• Name: Kailas Gohil
• Roll No:- 14
• E-mail ID:- kailasgohil1998@gmail.com
• Paper No:- 9 ( The Modernist literature)
• Submitted by:- Department of English,Dilip Barad sir
Topic:- The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
• Introduction:-
Harold Pinter, born in 1930, English Playwright, knows for his so-called “ COMEDIES OF MENSCE”, which humorously and Cynically depict people attempting to communite as they react to an invasion or threat of an invasion of their lives. He is also noted for his unique use of dialogue, which exposed his characters alienation from each other and explores the layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence. In 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Meg Boles:-
Petey's wife, Meg Boles is a good- natured woman in her sixties. Of only from a lack of any reference to offspring of her own, it is implied that she and Petey are Childress, this she fills a void in her life by turning the bole’s boarding – house tenant, Stanley Webber, into a kind of surrogate child. She insists on calling him “boy” and mothering him. She even takes liberties appropriate to a parent- though not to the landlady of an adult roomer- by invading his privacy to fetch him down to breakfast.
At the se time, Meg flirts with Stanley, trying to fill a Second void in her life. Her marriage to Petey has settled in to mechanical routine, as their listless and inane dialogue that opens the play reveals. Meg tried to win Stanley's approval of her as a woman, Shamelessly fishing for compliments. Stanley, in his mildly perverse manner, responses by reading by reading her, knowing that she is both vulnerable and gullible.
The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
As the play progress, it becomes clear that Meg though mental lightweight, is a decent woman. She is also rather sentimental. Although it is probably not even Stanley’s real birthday, she insists that it is, determined to help Stanley weather his self – destructive despondency. She also seems to be his last hope, and her absence, when he is taken away near the end of the play, intensified his final wretchedness.
• Petey Boles:-
Like his wife, Petey Boles is in his sixties. He is a deck- chair attendant at the unidentified seaside resort where he and Meg own their boarding house, which, although it is “on the list” ,has seen much better days. Petey is full and ambitionless, no more inclined than his wife to find challenges beyond the confines of their rooming house. The pair have simply settled in to a humdrum existence appropriate to their mundane minds.
Because it is his chess night, Petey is not present during the birthday party. He leaves before it begins, then appears the following morning, when he makes a feeble attempt to prevent Goldberg and McCann from taking Stanley away, though he backs down the when the men suggest that they might take him as well. Petey’s decency is finally as ineffectual as Meg's. At the play's conclusion, he can do nothing but slip back in to vapid conversation with his wife, who reveals that was not even aware that he had completely missed the party.
• Benny:- see Nat Goldberg.
• Simey:- Se Nat Goldberg.
The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
• Lulu:-
Described as a “ girl in her twenties,” lulu is a neighbour who first appears carrying Stanley’s birthday present, the toy drum and drum sticks that Meg had bought for him. On the flirtatious side, she is self- conscious about her sexual appeal and cannot sit still for long without taking out a compact to powder her face. To her, looks are obviously important, and she sees Stanley as “ washout” because he seems to care nothing about his unkempt appearance.
Behind her glamour, there is some youthful innocence to lulu. She is blind to Goldberg's predatory nature and is drawn into his charm. She sits on his lap and flirts with him, a foreshadowing of what occurs between them later that night. That she is some sort of sexual sacrifice is also suggested in the conclusion to the bizarre events that take place when the light go out during the party. When they are restored, she is revealed “ lying spread- eagle on the table.” With Stanley hunches over her giggling insanely.
In the last act, Lulu seems broken by the night's experiences, but she is also angry. Goldberg, who baldly claims that he shares some of her innocence, had entered her room with a mysterious briefcase and begun sexually abusing her, using her, she complain, as “ a passing fancy.” She leaves angry and frightened when McCann and Goldberg threaten to exact a confession from her.
• Dermont McCann:-
McCann, in his thirties, is Goldberg’s younger associate. Unlike Goldberg, who reveals a Jewish heritage, McCann is an immoral
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
Irish Catholic, possibly a defrocked priest. Like Goldberg, he exercises careful self control, a quality which contributed to the sinister impression of both men. He is also methodical and compulsive, as is revealed in his ritual habit of carefully tearing Petey’s newspaper into strips. He differs from Goldberg in important respects , however. More reticent, he is not as superficially warm or out going, and when he dose speak he seems more inclined to echo Goldberg than to offer new observations. He is also physically more intimidating than Goldberg, who deliberately covers his viciousness with mask of fatherly interest in the others and disarms everyone with his nostalgia. It is McCann who shoves Stanley at the party and snaps. When he does talk, McCann usually just adapts to the mood set by Goldberg. Usually, too. He defers to Goldberg’s age and authority, even obeying the older man's peculiar request that McCann, blow into his mouth. However, at times he seems more Goldberg’s equal partner, especially during the interrogations of Stanley, when, just as voluble ,he become Goldberg’s co- inquisitor.
