AO3

Question 1

Oliver - Goldberg and McCann

Answer 1

“avuncular Goldberg and unfrocked priest McCann”

Question 2

Oliver - Stanley’s attempted rape & the blackout

Answer 2

“Whilst he may begin the game a pathetic figure of fun, the sudden plunge into darkness robs everyone of sight, affording Stanley a fleeting chance to become the aggressor.”

Question 3

Oliver - breaking of Stanley’s glasses and puncturing of the drum

Answer 3

“Meg’s blindfolding of Stanley, the breaking of his glasses and puncturing of the drum can all be read as attempts to emasculate or even symbolically castrate him.”

Question 4

Oliver - Stanley’s deterioration

Answer 4

“his defiant spirit seems to have been crushed by the forces of social conformity.”

Question 5

Esslin - context of absurdism

Answer 5

“Unshakable basic assumptions of the former ages have been swept away … they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions.”

Question 6

Ioneso on absurdism

Answer 6

“Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose … Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless”

Question 7

Esslin - the purpose of the Theatre of the Absurd

Answer 7

“T.O.A seeks to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach”

Question 8

Cohn - Act III

Answer 8

“Act III is a virtual post mortem”

Question 9

Cohn - symbol of the van

Answer 9

“Act III is a virtual post mortem”

Question 10

Cohn - the seaside boarding house

Answer 10

“they provide a temporary if tawdry refuge for Stanley”

Question 11

Cohn - Meg

Answer 11

“Meg mother mistress”

Question 12

Brown - Pinter’s ambiguity

Answer 12

“Pinter seems to play a game with his audience … Like his characters, he seems to evade, to obscure intentionally, to blaze false trails”

Question 13

Brown - Pinter frustrating the audience

Answer 13

“Pinter’s two-pronged tactic of awakening the audience’s desire for verification and repeatedly disappointing this desire.”

Question 14

Brown - tradition

Answer 14

“dead weight of custom and lethargy”

Question 15

Alexander - Meg’s relationship with Stanley

Answer 15

“maternal sexuality in which her frustrations find expression is clearly dangerously unstable”

Question 16

Alexander - Goldberg and McCann

Answer 16

“sentimental seduction and mindless violence, are the source of their power”

Question 17

Alexander - Petey

Answer 17

“Petey, the only character without fantasies of the past or future”

Question 18

Kennedy - circular structure

Answer 18

“‘ordinary’ conversational opening and ending are a frame for, a connivance at the ‘extraordinary’ events in the house.”

Question 19

Kennedy - realism eases into the growing absurdism

Answer 19

“the gradual stylization prepares the way for the fully stylized ritual inquisition later in the play”

Question 20

Kennedy - Goldberg’s speeches

Answer 20

“cumulative effect of Goldberg’s speeches is to parody a type of culture-patter;”

Question 21

Kennedy - Goldberg’s nostalgia

Answer 21

“The farcical paean about the joys of boyhood”

Question 22

Kennedy - Pinter and ritual

Answer 22

“Pinter’s attraction to the patterns and rhythms of ritual”

Question 23

Kennedy - interrogation

Answer 23

“The pressure is induced through rhythmic intensification, through the paralyzing spell of a disconnected language”

Question 24

Dukore - Goldberg’s speeches

Answer 24

“His speeches … overflow with the cliches of middleclass conformity”

Question 25

Dukore - interrogation

Answer 25

“Here language is used theatrically, not referentially”

Question 26

Wardle - McCann tearing the paper

Answer 26

“playwright’s habit of introducing an intrinsically theatrical idea and letting it find its own road back to common sense”

Question 27

Wardle - Goldberg and McCann

Answer 27

“they seem as much furies emerging from Stanley’s night thoughts as physical thoughts”

Question 28

Carpenter - Meg on Stanley

Answer 28

“Meg asks for nothing more than an unsevered foetus … who ventures away only as far as his prenatal leash permits”

Question 29

Carpenter - the main conflict of the play

Answer 29

“The action of the play hinges on the conflict between these highly particularised mother and father figures. The two engage in a tug of war, with Stanley’s umbilical cord as the rope”

Question 30

Carpenter - safety of the boarding house

Answer 30

“insulated web of self-indulgent womb life”

Question 31

Carpenter - Stanley’s rebirth into Hell

Answer 31

“Wrenching a man from a living death and dragging him into a deathlike life”

Question 32

Carpenter - Stanley’s attempted rape

Answer 32

“In the blackness, stanley weirdly and ritualistically ‘measures’ Lulu for the role of mother”

Question 33

Carpenter - Goldberg’s speech

Answer 33

“Nat again paints the surface of his world with conventional virtue”

Question 34

Knowles - Stanley’s destruction

Answer 34

“Reduced to a speechless cypher of surface respectability”

Question 35

Knowles - power of names

Answer 35

“It is as if knowledge and the use of a name form is a kind of articulated power”

Question 36

Esslin - real vs. dream

Answer 36

“This ambivalence between the concrete reality of his characters and their simultaneous force as dream images, symbols, thoughts, is of the essence of Pinter’s poetic personality”

Question 37

Esslin - the various interpretations

Answer 37

“there is a deep and organic connection between the multiple planes on which the layers of ambiguity of the imagery operate”

Question 38

Batty - the basis of the inquisition

Answer 38

“A rejection of the essentially reactionary demands of church and partriotism, then, form the cornerstone of Webber’s transgression

Question 39

Batty - language

Answer 39

“It is language used violently, illogically, as an oppressive force”