MEANING IN A MEANINGLESS WORLD: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF HAROLD PINTER’S THE BIRTHDAY PARTY AND SAMUEL BECKET’S WAITING FOR GODOT

Abstract

The Theater of the Absurd came to prominence in the wake of the World Wars, showcasing the existential upheavel of modern society. This research article explicates Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party as core works of theater of the absurd. These plays challenge conventional dramatic structures, discarding commonsense plot and means of communication with dialogue that is circular, ambiguous, and replete with silence. Beckett highlights the fundamentaly futile aspect human existence through ceaseless waiting, while Pinter displays menace and unstructured identity within the everyday scenarios that characters are placed into. Extrapolating from Martin Esslin’s theory of absurdism and its close affinity with Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, the paper showcases how these works exhibit the disorientation of meaning in a disordered world. Thus, absurdist drama emerges as both a philosophical reflection and a cultural critique of human condition that emerged after the world wars.