On Pinteresqueness In The Birthday Party

Harold Pinter is considered to be the greatest British playwright after George Bernard Shaw. Together with Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, he is categorized as one of the most prominent figures of the Theatre of the Absurd. As a playwright, he has achieved great success and is awarded many important literary prizes. In 2005, his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature promotes him to be the universally acknowledged great writer, so more and more scholars turn to put highlights on the study of his plays.Harold Pinter has created twenty-nine plays, in which the most famous ones are The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter, Homecoming and The Lover. Although The Birthday Party is written in the early stage of his writing career when the innovative dramatic methods are still experimented, this play, as one of Pinter's classical works, has exhibited explicit characteristics of"Comedy of Menace".As in his other works, Harold Pinter refuses to write the bloodily violent scenes in The Birthday Party. However, the sense of menace permeates in every corner of this play. The first chapter of this paper attempts to accentuate the menacing theme by the analysis of play's content. Stanley's tragic destiny is the clue to the development of the whole story, while the sudden arrival of the two strangers initiates the sense of menace. At the beginning, Stanley's arrival leads to the implicit collision to the Boles'marriage, because of his adultery with Mrs. Boles, i.e. Meg. Later, with the appearance of the new comers, Goldberg and McCann, who threaten, torture Stanley, and have him gradually deprived of the capabilities of seeing, taking actions, thinking and speaking, the menacing aroma is extremely intensified. The association of the characters'identities with their unfortunate experience and the constant worries of menace propel the story to its climax. The sense of menace is dramatized and at the same time realistic. Pinter's witness and experiences of the cruelty of the society and the aberrant forms of life in his growth arouse his inclination of depicting the menacing scenes.The second chapter revolves around the characterization by means of comic methods. The Birthday Party differentiates from the traditional tragicomedy which is actually still a comedy or tragedy, in a way that presents tragic characters by comic methods. The comic effects are produced from two aspects: the characters'hypochondria and their multi-faces. Devoid of normal approaches of social intercourse, the characters in the play capsule their egos in their imaginative worlds so that the comic scenes come about. Meg and Stanley contract hypochondria mostly. While adapting to different situations, the characters choose to hide their real purposes in the disguise of their multi-faces. For example, Meg presumes herself to be Petey's wife, Stanley's lover and mother at the same time; Goldberg behaves as the master of McCann, the lord of the house, and Lulu's lover. By the analysis in the first two chapters, the characteristics of"Comedy of Menace"are explicitly revealed.The third chapter explores the Pinteresque characteristics in artistic forms from four aspects: paradox, collage, language and images. In The Birthday Party, paradoxes not only exist between antagonized persons and conflicts in communications, but also the understanding of the real and unreal. The dramatized scenes are not always unrealistic. The characters are mixtures of fragmented personalities by means of collage, because their language and actions are lack of coherence. Pinteresque language is a kind of weapon, which is the first choice for the characters as self-defense, when their private territories are offended. If the topic indicates a character's secret, silence is applied to be a kind of inaudible language, reflecting unwillingness, sentiments and abominations. Moreover, in Pinter's early stage of writing career, there are some typical symbolic images, such as blindness, or a sealed room.Pinter is prolific and versatile, so the study of Pinter's works can be doned from different angles. The Birthday Party generally and obviously includes the Pinteresque features of his plays. Being a play during the experimental period of his innovative methods and in the process that his dramatic ideas become mature, this play is beneficial for the study of Pinter's original writing motivations and literary materials.