Pinter’s Language in ‘The Birthday Party’

Abstract

Harold Pinter is the leading playwright of the post-modern era in English literature. He was awarded the Noble Prize for literature in 2005. The Birthday party is his first full length play. It is very difficult to put this play in any one of the three well known categories, i.e. comedy, tragedy or tragic-comedy. It has been called an absurd play. The phase ‘absurd drama’ becomes popular as result of Martin Esslin’s book- ‘The theater of the Absurd’. This termed is applied to a group of dramatist in the 1950’s. These dramatists shared certain attitude towards the predicament of man in this universe. The literal meaning of absurd is out of the harmony with its surrounding. The language becomes subterfuge implies more or less an artifice used to avoid something unplesent embarrassing and disgusting. The play is complex and confusing. It makes no apparent sense as the language used by Pinter only puzzles the reader. The events take place in bizarre manner and the characters act in an in comprehensibly baffling way sharing a completely off-beat dialogue among them. The language in his plays become a pretence, a means of evasion or a disgusted weapon to illustrate his own philosophy about language Pinter demonstrates the use of language as a pretext, as a more veil where true emotions are kept behind the doors and words are allowed only after having crossed numerous check posts like hurdles from head to lips. Pinter takes cudgels and present dialogue in his play in such vein that the audience is made to feel the hollowness of the language. Thus language is used as a subterfuge in his play.