Existential anxieties created by menace in Harold Pinter's plays: The Room, The Birthday Party and the Dumb Waiter

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is one of the most outstanding and important British dramatists. He wrote theatre plays, radio plays, screenplays for films, sketches and poems. Harold Pinter is well-known for his comedies of menace. In his works, he mainly deals with alienation, violence, distorted memory, jealousy, fear, anxiety, betrayal, hidden secrets and sexual politics. By inserting comic dialogues and scenes, Pinter blends comedy and tragedy in his works. The Jewish playwright Harold Pinter was born in 1930. That is, in his childhood he experienced war and the anti-Jewish tendencies and all the fears and terrors coming from that. It wasn't possible for Pinter to remain unaffected. Therefore, it can be clearly understood that he was influenced by the existential thoughts which were in the air at that time of history as a person who experienced anti-Semitism before the WW II and who was sent to a safer place from German bombing. People found themselves in a worse, fragmented and complex society. After the war, they were disillusioned and they lost their aims in life. After all, the only thing important for them is their own existence since the society they lived in is full of threats. As a matter of course, these menacing factors played an important role in his life and he reflected what he lived and what he was influenced in his works. Pinter's characters are kept in an absurd-existential situation and they struggle to make sense of their own being. These existential situations are actually characters' existential anxieties because the characters are threatened by the menace, and in return, react to the danger of the invasion of their lives by this threat. The seeming safety of inside is compared with the danger of the outside world where the menace is assumed to dwell. However, Pinter shocks his audience by showing that the menace dwells not necessarily in the external world but can be anywhere, including the inside of the house. This study aims at exploring existential anxieties in Harold Pinter's plays created by menace which appeared in social life after WW II. In order to do this, this study covers Harold Pinter's three plays; The Room (1957), The Birthday Party (1957) and The Dumb waiter (1957). The reason why these three plays are chosen to study is that existential anxieties and the menace creating them are so apparent in them and it plays the central theme in these works. The introduction part of the thesis gives general information about Harold Pinter's biography, his works and Comedy of Menace. The second part of the thesis covers the concept of menace in these selected plays. The third part of the thesis gives information about what sort of existential anxieties reflected because of menace. Lastly, the conclusion gives an overall evaluation about the subject of the study. Key Words: Harold Pinter, Menace, Existentialism, Existential Anxiety