The Anxieties Of Identity In Pinter’s Plays

British playwright Harold Pinter’s works are well known for their lack of logic and reasons. In his plays, the characters usually find themselves caught in a context where there is no way to effectively interact with others, even with themselves, thus resulting in all sorts of anxieties of identity. As for the performance, characters’ dialogues and behaviors naturally become absurd and unexpected. Focusing on the above-mentioned phenomenon, this article commences with Pinter’s former experiences by way of author study to seek the backgrounds and reasons for the playwright’s unique sense of identity, based on which and quoting his own explanation on his works, inducing the playwright’s sense of identity, namely, there is no way to identify. From Pinter’s perspective, nowadays people’s daily life has already been totally different from the traditional one in which people usually encounters numerous examples where they can’t fully obtain information about others’identity; therefore people find it difficult to establish a stable and lasting interactive relationship. As a result, his works are devoted to expressing this truth in people’s daily life.Meanwhile, this article introduces a perspective of symbolic interactionism to restudy the intricate relationship between characters in Pinter’s works, selecting eight plays out of Pinter’s whole works from his four stages of writing, striving to fully discussing all sorts of phenomena of anxiety of identity in his works and the reasons behind them. The phenomena include characters’disability to identify with others, even with themselves. Specifically, the anxieties refer to context, identity, memory and politics, etc. Never had the playwright offered any necessary information, it is unlikely to realize an effective interaction based on identification, thus breaking the audiences’expectations formed from the traditional plays. Quoting Pinter’s opinion that a modern play should truly express the essence of the real life, rather offer a false fantasy, this article sums up that the meaning of his plays with unique dramatist style lies in the playwright’s concentration and magnification of the absurdity of daily lives before his audiences. Finally, through a review of the history of absurd dramas, this article concludes that Pinter’s writing style both traces back to an early origin and develops its own school, deeply influencing numerous latter dramatists.