A Social Psychological Study Of Freedom Escapers In The Room And The Birthday Party

Harold Pinter (1930-2008), the winner of Nobel Price in Literature in2005, has been the most influential modern British dramatist. With an accurate and affectionate ear for the irrationality of real-life conversation, he produces plays which stand out in their own enigmatic style—puzzling, dramatic and charged with fascination.From the one-act play The Room to the full-length The Birthday Party, one single pattern predominates:Within a cocoon-like room, the ordinary people pursue their mundane life and are reluctant to go out, always talking in a way which is full of uncooperative responses, awkward silence and pauses, until one mysterious figure enters and eventually leads to the mental breakdown of the characters when their internal fear of freedom is fully projected externally.Based on the study of freedom by the American social psychologist Erich Fromm, this thesis applies social psychoanalysis to identify and understand the characters in The Room and The Birthday Party as freedom escapers. It views personal progress in the social context and aims to conduct a social psychological research on the principles, neurotic symptoms, and mechanisms of the freedom escapers.The thesis first puts forward the research questions and objectives of the thesis and introduces Harold Pinter, his reception and related criticisms on his plays; and then Chapter One discusses the social psychological principles of the freedom escapers to elucidate freedom as a social psychological problem. Chapter Two collects qualitative data from the two plays and conducts a social psychoanalysis of neurotic symptoms of the freedom escapers. Chapter Three categorizes mechanisms adopted by the freedom escapers with detailed analysis from the perspective of social psychology.Finally, the thesis concludes that it is under the social influence that the characters who are in the fear of isolation and powerlessness become freedom escapers but never find a way out. As an interdisciplinary study in nature, the task of conducting a social psychoanalytic literary research is thus completed.