Jimmy Porter and T.S. Eliot, both writing in the 20th century gave the world something new, something which was not thought of before, they gave us expressions to reveal the true self, hidden under the mask of personality and for this purpose they used exact and powerful words, because words, when arranged coherently, generate meaning which has an immediate impact upon the audience/reader.
Due to the societal conditions, one is not able to go against his repressions and he pretends what he is not, this other “what one is not” is given a reflection in the two works: John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back in Anger’ and T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’.
In both the narratives, we have a strong collection of words, powerful words which have the meaning provided with sound impact. We can compare both the forms clearly as both have ‘interruptions’ which give us meaning.
T.S. Eliot, on the one hand, was influenced by Lanforge, Dante, Charles Maurris, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt; Osborne on the other side was influenced by the realist as well as absurdist dramatists.
Eliot was influenced by the symbolist movement and applied free verse/verse liber in his poems. Osborne was an exponent of realism as well as symbolism, both of them have many double meaning words in their techniques and there are many repetitions as well.
W.R. Goodman rightly said for Elliot that his poems are typically made of narration and exposition is laconic, fragmentary, dense, and oblique.
Words create territories/boundaries, i. e. they limit the perspective, so Elliot, as well as Porter in their narrations, used symbols through the use of words to expand their power of expression to give a more in-depth view.
Elliot uses the Dadaism i.e. cut and paste job of images which are actually broken and it’s the reader who has to give coherence to it by arranging the images in proper way and order.
Elliot wants us to see his poems through symbols as symbols ultimately give rise to thoughts. There are many words that can be sourced from both the narratives that are used as symbols — ironing, the church bells, the trumpet, hollow men, stuffed men, dried voices, dead land, empty men, these words generate images, they represent spiritual barrenness, lack of morality, spiritual paralysis, the futility of life, alienation/loneliness that has resulted in anger and hate in modern man.
Both works also talk about an ‘Identity Crisis’. Identity has become the problem, there is a ‘loss of identity’ due to ‘borrowed identity’ thus the false identity of the self has been critiqued.
Then there is this real vs. fake i.e. mask used as a personality vs. individuality without a mask problem. Language gives rise to ‘value’ to the self which when combined with the ‘other’ gives rise to society but here there is a lack of ‘other’, everyone is wearing a mask thus hiding their individuality without knowing the truth.
Jimmy portrays the ‘real self’ — he is just what he is, and what he should be, without any mask and this other ‘masked identity’ is being critiqued in The Hollow Men.
To sum up, I would say that both the artists are against the post-generation that resulted after World War II; the absurd social norms and laws adopted by them.
