Harold Pinter's Silence: The conflict vanishes

Abstract

Harold Pinter who is Nobel Laureate for Literature (2005), is well-known as one of the greatest writers in a body of literary work that consists of thirty-two plays, twenty-one film scripts, one novel, and numerous poems. Besides being a productive writer, he has been a director, an actor, and a political activist in the second half of the twentieth century. This paper handles Pinter's characterization in the first one-act play that denotes Pinter's second phase of writing, Silence (1968). The paper hypothesizes that Pinter throughout his second stage of writing has tried to give the impression that the conflict which has been appearing throughout his first stage of writing is vital to get full-life characters. And without such conflict, there will be neither protagonist nor antagonist. Character analysis will be the implement of discussion. The argument concludes that Pinter has used out of touch characters to indicate the idea that conflict is an essential part for life continuation and character's construction.