: 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,"

@Phylliss352

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Just to add a point related to @Galastel 's answer, you can show the character is being irrational by having them defend themselves (in the narrative, dialogue or both) in a way that is, on your part as the author (but not the character's), deliberately bad. Bad how? Here are some options:

Their reasons for their feelings are all over the place. This works especially well if they're not given together (provided the anger lasts long enough), since then it seems more like they can't keep their story straight, rather than their having several justifications that support each other. They may even make inconsistent claims about the consequences for the world of whatever they're angry about. Is their issue with its effects on them, someone they care about, or someone they frankly don't care about?
It seems like they don't know what they're really angry about, even if they think they do. People often express anger to try to solve a problem, but do they have the wrong problem?
Someone in-universe is liable to disagree with their I'm-in-the-right-about-this attitude, in which case there may be an argument about that. Of course, that can also happen when the anger's rational, so how do you show the difference? Have the other person make better arguments. Just switch to temporarily writing them as more sympathetic. How you do this is down to you. You might find it helps to write it in third person, then redraft to reinstate the usual narrator, but with as little of their internal monologue as possible. (Or, if it must come back, compose it of snippets that could have been dialogue, preferably the petulant kind.)
Related to that last point, sometimes you have two characters up against each other who are both angry, but they want different things to come from their anger. It might take the reader a while to work out who you intended as "right", or it might not. Any argument Mainwaring has with Hodges in Dad's Army is an excellent example of this. Often they're as bad as each other, but often they're decidedly not. Have a look at some clips to get a feel for how you make one angry person look like they're coming from a position more grounded in the facts than the other does. (With that pair of characters, it could be either one who's more "grounded" in that sense, depending on the episode. It was a great dynamic.)

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