To Understand "Pinteresque": On Characteristics Of Harold Pinter's Plays

In his nearly 50 years of playwriting, the 77 years old British playwright Harold Pinter has demonstrated his stature as one of the most important living dramatist of modern times. In announcing the Nobel Prize award for Literature in 2005, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter is an artist "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Pinter has written 29 plays including The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, One for the Road and so on.Pinter's highly individual style, when attempted by others, is labeled "Pinteresque". His plays are sparsely populated, and their plots slight. His characters' motives often remain obscure, their backgrounds indefinite, their fate at the end of the play indeterminate; and their language includes the repetitions and illogicalities of ordinary speech. The scripts are as carefully balanced, with pauses and silences exactly indicated, as musical scores.Pinter is an extraordinary talented and active writer. Besides plays, he also writes poetry, fiction and prose, as well as engages in acting, play and film directing, screenplay adapting, and even politics. He almost won all the British and western awards relevant to literature.The purpose of the thesis is trying to break through the limitation that most of Chinese researchers just focus on Harold Pinter's one play or on one certain phase of Pinter's plays, or analyze Pinter's plays with a particular critical method, such as feminist criticism or psychoanalytical criticism. On the contrary, this thesis chooses some most representative plays in Pinter's three creating phases as its studying objects, and emphasizes on analyzing the characteristics of Pinter's plays and interpreting "Pineresque".