Existential resistance to life and inauthentic responses in the plays of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee

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2009

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Çavuş, Aysel Merve

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This thesis carries out a comparative analysis of Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party", "The Caretaker", and "A Slight Ache" and Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" and "A Delicate Balance". It achieves this by exploring how the dramatic structure, characterization, and use of language in these plays display the playwrights' tendency to employ similar themes of existentialist philosophy; existential resistance to life and man's seld-quest in the face of existential anxiety and despair. Man shows a variety of inauthentic responses in order to escape the lack of meaning in life, freedom to choose and burden of responsibility. The aim of this study is to discuss these inauthentic responses given by the characters in the above mentioned plays. They are classified as active and passive forms and analyzed while the parallelism and differences between these two playwrights' approaches are explored.

Subject Keywords

English., English literature.

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12611282/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/19198

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

A. M. Çavuş, “Existential resistance to life and inauthentic responses in the plays of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2009.