Dislocation of Temporality as a Fractured Dramatic Space in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Harold Pinter’s Old Times

Abstract

After reading the two fine plays Endgame by Samuel Beckett and Old Times by Harold Pinter, one sees that the two depicts modern man who turned to the most passive of all, bewildered, disillusioned, purposeless and dislocated. A man who is bewildered of simple questions: who am I? what am I ? what will be the end? They are endless questions in an attempt to assert himself in a dislocated temporality. Temporality is a direct echo of the existential impasse of the modern world. Both plays assert that selfhood is fragmented and fashioned by this impasse. Hence dislocation of the temporal is an assertion of the fragmented self of their vanishing characters.