Violence as a Coercive Tool to Establish State Control in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road

Abstract

After Harold Pinter became a member of PEN and Amnesty International in the early 1980s, he grew interested in global politics and started to openly speak up against human rights violations present in several countries of the world. Then, in 1984, he published One for the Road, which is considered his first overtly political play. Taking place in an unnamed country and historical period to preserve its universality, the play portrays the torture and violence practised by totalitarian regimes against political dissidents. This study examines the use of various forms of violence in the text and analyses their role as the means to establish state control over nonconforming individuals, break their will and coerce them into submission. For this purpose, a socio-political approach is used by employing the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung’s theory on violence. The detailed analysis of the play reveals that tyrannical systems dehumanise and debase noncomplying citizens using political ideology as an excuse so that imprisoning and torturing them becomes justifiable.