Look Back in Anger

In Act III, what is the typical significance of the fantasy play pretense between Jimmy and Alison, the bear and the squirrel?

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In Act III, Alison makes Jimmy realize she has become the person he wanted her to be. In Act I, Jimmy berated Alison as something less than a human being because she had not gone through the kind of suffering that he had once gone through at the death of his father. Now, with the death of her unborn child, Alison tells him that she understands suffering. Jimmy’s ultimate reaction to this news, and to Alison herself, is left unexplored. Their immediate reaction, however, is to return to their game of bear and squirrel. They now both understand, even if not consciously, that the only way to escape the suffering of the real world is to create a fantasy world that is just as powerful and stable. This is Osborne’s ultimate statement with the play: the only way for people of modernity to truly understand and cope with the world around them is to create fiction. As a playwright, this is the course that Osborne himself has charted with Look Back in Anger. His fiction, no matter how realistic, is a diversion from the rest of the world.

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