Anger Issues and Power Struggles

Since anger is perhaps the most powerful human emotion besides love, and power is something I find fascinating, I set out to find each and every occurence of those two key words.  I was under the original impression that these words would occur numerous times.  Having finished the novel, I am actually sort of shocked that there is not more explicit anger issues and power struggles within the novel as a whole--I only found the words anger/angry about 12 times.   I found “power” a whopping 4 times.  So overall not what I expected.

Yet perhaps because those words didn't appear very often, when they did appear it was in moments of real anger and real inferiority, and identification and realization of those feelings.  For example, when Jules finally realizes just how much he has messed up his life and how much he missed while he was in prison, he says “ANGRILY ...I go away and the whole fucking world is upside down” (123).  Upon enlightenment, he is enraged.  Same with the general and his reactions to Kitty’s rather stupid comments on genocide, corpses, etc. Arc has to say multiple times that “The general is becoming angry” until finally “The general is angry” (160, 163).  In this case, once the general realizes the insults and truths coming his way, anger kicks in. Ted has many emotions  when leaving 6 year old Sasha at the end of that summer, but he is only angry when he realizes that he cannot rescue her—“what he longed to do...was rescue her...but he could do nothing really to protect his neice...and he set off feeling angry at her” (220).  He is angry at her when he realizes she is un-saveable.

While in A Visit From the Goon Squad anger has this role of reaction to enlightenment/truth, power plays the role of identifying inferiority within a relationship.  In the two contexts of power, yes it is talking about the power and superiority of a character, yet the person narrating is always feeling inferior in the face of this identified power.  When Scotty is meeting with Bennie, and identifies Bennie’s desk as “his seat of power” (101), this is not only setting Benny higher up, but it is also reflecting how Scotty sees himself as not having that power, as being inferior to Benny.  This underlying element of jealousy also can be seen when Dolly is watching LuLu’s elementary school interactions, and states that LuLu was “completing whatever actions were required to affirm and sustain her power” (146-7).  We know for a fact that La Doll had this power; it would make sense that she would be jealous, or at the least impressed, at LuLu’s social prowess.

So while anger helps identify reactions and enlightenment, power helps to identify feelings of self-worth and lack of self-worth.  Power and anger are not words that apply to only one person or thing—they are words that reflect connections and multi-level situations.  Anger is an effect (or perhaps a chain of effects) that needs a cause, and power, as so well said by Scotty, “Power is like that; everyone feels it at once” (103).