Analysis Of Harold Pinter's Ashes To Ashes

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Harold Pinter has been termed as an artist of mannerism by various critics. He was an author who never stopped experimenting with technique and stagecraft ; one who was simultaneously deconstructing and reinventing himself within his oeuvre. In Ashes to Ashes the artist’s virtuosity of his innovative dramaturgy lies in the execution of a simultaneous movement of two conflicting modes of dialogue (named by Yael Zarhy-Levo) : the ‘private- personal’ and the ‘public- political’. ( 222) A confused patterning or mapping evolves by Pinter’s juxtaposing of the dialogue between the two characters of the play: the indirectly imaginative, ambiguous, unverifiable lines of Rebecca who seems to live in the past, with the directly explicit, aware and down to earth lines of Devlin who exists in the present. This defies an effective understanding on the part of audience/ reader. Therefore, such an elliptical patterning and cryptic structuring calls for an active engagement on the part of the audience/reader, along with other critical discourse and intertexual references, to be able to affect an underlying reasoning. Some logic is thus revealed after scrutinizing several layers of meanings of the play. As Austin Quigley has pointed out: Pinter’s use of multi linear plots provide a structural basis for his depiction of irreducibly different characters with competing goals, needs, wishes, aspirations and expectations ... Pinter’s interwoven narrative are consequently able to offer