SOURCE: “Pinter's Landscape and the Boundaries of Narrative,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 37-45.

In the following essay, Richardson considers whether the two apparently separate narrators in Landscape form one integrated narrative, and if “narrativity” is the result of chronology, causality, or juxtaposition.

It is both curious and unfortunate that narrative theorists rarely address the experiments in story construction frequently present in modern drama. It is also unfortunate that interpreters of innovative playwrights like Beckett, Stoppard, and Pinter generally neglect the critical perspectives afforded by narrative theory.¹ In what follows I suggest that a comprehensive poetics needs to address the unusual questions posed by dramatists like Harold Pinter, and that some of Pinter's distinctive achievements, traditionally so difficult to articulate, can be effectively described and appreciated within the context of narrative theory.

Pinter has exposed and transgressed most of the fundamental elements and conventions of...