40 pages • 1 hour read
Harold PinterThe Birthday Party
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Absurd Meaninglessness of Language
The Birthday Party is an absurdist work. Very broadly speaking, absurdism is a philosophical theory that life is absurd—that it is devoid of any higher meaning or essence to be apprehended by the intellect. In literature, the theory is dramatized by human agents—often through bleak, sideways comedy—when humanity’s instinctive drive to find meaning clashes with the inherent meaninglessness of life. One common convention of absurdist theater is the deconstruction of language, since humans use language to assign meaning to lived experience.
From the play’s first moments, Pinter satirizes the meaninglessness of the small talk that fills the empty space in relationships. Because Meg and Petey are in their sixties and have most likely been married for a long time, their interpersonal monotony has an implicit perpetual quality. Meg forces Petey to maintain their daily conversational routine, asking silly questions about cornflakes and the newspaper, and pretending that the gender of a stranger’s baby is of consequence to her. Petey’s responses are placating and equally meaningless. He simply tells Meg what she wants to hear. Stanley, however, doesn’t do so; he tells her that the milk is sour, that her housekeeping is terrible, and that the home is rundown. Stanley’s and Petey’s words directly contradict each other, and it is impossible to be sure to what extent either is telling the truth or lying out of spite or kindness. Meg’s choice to believe Petey’s compliments over Stanley’s critiques demonstrates language’s utter subjectivity and unreliability.
Characters also use language to manipulate others and obfuscate circumstances. For example, Goldberg’s language is often disingenuous and manipulative, obscuring his meaning and true intentions from both the audience and the characters themselves. When Goldberg and McCann question Stanley, it is impossible to tell which (if any) questions are meant to be taken seriously, while Stanley wholly denies any wrongdoing. The simplest explanation for the action of the play is that Stanley has committed an offense and then hidden from the consequences for a year. Nevertheless, the characters’ language destabilizes the audience’s customary, basic assumption of narrative reliability, leaving the play constantly equivocal. The characters contradict themselves and each other, fundamentally obscuring whether anyone is telling the truth or whether there is even a truth to be told.
Such inefficaciousness of verbal communication also emphasizes the characters’ isolation and alienation from one another, which is another common convention in absurdist theater. Each character perceives the world and their shared situation differently, and each perception is equally true to each individual because their perception of the truth is unstable and conditional. At the end of the play, Goldberg and McCann have broken Stanley down and removed his ability to utilize language, which in turn correlates Stanley’s loss of language with his loss of identity. Once they take Stanley away, Petey uses language to create a reality for Meg in which Stanley is still upstairs asleep. The characters use language to construct their own delusions, rendering a shared reality and an objective truth virtually impossible to determine.
The Arbitrariness and Instability of Self
The play’s central event is a birthday party, but this is a vehicle for a theme: the arbitrariness and instability of self. In this vein, the party underpins the play’s vital irony and, ultimately, its absurdity: Parties and gift-giving typically honor a milestone in the framework of someone’s life, but Stanley’s birthday party forces a framework onto him and reconstructs his personhood. Over the last year, Stanley’s life of isolation has become formless. Meg has tried to give her own life excitement and meaning by both shaping Stanley into her fantasy of a son and illicitly flirting with him. She gives herself the odd task of informing Stanley that it’s his birthday and, when he denies it, still insisting. She thereby both forces a fundamental point of his identity onto him and shows the arbitrariness of birthday celebrations—and, by extension, selfhood. Likewise, Goldberg’s enthusiastic suggestion of the party is malicious, which upends the customary spirit of parties.
The idea of birthdays therefore ties into the idea of selfhood, and even beyond the party’s literal scope, Stanley’s sense of self is in flux. At breakfast, he sees himself as a concert pianist who is temporarily out of work, even claiming that he has a job offer lined up to tour the world. However, Stanley’s claims clash with his slovenly appearance and avoidant behavior. Seeming surprised when Lulu calls him a washout and tells him to look in the mirror, he washes his face as if his reflection isn’t what he expected. Later talking to McCann, Stanley says his appearance doesn’t show who he really is and that he only looks rough from a hard year of drinking. These constant contradictions between Stanley’s self-concept and his outward appearance reveal that he hides behind many self-made delusions.