• Stanley Webber:-
Until his nemeses Goldberg and McCann appear, Stanley is the only lodged at the boles' run- down seaside boarding house. The basis of his relationship to Goldberg and McCann, at best hinted at, is never fully revealed, but their coming finally destroys Stanley’s last vestiges of self- control. Near the play’s end , when they have reduced him to idiocy, they haul him off in Goldberg’s car to face the “ Monty,” some vague, ominous fate.
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
Stanley, in his late- thirties, Is an unemployed musician, reluctant to leave the boarding house, which has become a kind of refuge from “them” the nebulous persecutors who, in the past, destroyed his career as a concert pianist. He has grown both slovenly and desultory, and although he fantasize about playing in great cities on a world tour, he has no real hope. Lacking a piano, he cannot even practice . As he confides in an honest moment, his only success in concert was in concert was in lower Edmonton, a pathetic contrast to the cities he names as venues on his dream tour.
Stanley’s dread of what lies beyond the boarding 6 traps h in a trying relationship with Meg, for whom he must act as both wayward child and surrogate husband. He is not always able to mask his disgust with this relationship and is prone to express his contempt for her in cruel verbal jibes and petty behaviour. He also teases her. For example, he tells her that “they’ are coming in a van with a wheelbarrow, looking for someone to haul off, presumably Meg. His hostility finally takes more violent from, when, during the birthday party, he tried to strangle her but is stopped by McCann and Goldberg.
Stanley, the nominal protagonist of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, barely struggles against his persecutors, quickly succumbing as if before some inevitable and implacable doom. Although he never evidences any built for his betrayal of the unspecified cause he responses to his inquisitors as if he knows that there is nowhere to tum, nowhere to hide. At the end, although unable to voice his feelings, he seems resigned to his unknown fate.
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
• Conclusion:-
Any short of single interrogations of Pinter’s play possible. His plays cannot be bound in any single definition:
Pinter in his speech at the time of Nobel prize:
“I have often been asked how my plays about. I cannot say. Nor can ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what is what happened. That is what is what they said. That is what they did.”
• Roll No:- 14
• E-mail ID:- kailasgohil1998@gmail.com
• Paper No:- 9 ( The Modernist literature)
• Submitted by:- Department of English,Dilip Barad sir
Topic:- The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
• Introduction:-
Harold Pinter, born in 1930, English Playwright, knows for his so-called “ COMEDIES OF MENSCE”, which humorously and Cynically depict people attempting to communite as they react to an invasion or threat of an invasion of their lives. He is also noted for his unique use of dialogue, which exposed his characters alienation from each other and explores the layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence. In 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Meg Boles:-
Petey's wife, Meg Boles is a good- natured woman in her sixties. Of only from a lack of any reference to offspring of her own, it is implied that she and Petey are Childress, this she fills a void in her life by turning the bole’s boarding – house tenant, Stanley Webber, into a kind of surrogate child. She insists on calling him “boy” and mothering him. She even takes liberties appropriate to a parent- though not to the landlady of an adult roomer- by invading his privacy to fetch him down to breakfast.
At the se time, Meg flirts with Stanley, trying to fill a Second void in her life. Her marriage to Petey has settled in to mechanical routine, as their listless and inane dialogue that opens the play reveals. Meg tried to win Stanley's approval of her as a woman, Shamelessly fishing for compliments. Stanley, in his mildly perverse manner, responses by reading by reading her, knowing that she is both vulnerable and gullible.
The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
As the play progress, it becomes clear that Meg though mental lightweight, is a decent woman. She is also rather sentimental. Although it is probably not even Stanley’s real birthday, she insists that it is, determined to help Stanley weather his self – destructive despondency. She also seems to be his last hope, and her absence, when he is taken away near the end of the play, intensified his final wretchedness.
• Petey Boles:-
Like his wife, Petey Boles is in his sixties. He is a deck- chair attendant at the unidentified seaside resort where he and Meg own their boarding house, which, although it is “on the list” ,has seen much better days. Petey is full and ambitionless, no more inclined than his wife to find challenges beyond the confines of their rooming house. The pair have simply settled in to a humdrum existence appropriate to their mundane minds.
Because it is his chess night, Petey is not present during the birthday party. He leaves before it begins, then appears the following morning, when he makes a feeble attempt to prevent Goldberg and McCann from taking Stanley away, though he backs down the when the men suggest that they might take him as well. Petey’s decency is finally as ineffectual as Meg's. At the play's conclusion, he can do nothing but slip back in to vapid conversation with his wife, who reveals that was not even aware that he had completely missed the party.
