Pinter s Use of Pauses and Silences in

The Use of Pauses and Silences in the Homecoming Harold Pinter is a British dramatist who was known of his economy and simplicity of diction in his works, but some situations in his plays must to be associated with many social and cultural elements in and out the text. For example, the vulgar and dirty interaction between the father and his sons is strange for the conservative society in the west before WWII and to the Arab readers who by traditions and religion highly respect their parents. Also, when they talk about sexual matters freely, we must consider the sociocultural changes of the western society in the 1960s. Pinter 's use of communication forms is obvious and important to understand his plays. Sometimes the verbal communication is not enough to give the reader the whole picture. Therefore, he used nonverbal and paraverbal forms such as gestures, body language, tone of speech and hesitations written in the text as silences, three dots and pauses. In this paper, I 'll try to analyze the opening scene and the first meeting of Lenny and Ruth in the Homecoming by looking carefully at his use of pauses, three dots and silences. The opening scene is a domestic context where two participants, Max and Lenny, interact. The father and the son are in the living room. Lenny is absorbed in reading the paper, while Max is looking for the scissors "to cut something out of the paper." (Pinter, 8) The first line of the dialogue is an accusatory question, "What have you done with the scissors?", as if Lenny is hiding them from his father. This reveals that Max doesn 't trust Lenny. Pinter used a lot of pauses in "The Homecoming" for different reasons. One reason is what Esslin observed: . "When Pinter asks for a pause ..., he indicates that intense thought processes are continuing, that unspoken tensions are mounting," (Esslin, 237-8) For example, Max pauses to hear the answers from Lenny but he ignores him. Therefore, he repeats the questions with phrases

Cited: Esslin, Martin. The Peopled Wound: the Work of Harold Pinter. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1970. Print. Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. New York: Grove Press, 1966. Print. Tannen, Deborah. "Silence as Conflict Management in Pinter 's Betrayal and a Short Story, 'Great Wits '." Conflict Talk, ed. by Allen Grimshaw, 260-279. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990.