Rereading Harold Pinter’s “The Room” fr...

Rereading Harold Pinter’s “The Room” from Post-Human Perspective

Author Name : Thanuja Rahman

ABSTRACT

The analysis of Harold Pinter’s playThe Room in the light of theories put forward by Posthumanism gives the play an new identity and significance. Pinter wrote the play in the backdrop of a world where everything was in chaos after the two great wars. People were shattered economically and psychologically. Pinter’s use of menace has a fine expression in this play.The fear that Pinter portrays in his works, was an experience of reality. There was a sense of impending danger, waiting at the end of the corner to jump upon and devour. This sense is not unknown to us today. We have seen the world change without a warning, in ways unprecedented.

Posthumanist thinkers of our time tries to analyze our connection with everything around us, without making our existence something to be valued more than the existence of anything else. Some influential thinkers if this school have helped to change the way we see the world. The mind-body philosophy, new insights into perceiving truth, concept of moral obligation to one another etc. give us a stand point from where we can revisit our lives and literature.

In Posthumanism, man is seen as a hybridization of human with non-human, i.e., inseparable and equal to all other living and nonliving things. Preconceived notion about the society is blamed for the problems it faces. The theory also preaches that individual identity and self are formed by their relation to the society. While interrogating the play from this perspective, The Room gets a new value and contemporariness.

Keywords: Coupled System,Extended Minds, Menace,Posthumanism, Tool analysis, Tool-beings