Love, Power, Paradox in Pinter’s Play the Lover

Abstract

Abstract

e Lover by Harold Pinter depicts an ironic representation of love that is conventionally established as the desired goal in a conjugal relationship for bringing the marital equilibrium and social stability.The play is inclined not only to oppose the traditionaldichotomy of love and sex in which one is respectable and the other illegitimate and therefore unacceptable, it also tries to dismantle the boundary between the civilized role-playing and the immediate gratification of savage desires. Rather both of them are part of a larger mechanism in which they are subjected to involve themselves in their fragmentized multiple roles to the endless process of struggle for power. The struggle may engender a gamut of paradox and contradiction which are consistent in understanding the profound irony of human existence in a contemporary world full of anxiety and instability.