Postmodern Cultural Fragmentation and Subjectivity in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore postmodern fragmentation in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. It focuses on the thematic insights of postmodern fragmentation to infer Pinter’s concern with contemporary changes of cultural values. These changes include the transformation of human view of life and humanistic ethical principles at the onset of postmodernism. Therefore, the theme of fragmentation will be elaborated in the light of postmodernism’s relative consideration of life i.e., people perceive life and its pertinent matters according to their judgmental subjectivity. Such judgments will be the nexus of cultural fragmentation because people have contradictory views concerning their relations or judgments of facts. For this reason, the study follows a qualitative analysis of the theme of cultural fragmentation by interpreting the characters and their subjective relationships with each other. The characters’ relationships are not on appropriate accord because they undergo cultural fragmentation in terms of their relationships and judgments of life.