: Re: How do I portray irrational anger in first person? Characters (and people) get angry at all sorts of things that might not make sense to the outside observer: Marty McFly and the word "chicken,"

@Rivera824

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On illustrating the anger via the character's internal monologue:

There are many good suggestions here already! I particularly like @Rand 'alThor's point about the tunnel vision one might experience during extreme anger-- your character will react to the trigger out of proportion to normal considerations for the situation, the consequences, the bystanders, etc. Here are some others I think are key:

Help us feel the rage. The character's physiological responses can be felt; try to phrase it as a visceral, specific experience rather than a more generic description of the symptoms. ("I could feel my face heating up so much my cheeks began to tingle, and acrid saliva pooled beneath my tongue." vs. "I was getting so angry my face turned red and I was spitting mad.") Look for descriptions of the sensations one might experience with a "fight" response (as opposed to "flight").
Establish a feedback loop. If the anger is irrational, something about it must be out of proportion to the problem. Why does this happen to your character? A logical, removed view on the situation won't work, so allow the logic to be lost in favor of swirling emotion. Let your narrator's mind loop back to the same outrage over and over, feeding the anger as though a new insult had actually been delivered each time. Or have the latest trivial problem trigger feelings of anger and frustration about prior or ongoing problems, and conflate them in the character's mind.
Feelings of frustration are often important to an uncontrolled angry response, though I think there is some rationality to them. If your character can't fix the problem or vent, the problems will fester as frustration with the situation. You can indicate this in passing with some brief introspective searching for an answer, or rhetorical but unconstructive questions like "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?" But this is only a stepping stone to the angry outburst.
Move to action. As the pressure valve hits critical, the self-analysis needs to drop away. (Hulk smash!) If your character lashes out physically, they aren't processing anymore-- give us the action in short, violent bursts of declarative statements. Use the rhythm and texture of your words to evoke the events. Percussive consonants can be aggressive, particularly on stressed syllables. (Think about all the best swear words.) If your character makes repeated gestures like punching or bashing their head into the wall, echo it with the meter of your words: ("I slammed my bedroom door to get away from that two-timing, smarmy asshole, but there the bastard was again, now smirking at me from his glossy movie poster! Argh, I could not get away from him!" [build up to it, and then...] "I punched his stupid lying face, hard, harder, until the veneer of the cheap door splintered and my knuckles were scraped bloody.") Note that this is a way to interweave narration and the internal monologue-- you learn the actions that have been taken, but they're punctuated by the character's thoughts (in my example, "stupid lying face" is the monologue happening simultaneously with "punching," hard and harder). This is a way of handling "close" narration, when you are very much in the character's head-- which is what first-person narration tries to maintain throughout.

On manipulating the reader's emotions:

I don't think you need to make the reader experience the anger the same way the character does. Most readers are unlikely to get very angry unless the injury to the character is a triggering topic for a given reader. But you can get them invested in the outcome of the anger and thereby build tension. Give the scene and the players in it stakes that the reader will care about. Does the irrational outburst damage a key relationship? Does it close a possible opportunity or plot pathway for the story? Use dramatic irony to your advantage by making the reader dread the escalation and its consequences even as it's happening.

Here's another aspect of irrational anger to consider:

When you are dealing with a first-person narration and the POV character is being irrational, you have an unreliable narrator, i.e., a character whose point of view proves to the reader to be untrustworthy.

Even if your character usually provides a reliable perspective on their story, they might have moments where they slip into a less balanced viewpoint; a bout of irrational anger would be the perfect place to nudge the reader away from implicitly believing your character's narration and instead guide them toward a realization or a reminder that the reader is only getting one side of the story. If you want to avoid that you'll have to provide at least a significant trigger for the anger, even if it doesn't really justify all of that rage.

This article has a lot of useful information on writing and capitalizing on an unreliable narrator: What is an unreliable narrator?

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