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A linguistic and literary analysis of silence in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957)
Date
2025-09
Abstract
Recognized as “one of the world’s leading theatre personalities and playwrights” in the British theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin 1977, p.10), Harold Pinter’s literary contribution is encapsulated in one word: Pinteresque. Pinteresque encapsulates a style or a genre that is full of oblique and repetitious language, but which also mimics everyday talk or even adds a touch of surrealism to it. Pinter’s unique style is also characterized by the use of pauses and silences, or the absence of words, that are meticulously placed and therefore foregrounded. Not only does such silence serve an aesthetic purpose, but it also interrupts the flow of turn-taking, enables speakers to shift topic, or reflects their unwillingness to communicate and therefore uses silence as “a constant stratagem to cover their nakedness” (Pinter 1962). All these theatrical elements, including incommunicability, absurdity of situations, violence, silencing and silenced characters, and the unverifiability of the stories they tell, contribute to creating the sub-genre comedy of menace that is imbued with comedic effect that soon turns into a violent encounter, which, at times, is broken with silence. This research makes use of several theories on silence to ground a stylistic analysis of Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958) from both a linguistic and literary perspective. It synthesises these literary and linguistic perspectives on silence to develop an analytical framework for interpreting the functions of silence in the play. Silence is shown to be a key component in the process of characterisation for not only The Birthday Party, but Pinter’s oeuvre more generally. Ultimately, systematic analysis of silence highlights the recurrent themes and motifs of Pinter’s style.
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Description
Publisher
University of Limerick
Citation
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Funding Information
Sustainable Development Goals
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Type
Thesis
Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/