The Theme of Isolation in Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker'

The life in post-war period has been adverse due to the catalyst World War II for the infliction of human suffering. The period in the second half of the 20th century has been an awful stage copious in predicament and misery. Harold Pinter and other absurdist playwrights have investigated the circumstances in the post-war period in which every kind of suffering haunted the humans. Existential dilemma has been the main problem that kept the human movement twisting—for they have to earn to keep their being. Breakdown of communication and identity crisis has been the issue among the people of 20th century, and is aptly reflected in the play. The attitude of hegemony found among individuals is revealed mostly through the episodes of the play.

Loneliness or seclusion is a very significant feature in Absurd plays. In this kind of theatre, characters feel alone profoundly. They are isolated from their family, friends and society. They even are strange with themselves and don't know themselves properly. Furthermore, this characteristic makes them lose their identity. All Pinter's Absurd works observe this pattern and depict human isolation. The characters usually accept this seclusion spontaneously but sometimes this isolation is forced on them. This paper aims to foreground the concept of loneliness and isolation in Pinter's The Room and The Caretaker. Pinter employs limited characters to highlight the absurdity of life. This study demonstrates how Pinter's characters are isolated not only from the real world but also of one another. They confine themselves in their chaffy microcosm and see nothing except their ideal place: one individual room. They do their best to keep their room safe from the invasion of strangers as they all assume they are secure in their room, unaware of this fact that danger hovers on the exact safe spot. The fright of losing the room lead Pinter's characters to some kind of loneliness that contributes to audience's sympathy.

Readers who approach the Theater of the Absurd face complex interpretive problems. The style of Harold Pinter, the laureate British playwright, adds an additional difficulty due to his particular use of language. His plays The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter show how speech is overshadowed by silence, which provides a more direct access to the tortured psyche of characters.

In her stylistic analysis of modern drama, Deirdre Burton (1980) argues that the linguistic frameworks used in the field of conversation analysis are suitable to be applied to dramatic texts due to the performative element that is inherent within them. Modern play texts are written in a style imitating naturally occurring speech because, whether or not the production is intended to be naturalistic, the narrative will take the form of spoken conversation in performance. However she warns against assuming that play texts operate in exactly the same way; plays are unlikely to contain the ‘hesitation-phenomena, repetitions, false starts and stammers that characterise almost any transcript of naturally occurring talk.’ (4) Despite this, the performative element allows the reader or viewer to ‘relate the language used in a text, or by an author, to the conventions of the language as a whole’ (5). Burton’s argument is sound and thereby gives the justification for the use of conversational techniques in the analysis of drama texts.

In contemporary world, we often confront the incidents when people fall sick mentally and suffer from behavioral and personality disorders. The present research paper seeks to point out the reasons behind neurotic disorder with special reference to social aspect of individuals' life, considering society and authorities as driving forces behind almost every neurosis by applying Freud's psychoanalytic theory of neurosis (but with a little deviation) upon the dramatic persona created by Pinter in The Caretaker (1960). It has been attempted to analyze and interpret the text with Freudian perspective in order to unwrap society's monstrous role in creating neurotic disorder in individuals by pressurizing them to repress themselves in certain ways.

This paper aims to emphasize Pinter’s use of the concept of ‘intrusion’ in his early plays, The Birthday Party, The Dumbwaiter, The Room, The Caretaker, The Collection and The Homecoming. As the study shows, the room in Pinter’s plays represents the microcosm; whereas the macrocosm is represented by all physical and psychological effects that come from the world outside the room. The study also focuses on Pinter’s skillful use of ‘intrusion’ as a device that destroys as well as restores human relationships. In The Room, for instance, the ‘intrusion’ of Mr. and Mrs. Sands and the Negro is used as a destructive force that brings about an end to the relationship between Rose and her husband, Bert Hudd. But the ‘intrusion’ by Davies stabilizes and perhaps develops their relationship of Mick and Aston in The Caretaker.

This paper studies the influence of Samuel Beckett on Pinter's oeuvre and analyzes their differences as well as similarities. As these two Nobel laureates are two impressive men of New Theatre, thus the meticulous survey on their works seems essential. Despite the fact that Pinter most often takes his model in writing from Beckett, one can easily diagnose the various distinctions in their plays. In spite of the same messages about human condition in the world, their techniques and their way of expression differs in some manners.

The life in post-war period has been adverse due to the sudden eruption of the World War II that inflicted human suffering. In the second half of the 20th century, human life has been awful, problematic and miserable etc. the paper is an effort to understand post-war human suffering. Harold Pinter, the absurdist playwright investigated the unfavourable circumstances in this period where every kind of predicament troubled the humans. Existential dilemma has been the foremost issue discussed in the paper; it kept post-war humans on shocking edges all the time. The other issues reflected in the paper are Identity crisis and Breakdown of communication which have been the factors for human absurdity. The issue of hegemony or domination found among individuals is revealed through the events of the play.

This article situates Harold Pinter's radio play A Slight Ache alongside the radio-playwriting protocols of its first producer, the British Broadcasting Corporation. In guidebooks for radio playwrights, the BBC's Drama Department promoted a clear and coherent on-air style. Pinter challenged this standard by building his play around a silent character and thus refusing to let his audience fall back on familiar methods of listening. Having written a radio play that gestured toward the theatre, Pinter did the opposite in A Slight Ache's stage adaptation, concealing visual elements as if glancing back at the airwaves. Both versions moved toward transcending the realism of The Birthday Party, whose blackout scene had already experimented with restricting stage drama to sound alone. The influence on Pinter's later stage style can be seen as early as Aston's monologue in The Caretaker, where complex lighting effects briefly transform a realistic setting into the "mindscape" of a radio play.