The party more explicitly defines how others see Stanley as a person. To Petey, Stanley is only a boarder, so Petey is absent from the party altogether. Goldberg and McCann manipulate Stanley to turn him into a villain, legitimizing their roles as hostile interlopers. At the end of the play, they transform his appearance so he looks like a completely different person. Meg sees Stanley as a man who affirms her womanhood in a way that her husband no longer can—both as a mother and as a sexual being. Meg ignores the aspects of the party and of Stanley that contradict these beliefs, including when he chokes her. In terms of Stanley’s actual identity, however, the party only creates unanswered questions, leaving his true identity a matter of interpretation.
Perspective and the Subjective Nature of Experience
The variations of perspective are important thematic concerns within The Birthday Party, determining how characters interact with others and the reality of their lives. The characters rely on what they see (or what they want to see) as truth, even when the lines between truths and untruths are indistinguishable.
Most of the characters create their own version of reality through selective perception. This theme emerges at the beginning of the play, when Meg barrages Petey with questions about the morning, the weather, and newspaper items; in this case, she filters the world through his experience instead of seeing it for herself. Meg sees everyone and everything through artificial filters, and she interprets everything positively, even when reality clashes with her vision.
The play also gives this theme a symbolic expression, and eyesight becomes metaphorical. Stanley is the pivotal character for this symbolism, as his vision depends on a literal filter; the world is blurry without his glasses, which he sometimes adjusts or wipes to see more clearly. Likewise, Stanley doesn’t see himself clearly in a figurative sense, clinging to his idea of being a concert pianist and denying that his slovenly appearance represents who he truly is. Lulu, for her part, also presents metaphorical significance in her literal eyesight, but her perception isn’t blurry so much as vulnerable to her biased interpretation. For example, she looks at Stanley and sees him as a washout and a mess, but she sees Goldberg—who reminds her of her father and her first love—as attractive. She filters her view of both men through her need to be desired and loved.
Loss of sight is also tied to loss of control in the play. This relationship, too, is both literal and symbolic. It is significant that Goldberg and McCann remove Stanley’s vision as a means of torture and destabilization; the tactic symbolizes the removal of his agency. When the men interrogate him, Stanley claims that he can see even without his glasses—but when Goldberg removes his glasses, he can’t see well enough to walk without stumbling. This ties his loss of sight to an inability to control his movements and—by extension—his identity. The game of blind man’s buff is the play’s most dramatic and plainly comic scene involving loss of both vision and control. The game is a threat under the guise of birthday revelry, and McCann forces Stanley to give up his glasses and then breaks them. The two men shine light in Stanley’s eyes to blind him further, and when the lights go out, all of the guests are left to grope in the darkness. This loss of sight, combined with inebriation, alters the partygoers’ perceptions. McCann loses the flashlight, and the ability (or inability) to see becomes an issue of power and dominance. Without sight, the party devolves into a chaos with a broader symbolism: the absurdity of an existence in which human action has no value.
By Act III, the characters’ ability to see only what they wish to see has become seriously undermined. Meg is distressed, seeing for the first time that something is wrong: The drum is broken, the cornflakes are gone, and the black car out front seems like a threat. Stanley outwardly appears to be more respectable and well-kempt than he has been throughout the play, but when he tries to speak, it becomes clear that he has undergone something traumatic. Stanley keeps trying to put his broken glasses on, suggesting his belief that the glasses will restore his sight and his former sense of self. Goldberg promises they will buy him new glasses, swearing they will make Stanley better than ever. It remains unclear at the end of the play whether Goldberg and McCann are trying to punish or help Stanley, whether new glasses will alter Stanley’s vision and perspective to Goldberg’s specifications, and whether Stanley is too destroyed to be helped.
Related Titles
By Harold Pinter
