Pinteresque Discourse

The most important contemporary British playwright and Nobel Prize laureate in literature of 2005, Harold Pinter charts his distinct topography in the theatrical landscape that is in transition from the silenced post-war society to the plural-vocal post-modern society. For his nearly half-century playwriting career, he has totally written twenty-nine plays from The Room and The Birthday Party in 1957 to Celebrations in 2000 and he announced in 2005 not to write plays any more. His twenty-nine plays fall into three phases of different thematic focuses, respectively, "comedies of menace", memory plays, and political plays. Manifest in the plays of his three phases, his idiosyncratic style is so distinctive that an adjective lexis has to be coined out of his own name to represent his original dramatic discourse, Pinteresque. This word gets listed in the Oxford Dictionary with connotations for his combined use of high-fidelity quotidian language and oblique speech of ambivalence, gestures avoiding communication and endeavors dropsical with intentions, hollow words said and meanings unsaid. Other paradoxical overtones are more significant of his drama in relation to the consternation aroused by the mystic intrusion from the outside and the violent reflexes provoked out of those inside. All this solicits the commendation from Nobel Prize Committee on Pinter's status, "Pinter has perforated conventionally realistic drama with taciturnity's mystery."Between the silence of the depleted post-war world and the multi-vocal forum of the post-modern age, Pinter sharply identifies the pathology of modern world as misgivings and insecurity developed in the absence of attestable authenticity and people's unified identity. His philosophical supposition of the ambiguous nature of modern society marks a positive progress over the fatalistic theory describing the world as absurd and presenting a bleak prospect for modern people. The preliminary contention of the dissertation initiates by rectifying a wide-spread fallacy in the common reference of Pinter as a playwright of the Absurd. To argue against the classification, the dissertation proves that the central theme of Pinter's drama is riveted on the thesis of ambiguity asserting that existential meaning is never fixed, but in the process of becoming. Pinter's characters demonstrate this point by putting out all exertions to win meanings for their own existence in quicksand-like situations of...