Harold Pinter's Postmodernism

Postmodernism, which took shape between the two world wars at the initial stage, was a Euro-American phenomenon. But in the course of time it has become a wider term to mean everything everywhere. In today’s world the term postmodernism can be used to refer not just to art and culture but more comprehensively to aspects of modern society. It refers to general human condition or society at large as much as to art or culture. Thus becomes clear that it is impossible to confine the meaning of the term under any one particular criterion. Postmodernism proclaims the collapse of these metanarratives. The postmodern man has nothing to hold and he is living in the postmodern world in a helpless condition. The so called universal foundations such

But laments that there is no any foundation to form all these, There are no rules, morals and laws suitable for all periods and for all people. Pinter’s plays frequently contained awkward pauses, ambiguous or confusing language and circuitous or endlessly wandering plots. He used these techniques to present the unreliability of language which was a theme explored by post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists.Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prizewinning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party(1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others ' works includeThe Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant 's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others ' works. Pinter’s plays are ambivalent in their plots, presentation of characters, and endings, but they are works of undeniable power and

Harold Pinter, has contributed a lot to the clarification and revelation of the existential obsessions of modern man in his oeuvre. He has dealt with these themes through his comedy of menace and his own idiosyncratic techniques which he exercises on different parts of the play. In this paper, one of the great obsessions of man at this post modern era, the theme of identity which has been afflicted by the underlying existential conditions of postmodern era in his major play The Birthday Party . The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London".Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive supposedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn Stanley 's apparently innocuous birthday party organised by Meg into a nightmare. The Birthday Party belongs to the first stage in Pinter’s career when the playwright was interested in the state of characters who feel safe inside (a room) and are exposed to a menace that comes from inside, outside or from an unknown source. In his comedy of menace, in The Birthday Party Pinter depicts the threat that comes from outside with the unexpected visit of the newcomers, McCann, a taciturn and menacing Irishman in his thirties, and Goldberg, a