Pinter's Plays: Power Games

Harold Pinter is widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary dramatists. He is also a scriptwriter, short story writer, poet, director and actor. His sparse style and gift for creating tension and horror through the most economic of means has won him the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature. He is an enigma to critics. He is a focus for a wide range of critical approaches. As for critics who focus on Pinter's language, they always claim that Pinter's language is doing something that is in some way new. The constant search in Pinter criticism is for a distinction or set of distinctions that will clarify the nature of the novelty in Pinter's language, which hinders the progress in this area. The recent development in pragmastylistics can avoid this recurring pitfall of Pinter criticism. Moreover, this interdisciplinary approach attaches great importance to the relation that obtains between context and discourse, which makes it possible to grasp the implied meanings, the dynamic character of drama and its creation of meaning through interactive processes. In the light of the pragmastylistic approach, this thesis attempts to prove that Pinter's plays are power games and that in Pinter's plays how language is a continuous battle-tactic: a potential weapon of domination, a defensive posture to secure one's position, a source of evasion to hide truth. For the originality of his talent is to be seen most clearly in his earlier plays, this thesis will mostly focus on his early plays, especially The Dumb Waiter and The Caretaker.The thesis is made up of five chapters:Chapter One includes a survey of Harold Pinter's life and works, a review of a wide range of critical approaches to his works and the previous pragmatic approach to drama analysis, and the structure of this paper.Chapter Two briefly introduces pragmastylistics as an interdisciplinary approach, and pragmatic theories used in this paper.Chapter Three analyzes speech acts and deictics in The Caretaker. Through the analysis, power relations between characters are marked by indications of speech acts and way of addressing and deictics.Chapter Four elucidates Pinter's idiosyncratic linguistic style on the basis of the four maxims of Grice's Cooperative Principle. The author discovers that the characters may fail to observe a maxim because they are incapable of speaking clearly and directly or because they deliberately choose for special effects. These violations show that in Pinter's plays characters prefer to struggle for power and that language is a continuous battle-tactic.In Chapter Five, the paper draws such a conclusion that Pinter's plays are power games and points out the charm of Pinter's plays.