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Struggle and Protest in John Braine's Novel Room at The JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 STRUGGLE AND PROTEST IN JOHN BRAINE’S NOVEL ROOM AT THE TOP Dr. (Ms) Ramandeep Mahal1, Ms. Tanu Bura2 1Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University) Mullana (Ambala) 2Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Maharishi Markandeshwar (Deemed to be University), Mullana (Ambala) Email: [email protected], [email protected] Received: 14 April 2020 Revised and Accepted: 8 August 2020 ABSTRACT: The present paper focuses on the novel „Room At the Top‟ written by John Braine and analyzes the different concepts used in the novel. This novel published in 1957 is a story of an unethical social climber and class mobility. It is also focuses on the images of two towns, Warley and Dufton and may sometimes relate to the life and death antithesis. It brings up the problems of post war England and the subsequent blurring of class distinction prevalent in those times. Joe Lampton the protagonist of the novel has a working class origin and his struggle and manipulations to come up in society is the basis of this work. During the Second World War Joe lost his parents in a air raid and was living with his aunt in Dufton, a small town where he was unhappy with his surroundings and social environment. He was a war veteran and had been a pilot in the British Armed Forces.Gifted with good looks ,enthusiastic and ambitious he was dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities in Dufton. He ends up with a job in the town council of Warley which he is again extremely dissatisfied and unhappy with as it does not measure up to his expectations . His frustration with his existing situation had transformed him into an angry young man. This basic work is based upon Joe‟s projection as an ambitious Angry Young Man of post war England, his impatience with his status in life and his struggles to move to the upper echelons of society. This story is layered with his philandering with two women wherein he deserts Alice, one of them and choosing to marry Susan (who is better financially placed) for bettering his prospects in life. The naked desire to gain wealth, power and prestige finally guided the ruthless manipulations and resulting actions of this highly ambitious individual. Room at the Top is projected as a work of social realism, a literary style in vogue in Britain in the 1950s. KEYWORDS: wealth, story, social, society, upper I. INTRODUCTION Room at the Top is a story of the period following the World War when class boundaries were rigid and defined and social mobility was not easily possible. The after effects of the War was visible, and the material luxuries afforded by the affluent were coveted by the the Working Class. This produced the term „Angry Young Men‟ for individuals who were from the working class educated and resented the inequalities. For the protagonist Joe Lampton, this inequality makes him an ambitious socially upward bound person . Joe is acutely aware and obsessed with every income distinction . His study of the houses in the town and their style and size leads him to choose the room at the Thompsons because of it being in the more affluent part of the town. Therein the choice of the title „Room at the Top.‟ It signifies also Joe‟s ambition to catapult himself to the top of the social order. The narrator of the story is the protagonist himself namely Joe Lampton. Joe comes from a working class family and wants to rise above this below average routine life. He yearns to be upwardly mobile and achieve wealth and status. The pace was set in that period in theatre by John Osborne‟s work „Look Back in Anger‟ and in fiction by John Braine‟s novel „Room At the Top‟. The character Joe Lampton was with passage of time projected nationally and internationally by the filming of Braine;s novel. Joe Lampton became the epitome of the restless young Englishmen fed up with the social traditions and class barriers . Against a background of post-war Britain, a period of deprivation and desperation where the future was in flux and doubt, a reshuffling of social values was just around the corner. Joe Lampton was born in January 1921 and, aspired to socially and economically improve his lot. He was competent and employed as a local government official in a small time northern English town His leisure activities included amateur dramatics, smoking cigarettes and beer. He rated his own prospects of success as extremely poor. This whole decade (1950‟s) was of despair and frustration and was termed as “The Angry Decade” by Kenneth Allsop in his book. The “Angry Young Man” group includes writers like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, William Cooper, John Waine, Peter Towry, John Osborne and others with similar works. These writers dealt mostly with the working class protagonists and their frustration with their status in society. Fredrick Karl aptly puts it across in the following words : 6205 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 “They are however, disgruntled – with themselves, with their social status, with their work, with their colleagues, with the shabbiness of daily life, with their frustrated aspirations for self fulfilment, with the competitive spirit, with the inaccessibility of women and drink, with all the small activities whose pursuit takes up their depleted spirit”. These are called protest novels because of their depiction of the imbalance in society. These protagonists are generally thought of in need of comfort with power that‟s why their rebellion is result of their egoism or the feeling of being placed below their deserved status. There is also a feeling by other writers that their protest lacks moral substance. Kenneth Allsop remarks: “They do not rebel for the sake of society. They are in fact nauseated by the moral demands that society makes upon them”(52). Aspiring to reach the upper crust of society, the protagonist is ready to give up his moral values and personal beliefs. The major obstacle in Joe‟s path is the town where he is born and brought up in i.e. Dufton which he deserts for greener pastures offered by a more on the move town namely Warley. He comes before us in the novel as “a natural hero-un-hero, tongue-tied in all beyond materialistic values” (Tibble 211). As Braine‟s brain-child, “he seems to announce most clearly the philosophy of the times” (Albert 574). In this novel the hero‟s protest is against society at large in which he hates the fact that the rich becomes richer and the poor becomes poorer and continue to suffer. In his case it is a hollow protest against these social norms of the society because after deriding and despising the affluent he himself is trying to achieve the same things he is biased against that is the symbols of affluence.. As Joe belongs to lower middle class he pretends to hate the upper class society. In reference to these points Kenneth Allsop states: “An angry man, if his protest is to have significance, must reach in terms beyond his own wants and dislikes. When he is angry or when he rebels – he must stand for something significant. (75) In the beginning Joe and friend Charles expose the hypocrisy of Dufton‟s so called upper class society and also label them as the “Zombies in the society” . He categorizes them according to their financial position and status. That‟s is the prime reason that Joe leaves Dufton the city of Zombies because he does not want to become a Zombie himself . In fact the novel opens with Joe saying, “No more Zombies, Joe, no more Zombies”. When he reaches Warley, the voice of social protest eventually turns into the voice of his personal selfish ends. In the beginning of the novel he who hates the upper class becomes the most “successful Zombie” towards its end. It is indicative that Joe‟s protest is just a pretension. His hatred of the upper class and empathy towards the working class, disappears during his change of his environment in Warley, Dufton his native town becomes “Dead Dufton, Dirty Dufton, Dreary Dufton, Despicable Dufton”. In Warley, he runs down his existence in Dufton. and says: “It was as if all my life I‟d been eating saw dust and thinking it was bread”. He hates everything and everyone connected to his own town and was even derogatory in a comment pertaining to his old uncle and aunt whose hospitality he took advantages of after the death of his parents. Joe actually asserts: “I was too much at Top now, and half – hating myself for it, I found myself seeing them as foreigners. They were kind and good and generous; but they were not my sort of people any longer”. In the dislike for the higher echelons of Society Joe is not part of a social movement of that period rather he has this dislike of the affluent based on his dislike of his own lowly position and his bias against the socially better offs. The focus of novel is on the consciousness of a group or a mass movement but through an individual‟s consciousness based upon is being aggrieved by where he is socially placed. Though Joe describes the agony and obstacles of slow rise to the top for whoever wants to succeed in his life, but reality is that his desires and resulting ambitions are wholly self centred and conceited.
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