Traumatic Memories&Humanism Sentiments

Britain is the home of theater which has a long theatrical tradition, it was bornmany famous playwrights,such as Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw,Osborne, etc.Undoubtedly, Harold Pinter plays an important role in the post-war British or theworld theater scene,which cannot be ignored and insurmountable. Pinter’s theatricalcareer began in1957----the one-play room, during the past lifetime he created29plays and24screenplays. Unique charm of Pinter’s plays lies in the ambiguous“Pintersque” which is difficult to define, and the stage effect which combine realitywith fantasy. Pinter’s plays are full of ubiquitous threat, never avoided violence andreal individual or collective trauma. From the perspective of the theory of trauma, thisarticle focus on not only the external research which Pinter’s traumatic experience butalso the internal research which the text present the collective trauma, it want to findPinter, as a trauma patients, how to recovery from the trauma. The most important, itdig out the profound humanitarian sentiments which behind the works.Except the introduction and conclusion, this paper includes three parts altogether.The first chapter mainly introduces the formation and development of trauma theory:the development of modern civilization makes traumatic transition from a simplemeaning to the concept of medical psychology direction. Freud’s studies on humanHysteria laid the foundation for the trauma theory, then Cathy Caruth, Judith Hermanet al. further deepen and expand the trauma theory from the perspectives such asdefinition of trauma, relationship between trauma and historical, literature and otherdisciplines, trauma recovery et al. Then sociologists represented Jeffery Alexanderproposed cultural trauma, collective identity concepts, they tried to reflect oncatastrophic injury in the history of the event and look for the construction ofcollective identity. Then start from the external research, the traumatic experience ofPinter including war and race double trauma in childhood, family trauma caused bymidlife crisis, war-prone wounds of war in the old. At the moment, supplemented by staging a brief correspondence works.The second chapter mainly from the internal research to focus the text analysis,such as Race, Family and War collective trauma. Race trauma through The DumbWaiter,Birthday metaphor lays out the Jews to survive the hellish reality of WorldWar II in concentration camp and escaped after the tragic fate of the Gestapo againrecovered. Family trauma through the Homecoming,Betrayal depicts the relationshipbetween family members deformity and mutual betrayal of marital states. War traumathrough the Ash to Ash, Mountain Language reproduced the World War II survivor’straumatic memory, and created a positive image of women with a unique sense ofrevolt in Pinter’s plays.The third chapter to summarize the unique value of Pinter trauma writing. Firstly,Pinter’s plays with obvious traumatic discourse, such as avoidance, repetition, silence,pause and other linguistic phenomena. There, traumatic forms of discourse is indeed atheatrical theme of trauma case. The theme of the connotation of mining trauma isshowed. It is not only a true reflection of the state of human existence but Pinter as atrauma patient is trying to build traumatic memories, looking for some kind ofcollective identity literary attempt.