THE ROOM

The theme of The Room is people's inability to protect themselves from

harm and insecurity. At the beginning of the play, Rose bustles about
making her husband, Bert, breakfast. Her goal, she says, is to "keep the
cold out." Speaking to her husband without his answering, she says, "It's
very cold out. I can tell you. It's murder." She attempts to fill her husband
with warm food to make sure he isn't cold when he leaves the room to go
outside. 

While she seems perturbed and rocks herself, she says, "And we're not
bothered. And nobody bothers us." She clings to the hope that she can be
at peace in her room. However, after her husband leaves to drive his van, a
couple named Mr. and Mrs. Sands knock on the door, as they've heard
Rose's room is to let. Later in the play, a blind black man enters the room,
and Bert comes home and attacks the man. At the end of the play, Rose
says that she is no longer able to see. It is apparent that Roses's attempts
to keep the horror and want of the outside world at bay have been futile.
Despite her attempt to stay warm, she finds herself out in the cold and
vulnerable. 

The primary theme in Pinter's "The Room" is alienation. The atmosphere is

menacing, the players all feel at risk and insecure. Pinter explained the
alienation theme in an interview: 

Two people in a room. I am dealing a great deal of the time with this image
of two people in a room. The curtain goes up on stage and I see it as a very
potent question: What is going on between two people in the room? Is
someone going to open the door and come in? ---obviously they are scared
of what is outside the room. Outside the room there is a world bearing upon
them which is frightening. I am sure it is frightening to you and me as well."

The tension is intensified by the juxtaposition of security vs. insecurity. The

room itself is safe and secure; but outside, the unknown lurks, a void to be
feared. The occupants are unaware of some very basic information that
makes them wary of what lies beyond the seemingly-solid walls. For
example, they do not know what floor the room is on and or even how
many floors are in the house. They are alienated completely from
everything beyond the room. 
Is there any relation between Harold
Pinter and Post-modernism?
Pinter’s work, namely his plays, frequently contained awkward pauses,
ambiguous or confusing language and circuitous or endlessly wandering
plots. He used these techniques to present the unreliability of language
which was a theme explored by post-structuralists, deconstructionists and
postmodernists. That is to say that language is based on arbitrary signs
and each text, each word or each sign can be interpreted differently
because of puns, irony and the general subjectivity of perception. So, his
work illustrated one of the trends in postmodernism, as applied to literature,
linguistics, philosophy and psychology, that all communication is
ambiguous and subject to multiple ways of interpretation.

Additionally, postmodernists were skeptical of all systems of thought,

government ideologies and cultural roles. In presenting confusing dialogue
and wandering plots, Pinter illustrated skepticism in language, meaning and
communication in real life. Some of his plays, such as The Birthday Party,
depicted a Naturalistic or Realist setting on the surface. But the dialogue,
plot and interaction of the characters unsettled this superficial Realism to
reveal a depiction of existence as absurd, indeterminable and skeptical at
all levels. These techniques mark the influences of Brecht and Beckett, the
skepticism of postmodern literature and the “slipperiness” of meaning
described by post-structural linguists and literary theorists.

Pinter’s work moves past Modernism by suggesting that, underneath the

surface plot and complications (see Ibsen or Chekhov), there is another,
unspoken combat going on (what Pinter called “the weasel under the coffee
table”) in human contacts.  In The Dumb Waiter the drama is not inherent
so much in the characters on stage but rather in the unknown world on the
invisible end of the dumbwaiter.  In Birthday Party it can be heard in the
one word,  “Succulent”, giving a sinister and sexual undertone to the
surface action.  Pinter uses stage language and appears to be present a
typical human drama, but unlike the Modernists, is much more interested in
staging the unspoken.  In this sense he can be included in Postmodernism,
although not as obvious as Surrealism, Expressionism, and the other
departures from Realism that are grouped under the heading “Post-
Modernism.”
Explain the role of Harold Pinter as
a representative  of modern drama.
I think you’d have to call him a Modernist and a Postmodernist. As a
Modernist, Pinter’s work is indebted to a naturalist/Realist tradition in that
his dialogues are often so close to every day speech that they, ironically,
tend to be ambiguous or downright absurd. Naturalism is an objective look
at reality, like a botanist looking at the world from afar and realism is the
approach of staying as close to reality as possible. What I mean is that he
would include awkward pauses, sentence fragments, trailing off . . . and all
the idiosyncratic ways we speak. This kind of ‘tape-recorded’ drama
showed how our speaking is largely sparse, interrupted and occasionally
nonsensical. So, in that respect, it is a prime example of Realism in that it
capture reality as a mirror or a tape recorder would. Realism and
naturalism were at their height at the beginning of the Modernist period
(mid 19th-early 20th). But Modernism also had themes of uncertainty and
wandering in a fast-changing world. So, the presentation of actual speech
as stilted and confusing was a mirror depiction but it was also a metaphor
of the growing alienation and confusion in a world that was becoming
populated with faster machines (cars, planes) and larger, clustered cities
often depicted as dark and alienating. Pinter’s work showed that his surface
depiction revealed a deeper psychological or philosophical take on
current/recent understanding of this period in history. The period being mid
to late 20th century, which is the transition of Modernism to
Postmodernism. Both movements shared some themes such as alienation,
uncertainty, and particularly with authors like Pinter, Beckett and Kafka, the
element of Absurdity. But Pinter’s experimentation with language is
primarily Modern but has elements of the Postmodern in form and function.

