Waiting as Domination in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter

Abstract

This study explores the role of waiting in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1960) and its effect on creating obedience in the characters trapped inside a bureaucratic system. The research aims to uncover the ideological function of enforced duration as a technique of domination, extending existing readings of the play beyond language and institutional discipline toward a properly sociological account of time. The paper focuses on the play’s genre, language, silence and central prop as forms of temporal domination with the help of close textual analysis that draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s (2000) theory of waiting, Javier Auyero’s (2012) work on bureaucratic delay and Harold Schweizer’s (2008)   work on duration. The analysis shows that the obedience of Ben and Gus is not due to discourse or surveillance alone, but is the result of an administered waiting that undermines the capacity to question authority; the play’s unresolved ending is not open to interpretation, but confirms the effect. This work contributes to Pinter scholarship by proving The Dumb Waiter’s (1960) dramatic exploration of power is a dramatisation of unequal distribution of time, and provides an approach applicable to a wider understanding of absurdist drama and institutional control.