• Benny:- see Nat Goldberg.
• Simey:- Se Nat Goldberg.
The Birthday Party: Character Analysis
• Lulu:-
Described as a “ girl in her twenties,” lulu is a neighbour who first appears carrying Stanley’s birthday present, the toy drum and drum sticks that Meg had bought for him. On the flirtatious side, she is self- conscious about her sexual appeal and cannot sit still for long without taking out a compact to powder her face. To her, looks are obviously important, and she sees Stanley as “ washout” because he seems to care nothing about his unkempt appearance.
Behind her glamour, there is some youthful innocence to lulu. She is blind to Goldberg's predatory nature and is drawn into his charm. She sits on his lap and flirts with him, a foreshadowing of what occurs between them later that night. That she is some sort of sexual sacrifice is also suggested in the conclusion to the bizarre events that take place when the light go out during the party. When they are restored, she is revealed “ lying spread- eagle on the table.” With Stanley hunches over her giggling insanely.
In the last act, Lulu seems broken by the night's experiences, but she is also angry. Goldberg, who baldly claims that he shares some of her innocence, had entered her room with a mysterious briefcase and begun sexually abusing her, using her, she complain, as “ a passing fancy.” She leaves angry and frightened when McCann and Goldberg threaten to exact a confession from her.
• Dermont McCann:-
McCann, in his thirties, is Goldberg’s younger associate. Unlike Goldberg, who reveals a Jewish heritage, McCann is an immoral
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
Irish Catholic, possibly a defrocked priest. Like Goldberg, he exercises careful self control, a quality which contributed to the sinister impression of both men. He is also methodical and compulsive, as is revealed in his ritual habit of carefully tearing Petey’s newspaper into strips. He differs from Goldberg in important respects , however. More reticent, he is not as superficially warm or out going, and when he dose speak he seems more inclined to echo Goldberg than to offer new observations. He is also physically more intimidating than Goldberg, who deliberately covers his viciousness with mask of fatherly interest in the others and disarms everyone with his nostalgia. It is McCann who shoves Stanley at the party and snaps. When he does talk, McCann usually just adapts to the mood set by Goldberg. Usually, too. He defers to Goldberg’s age and authority, even obeying the older man's peculiar request that McCann, blow into his mouth. However, at times he seems more Goldberg’s equal partner, especially during the interrogations of Stanley, when, just as voluble ,he become Goldberg’s co- inquisitor.
• Stanley Webber:-
Until his nemeses Goldberg and McCann appear, Stanley is the only lodged at the boles' run- down seaside boarding house. The basis of his relationship to Goldberg and McCann, at best hinted at, is never fully revealed, but their coming finally destroys Stanley’s last vestiges of self- control. Near the play’s end , when they have reduced him to idiocy, they haul him off in Goldberg’s car to face the “ Monty,” some vague, ominous fate.
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
Stanley, in his late- thirties, Is an unemployed musician, reluctant to leave the boarding house, which has become a kind of refuge from “them” the nebulous persecutors who, in the past, destroyed his career as a concert pianist. He has grown both slovenly and desultory, and although he fantasize about playing in great cities on a world tour, he has no real hope. Lacking a piano, he cannot even practice . As he confides in an honest moment, his only success in concert was in concert was in lower Edmonton, a pathetic contrast to the cities he names as venues on his dream tour.
Stanley’s dread of what lies beyond the boarding 6 traps h in a trying relationship with Meg, for whom he must act as both wayward child and surrogate husband. He is not always able to mask his disgust with this relationship and is prone to express his contempt for her in cruel verbal jibes and petty behaviour. He also teases her. For example, he tells her that “they’ are coming in a van with a wheelbarrow, looking for someone to haul off, presumably Meg. His hostility finally takes more violent from, when, during the birthday party, he tried to strangle her but is stopped by McCann and Goldberg.
Stanley, the nominal protagonist of THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, barely struggles against his persecutors, quickly succumbing as if before some inevitable and implacable doom. Although he never evidences any built for his betrayal of the unspecified cause he responses to his inquisitors as if he knows that there is nowhere to tum, nowhere to hide. At the end, although unable to voice his feelings, he seems resigned to his unknown fate.
The Birthday party: Character Analysis
• Conclusion:-
Any short of single interrogations of Pinter’s play possible. His plays cannot be bound in any single definition:
Pinter in his speech at the time of Nobel prize:
“I have often been asked how my plays about. I cannot say. Nor can ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what is what happened. That is what is what they said. That is what they did.”
