SOURCE: “Pinter and Morality,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 68, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 740-52.

In the following essay, Hynes explores Pinter's visions of morality and values.

Viewers and critics have applied any number of adjectives to Pinter and his plays. Among the terms used, usually but not always by way of offering compliments, are “absurdist,” “existential,” “anti-humanistic,” and “amoral.” Each of these labels makes its own kind of sense, I think, but none of them, alone or in combination with others, says about Pinter's plays what it seems to me ought finally to be said about the achievement of any writer who has written so much and whose work has been so widely valued. I should therefore like to look at the terms cited here and to go beyond them, with an eye to defining the view of morality or the moral life to be derived from a number...