The absurdist view of the self in Harold Pinter's plays Dumb Waiter and Moonlight

In the middle of the twentieth century, a new type of drama entered the history of theatre in order to challenge all the existing dramatic conventions of the traditional theatre and to argue about the absurdity of existence, the meaninglessness of life, and the lack of communication among individuals. This movement, called the Theatre of the Absurd, rejected the traditional forms of the theatre and developed new sets of conventions, new ways of using the stage, while exploring new concepts of ontology and serving as a vehicle for the materialization and dissemination of existentialist ideas.Entitled ?The Absurdist View of the Self in Harold Pinter?s Plays Dumb Waiter and Moonlight?, the present thesis reinterprets the critical idea that the Theatre of the Absurd expresses the purposelessness of life and that it reifies the existentialist conception by focusing on two plays by Harold Pinter, Dumb Waiter and Moonlight. With these two writings, especially, Harold Pinter achieves originality and creates his personal style as a result of the playwright?s inventiveness, yet remaining an exponent of absurdist drama.This thesis consists of two chapters, one theoretical and another representing the textual analysis of the plays. In the first part, the Theatre of the Absurd and its origins and main characteristics are stated, along with the presentation of the relationship between absurdist drama and the philosophy of Existentialism, and finally of the absurdist tradition in Pinter?s drama. The second part consists of a comparative approach to the two plays concerning the absurdist view of the self and in relation to a number of important thematic and structural perspectives common to both texts, such as setting, characters, language, stage directions, menace and violence.Key Words: The Theatre of the Absurd, pinteresque, violence, menace, silence