SOURCE: “‘… Apart from the Known and the Unknown’: The Unreconciled Worlds of Harold Pinter's Characters,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring, 1970, pp. 17-24.

In the following essay, Gillen examines the division between the known and the unknown worlds in Pinter's plays.

The current Broadway success of Harold Pinter's Tea Party with its clear emphasis on the division between a world which the major character knows because he can touch it and a world whose reality he occasionally glimpses but cannot prove by any of his instinctual criteria for reality provides an appropriate occasion for a discussion of those divided worlds in two of Pinter's major works. To isolate a theme in Pinter is not, of course, to suggest that Pinter's highly complex and dramatic vision can be reduced or limited to an abstract schema. Yet the fact remains that both plays highlight what may well be the philosophical...