Thematic Concerns in John Braine's Room at the Top

Abstract

The paper aims at identifying the thematic concerns in John Braine's Room at the Top. The novel which depicts the concerns of a generation of post-World War II Britain appeared in 1957 amidst the heat of the angry young decade. Room at the Top traces the fortunes of Joe Lampton, the ambitious youth, who covets the wealth, position and power that his working class origin had not bestowed upon him. The various themes in the novel bring to the fore the spirit of the age in which it was written. Room at the Top deals with the aspirations and ambitions of a protagonist with a working class background, who chooses materialism as his ultimate aim, guised under the vestiges of a hollow protest and resentment against the rich, but he selects the wrong means to achieve his ends, and stoops in order to conquer. Braine here treats Joe as a human being forced with a crucial problem, whether or not to give up his soul to gain the world. And of course, Joe elects to give up his soul.