The Interrogation Scene in Harold Pinter's 'The Birthday Party': A Multi-Faceted Analysis of Pinteresque Dialogue Nashwa Abdelkader Elyamany

Abstract

The emergence of the Theatre of the Absurd is one of the prominent movements that blossomed in the literary world. The play texts of Harold Pinter (1930- 2008), who has gained visibility and successive popularity in such a new era of the dramatic world, unravel a new dimension in this European theatre genre. Pinter's outstanding endeavors and contributions to modern theatre afford a new layer of dramatic discourse, characteristically coined as Pinteresque discourse, in which power games evolve. In the interrogation scene of his first full-length three-act play, The Birthday Party, all the characters are portrayed in constant verbal struggle for survival and domination. In this paper, the researcher reports on a multi-faceted analysis of three randomly selected excerpts of the scene. The proposed framework for the study, which focuses attention on language in use, is drawn from conversation analysis and a two-fold pragmatic analysis. The conversation analysis, in terms of the dominant systematics of turn-taking prevalent in the scene, yields significant findings in regards to the characterization and the themes continually perpetuated by the play text. The pragmatic analysis sheds light on how flouting the Gricean maxims (Grice 1968; 1975) and manipulating different impoliteness super-strategies (Culpeper 1996; 2002; 2005; 2010) on the part of the characters encompass non-symmetrical relational power amongst them. This, in turn, gives rise to an "identity loss" of those stripped of power, by virtue of unwarranted and excessive verbal assault on their face. The study calls for a multi-faceted analysis of dramatic discourse to account for a full understanding of the wide array of dialogic and stylistic features and dynamics prevalent in dramatic texts..