The Characters In Harold Pinter's The Caretaker

Characters in The Caretaker: the Incontrovertible Oscillation between the Roles of Aggressor and Victim

Michael Billington’s eponymously titled engrossing biography of the eminent Nobel Prize winning playwright, Harold Pinter provides the reader with a glimpse into the foundational background of Pinter’s aesthetics. The source of The Caretaker is unravelled with the adequate aid of successive images that the playwright encountered in the course of his own life. Pinter himself has claimed to have written the play while he and his first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant were living in Chiswick:
‘[The flat was] a very clean couple of rooms with a bath and kitchen. There was a chap who owned the house: a builder, in fact, like Mick who had his

Apart from existential abstractions, his plays predominantly deal with the shifting nature of power relations. From the precise moment Davies is introduced into the essentially Pinteresque ‘room,’ Aston’s desire is to dictate and control Davies’s actions through his subtly defined stratagems. There is a particular bed assigned to the proverbial tramp, he must adjust himself with the window which would always be kept open. Davies perceives Aston to be the owner of the house and attempts to mould his desires in keeping with the alliance he hopes to form with his benefactor. But power is never constant; it encapsulates within its operation the continuous possibility of passing the parcel onto the other. Once Davies has secured for himself the warmth of a shelter, his need for favours turns into requests which are ultimately shaped by the contours of demands. This oscillating symbiotic relationship is disturbed by the intrusion of Mick. Mick’s initial physical assault on the poor old tramp is directed as an intentional exhibition of his physical prowess and by extension his physical superiority over the newly acquired member of the