Projection Of Anxiety, Fear And Death In Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter

Harold Pinter, the owner of the 2005 Nobel Literature Prize, is one of the most talented and prominent playwrights in the history of postwar British and even the world drama. Harold Pinter has aroused tremendous interests from critics, reviewers, academics as well as common theatre enthusiasts with his profundity in theme presentation and distinct characteristics of play writing.Although some critics have studied the psychological state of anxiety and fear of Harold Pinter or that of his characters from the perspective of existentialism, seldom has delved into the systematical analysis of the relation between existentialism and Pinter as well as existential anxiety, fear and death that Pinter wants to indicate in his plays. Based on Heidegger's theory, the thesis attempts to trace the great playwright's exploration of human existence and enlightenment in the recurrence of conscience from the state of falling prey from three stages of human life. After a careful textual analysis of The Dumb Waiter, the thesis discovers that Pinter has demonstrated the characters'anxiety, fear and death in real life, indicating the depressive mental status of the people and degradation of morality in capitalist society after World Warâ…¡. Furthermore, the thesis singles out certain dialogues as its target of study to analyze Pinter's creative talents and Pintersque skills of play writing in stage setting, dramatic discourse and the application of pause and silence.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces Pinter's achievement and honors that gained in literature and reviews the research concerning Pinter both abroad and in China. In addition, it presents the author's innovation of study about Pinter and his plays and the theory employed in this paper. The second chapter sets out to explore Pinter's projection of existential anxiety in The Dumb Waiter. In this chapter, the author makes in-depth studies of existential anxiety from three aspects:space, relation and discourse and the patterns of manifestation respectively. The third chapter attempts to project the characters'fear both in concreteness and universality. The fourth chapter further analyzes the final state of human being's existence---death. The final chapter is the concluding part of the thesis, which is mainly to analyze the author's findings of the study and social significance of the study of existential anxiety, fear and death in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. The contribution of the thesis is that it refines the scope of the research on Pinter's plays from the perspective of existential anxiety, fear and death and more importantly, it offers a mirror for the readers to ponder deeply the true meaning of human being's existence and modern society.