The Projection Of Harold Pinter's Anxiety In A Night Out, The Dwarfs And A Slight Ache

Harold Pinter (1930- ) is one of the most famous playwrights in contemporary England, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Although a few critics have mentioned the psychological state of anxiety of Harold Pinter or that of his characters, none of them has delved into the relationship between Pinter's anxiety and the anxiety of his characters. However, after a careful study of many materials about Pinter and his three radio plays, the author discovers that Pinter has written his experiences of anxiety from childhood to marriage into his three radio plays, A Night Out, The Dwarfs and A Slight Ache, successively and thus combined the true image of himself with his fictional characters'. Therefore the thesis analyzes Harold Pinter's superb depicture of the three stages of anxiety development in his three plays by the theory of the Neo-Freud psychologist, Karen Horney. By comparing Pinter' experiences with his characters', the author reveals the development of Pinter's anxiety and his tendency to neurosis.This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the background information and the status quo of researches on Pinter's three radio plays. Through the comparative study of Pinter's experiences of anxiety from childhood to post-marriage and the corresponding experiences of his characters in the light of anxiety theories, the second chapter finds that Pinter has projected his experiences of anxiety into his above-mentioned three plays. Through a detailed analysis of the three stages of anxiety development in the three plays in the framework of Horney's theory of the structure of neuroses, the third chapter focuses on the three characters' psychological development of anxiety. The final chapter draws a conclusion that the development of Pinter's characters in the three radio plays coincides with his psychological development and thus reveals his tendency to neurosis. The contribution of the thesis is that it enlarges the scope of the research on Pinter's plays from the perspective of the development of anxiety.