The Angry Young Man in English lit

Arthur's journey as a lovable rogue (for the most part) continues through the "Saturday Night" portion of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - and I keep wondering if the Sunday Morning (a much shorter segment) will provide some form of redemption. It's odd - you can't help but like Arthur and pity him to a degree; we see that, despite some postwar prosperity in the English Midlands, he and all his "mates" are consigned to a very narrow scope of life, a sense, or sentence, made all the more embittering by the glimpse they had of a wider world during their service in WWII. The novel has some very beautiful passages describing both the desolation of the factory towns - Nottingham, apparently - and some scenes of pastoral beauty: One of Arthur's endearing qualities is his penchant for fishing, and he occasionally takes a Hemingway-esque journey up one of the rives to a remote fishing spot where he finds some serenity. But then there's the other side to Arthur, not only brutish even thuggish (overturning the car of a man who insulted him; a youthful episode in which he stole gathered blackberries from some little kids - a bully no less), but he's a complete bastard to his friends: carrying on affairs with not 1 but 2 married women (sisters), one of whom is married to one of his so-called mates. Late in this section Arthur meets Doreen, who seems like a really nice young woman and someone he ought to stand by - but he seems on the verge of tossing her over, just so he can retain the freedom to carry on with the married women. He's not only destructive, but self-destructive - and all the sympathy he (and Sillitoe) build for Arthur, particularly as representative of an entire social class and moment in history (he's the near-prototypical Angry Young Man of British lit circa 1960), gets undermined by Arthur's unsavory behavior - which clearly is Sillitoe's intention; one of the strengths of the novel, and of his writing in general, is the refusal to argue and to judge.