Harold Pinter was a British playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Two of his most famous plays were The Birthday Party and The Dumbwaiter. He frequently used pauses, ellipses, and silence in his plays to depict the unpredictability of human conversation and create tension. In The Birthday Party, Meg's repetitive questioning of Petey is interrupted by pauses that reveal her challenging tone. Later, when Goldberg and McCann take Stanley away, their response after Petey's question is met with silence, heightening the mystery and menace of the situation. Pinter believed communication was frightening and that silence could communicate psychological stress and tension between characters.

1. Pinter Pause/Silence
&
The Birthday Party
Name: Vishva Gajjar
Email: vishvagajjar27@gmail.com
Department of English (MKBU)
Paper-9
The Modernist Literature

2. Harold
Pinter:
• Born: October 10th, 1930 (London England)
• Died: December 24th, 2008
• In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• Major Works:
• The Birthday Party (1957)
• The Dumbwaiter (1957)
• The Caretaker (1959)
• The Homecoming (1964)
• Old Times (1970)

3. Pinter Pause:
• A Pinter Pause is a radical device that Pinter frequently
incorporated into his plays.
• He felt that theatre neither accurately depicted the
unpredictability of human discourse, nor the complexities
found in carefully constructing an utterance. Often when we
search for the right words, we pause.
• Sometimes, we have no comment at all, remaining completely
silent. This is exactly what Pinter pursued in his plays – a
rejection of perfection in favor of realism.

4. Types of
Silence:
ELLIPSIS:
• Denoted by three dotes (…).
• Indicates slight hesitation.
PAUSE:
• Character in middle of deep
thought process.
• Create tension and unsettling
atmosphere.
SILENCE:
• Dead stop
• Character has encountered a conflict so
absurd that they have nothing to say.

5. Examples from The
Birthday Party:
MEG. Is that you, Petey?
Pause
Petey, is that you?
Pause
Petey?
PETEY. What?
MEG. Is that you?
PETEY. Yes, it’s me
(Page-3)
• Pinter is not merely withholding, for the
repetition of words has been carefully judged.
• Meg’s first three questions seems at first to
repeat the same inquiry, but the slight changes
in the uses of words reveal progressively that the
questions she asks are not truly questions at all,
but a challenge.
• ‘Petey’ is first placed at the end of the sentence,
then more commandingly at the beginning and
then becomes the single questioning word.
• Her questions, statements and action all
establish that she wishes to make him
acknowledge her presence and his dependence.

6. Continue…
GOLDBERG. Still the same old Stan. Come with us.
Come on boy
PETEY. Where are you taking him?
They turn. Silence.
GOLDBERG. We’re taking him to Monty.
PETEY. He can stay here.
GOLDBERG. Don’t be silly.
PETEY. We can look after him here.
GOLDBERG. Why do you want to look after him?
PETEY. He’s my guest.
GOLDBERG. He needs special treatment.
PETEY. We’ll find someone.
GOLDBERG. No, Monty’s the best there is. Bring
him McCann.
(Page-79)
• The silence in itself is highly meaningful. The
response that comes after the prevailing silence is
equally mysterious.
• Both ‘Monty’ and ‘special treatment’ create a
menace of their own, meaningful only to the
careful audience.
• As soon as Petey intervenes in the smooth
operation of Goldberg and McCann, the situation
becomes grim with serious implications.
• It is the play’s final moment of recognition. The
clean-shaven, well-dressed Stanley is being
forcibly taken to unknown destination.
• The henchmen encounters the very first
resistance ever, from Petey ‘where are you taking
him’, from the time they have came to the lodge.
• The stunning silence helps the audience to have a
feel of the crucial moment-the moment of
recognition before the end.

7. The Why
Question:
• The use of Pinter Pauses is often likened to the original Surrealist movement.
• Where Surrealism sought to tap the subconscious and illustrate the randomness
of our dreams through means of automatism, Pinter sought to tap the
randomness of ‘the conversation‘ in order to paint, in an often exaggerated
manner, the irrationality of human speech and its nuances.
• In doing so, he created a wealth of psychological drama filled with suspense,
pathos, anxiety and tension that distanced him from other playwrights of his
time.
• Through three dots, pauses and silence Pinter transports the audience to the
world of horror by making them share the psychological stress and tension of his
characters.

8. Conclusio
n:
• Pinter summed up his concept of silence in this quote of his, which can be
considered his Pinter Pause manifesto:
‘I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is
unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate
rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is
too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To
disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.‘
-Harold Pinter

9. Works Cited
• Bradford, Wade. The Best of Harold Pinter's Plays. 28 March 2019. web. 29 September
2019. <https://www.thoughtco.com/best-harold-pinter-plays-2713618>.
• Daniels, Nicholas Ephram Ryan. What are Pinter Pauses? And other Pinteresque Devices.
14 May 2018. web. 29 September 2019.
<https://www.londontheatredirect.com/news/what-are-pinter-pauses-and-other-
pinteresque-devices>.
• George, Dr. Mercy. "Language of Silence in the plays of Harold Pinter." International
Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities 2.6 (2014): 9. web. 29
September 2019. <http://ijellh.com/papers/2014/October/09-79-87-october-2014.pdf>.

10. THANK YOU