What is the important theme in The Room

by Harold Pinter?
The theme of The Room is people's inability to protect themselves from
harm and insecurity. At the beginning of the play, Rose bustles about
making her husband, Bert, breakfast. Her goal, she says, is to "keep the
cold out." Speaking to her husband without his answering, she says, "It's
very cold out. I can tell you. It's murder." She attempts to fill her husband
with warm food to make sure he isn't cold when he leaves the room to go
outside. 
While she seems perturbed and rocks herself, she says, "And we're not
bothered. And nobody bothers us." She clings to the hope that she can be
at peace in her room. However, after her husband leaves to drive his van, a
couple named Mr. and Mrs. Sands knock on the door, as they've heard
Rose's room is to let. Later in the play, a blind black man enters the room,
and Bert comes home and attacks the man. At the end of the play, Rose
says that she is no longer able to see. It is apparent that Roses's attempts
to keep the horror and want of the outside world at bay have been futile.
Despite her attempt to stay warm, she finds herself out in the cold and
vulnerable. 

The primary theme in Pinter's "The Room" is alienation. The atmosphere is

menacing, the players all feel at risk and insecure. Pinter explained the
alienation theme in an interview: 

Two people in a room. I am dealing a great deal of the time with this image
of two people in a room. The curtain goes up on stage and I see it as a very
potent question: What is going on between two people in the room? Is
someone going to open the door and come in? ---obviously they are scared
of what is outside the room. Outside the room there is a world bearing upon
them which is frightening. I am sure it is frightening to you and me as well."

The tension is intensified by the juxtaposition of security vs. insecurity. The

room itself is safe and secure; but outside, the unknown lurks, a void to be
feared. The occupants are unaware of some very basic information that
makes them wary of what lies beyond the seemingly-solid walls. For
example, they do not know what floor the room is on and or even how
many floors are in the house. They are alienated completely from
everything beyond the room. 

What is the significance of the character

of the "blind Negro" in Harold Pinter's The
Room?
The character referred to as the "blind Negro" in Pinter's The
Room functions both as a classical oracle and as a culmination of the play's
naturalism. His presence in the basement of Rose's building and his later
intrusion into her home suggests a racially charged atmosphere where
black skin symbolizes darkness and danger. However, his blindness also
alludes to the figure of the oracle in classical Greek tragedy, who is blind
yet all-seeing, predicting the downfall of other characters. Although he is a
stranger, he reveals intimate knowledge of Rose's family background. The
blind man's presence in Rose's apartment is the catalyst for her husband
Bert's unexpected savage violence. As Bert strikes the blind man, Rose is
simultaineously struck blind.

The Room

Pinter’s first play, The Room, contained a number of features that were to

become his hallmarks. The play is set in a single small room, the
characters warm and secure within but threatened by cold and death from
without. The Room is overtly symbolic, more so than Pinter’s later work, but
the setting and characters are, for the most part, realistic. Rose sits in the
cheap flat making endless cups of tea, wrapping a muffler around her man
before she lets him go out into the cold; her husband, Bert, drives a van.
Under the naturalistic veneer, however, the play has a murky, almost
expressionistic atmosphere. The room is Rose’s living space on earth. If
she stays within, she is warm and safe. Outside, it is so cold it is “murder,”
she says. She opens the door, and there, waiting to come in, is the new
generation, a young couple named Mr. and Mrs. Sands (the sands of time?
Mr. Sands’s name is Tod, which in German means “death”). They are
looking for an apartment and have heard that Rose’s apartment is empty.
“This room is occupied,” she insists, obviously upset at this premonition of
her departure. A man has been staying in the basement. She imagines it to
be wet and cold there, a place where no one would stand much of a
chance. The man wants to see her. Again the door opens, to reveal a
terrifying intruder from the outside. He comes in. He is a black man—the
color of death—and he is blind, tapping in with his stick, blind as death is
when claiming its victims from the ranks of the good or the bad. “Your
father wants you to come home,” he tells her. Rose’s husband comes in at
this moment, shrieks “Lice!” and immediately attacks the man, tipping him
out of his chair and kicking him in the head until he is motionless. On the
naturalistic level of the play, the action seems motivated by racist hatred,
perhaps, but at the symbolic level, Bert seems to have recognized death
and instinctively engages it in battle, as later Pinter characters kick out
violently against their fate. It is, however, to no avail: Rose has been struck
blind, already infected by her approaching death.

While this summary stresses the symbolic dimension of the play, it is

Pinter’s genius to achieve such symbolic resonance at the same time that
he maintains an eerily naturalistic surface—although less so in this first
play than in later plays. Critics have objected to the heavy-handedness, the
overt symbolism, of the blind black man, and characters with similar roles in
later plays are more subtly drawn.