ABSTRACT
Harold Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, challenged serious dramatic literature’s traditional portrayal of villain and victim with complexities that demand redefinition of those terms. The unwavering ambiguity which dramatizes the responsibility of both the dominant and the subservient characters for the disturbing events of the play disallows any simple equation of the dominant and subservient characters with villain and victim and invalidates easy application of those terms to his work generally. The dominant character, rarely wholly culpable, nor the subservient, wholly pure, embrace different values, engendering opposing resultant action. Those values and the conflicting action held up for approbation and censure define the ethic which informs the entire Pinter canon. Pinter’s antipathy for simplistic labelsreductive dualities or thinking which he believes encourage an audience to compartmentalize, distance, and dismiss rather than confront whatever disturbs-extends to his assault on the villain/ victim stereotypes. Exposing the individual responsibility of both those characters uncovers the moral responsibility of all other characters as well.
