In Harold Pinter's only novel, Dwarfs (written between 1952 and 1956, shortened and adapted as an one-act play in 1960, but not published as a novel 1990), Len poses to friend Mark existential question that we find at center of so much of Pinter's work, The point is, you? Not or how, not even (151), a query all more urgent because only by determining nature of other we (perhaps) arrive at self-knowledge: until know how | ever know am? (152). Throughout novel, Len remains tormented by he calls question of the (130), which not only raises issue of self-definition, but also confronts us with epistemological and linguistic challenges. we assume possibility of an answer to Len's question then we must assume possibility that the be made available as an object of knowledge; as an entity about which truth claims be made; as a kind of substance rendered transparent to language theorized as a re-presentational system that forecloses any potential gap between world (whether external or internal) and word. It precisely such assumptions, however, that Pinter interrogates throughout career. Len exhibits here a specific that Pinter identifies in speech Writing for Theatre: the desire for on part of all of us, with regard to our own experience and experience of others, a that, Pinter hastens to add, is understandable but cannot always be satisfied (11). Perhaps we could achieve such verification if we ask Len's question not in strong terms of you but in weaker terms of why or how ... [or] what. Len himself admits, I see [you are], clearly enough. see something of are (151, emphasis added). Even here, assertion of fulfilled epistemological desire finds itself undone by repetition of perhaps, which seems to place meaning of being beyond capacity of language to define, a point echoed by Len's other friend, Pete, confesses, If we going to define we are, and our limitations, then I'm afraid can't honestly do it for myself (178). reader must determine whether failure here belongs to Pete or whether we must locate it elsewhere, specifically in rules governing epistemological language games providing frame of intelligibility for our assertions of knowledge and truth--the games that posit language's ability to define nature of an external object, like a room, or of our interiority, our who ness. While neither who? nor what? seem to admit possibility of ultimate answers--the elusive last word (135) Len seeks, laying all ontological questions to rest--we should not, Hannah Arendt observes, view two questions as interchangeable, as Pete apparently does. (Note that, unlike Len, Pete does not distinguish between who and what but employs what to demarcate territorial limitations--the who--of our existential being.) Arendt seems to Len's frustration with question of the which, in turn, manifests itself as frustration with a language revealing its own territorial limitations. Arendt writes, The moment we want to say somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying he ... all definitions being determinations or interpretations of man is, of qualities, therefore, which he could possibly share (181). Therefore, his specific uniqueness'--the Len urgently needs to isolate--cannot be included among those things whose nature at our disposal because we name them (181-82). When dealing with who, Arendt exhibits a skepticism about language's ability to yield object in its irreducible essence shared by Len and voiced by Pete when he asks question, can put a name to it? (174). What find most noteworthy about Arendt's comments that they posit a breach between language and being, her own version of Lacanian distinction between symbolic and real. …