, his government as the fount of all wisdom and virtue.