No Man's Land Analysis

onto when reading The Fall, readers are, in a sense, forced to accept the idea of a subjective reality.
No Man’s Land, a play written by Harold Pinter, further explores the theme of reality and it’s relationship to existentialism. Two men in their sixties, Hirst and Spooner, are talking in Hirst’s living room. They have just met at a bar. They are both drinking, which is evident from the somewhat choppy dialogue. The encounter seems choppy as well. At first the two men seem like strangers but as the dialogue continues Spooner heckles Hirst about his wife and his manhood. These are seemingly strange topics for two men who had just met. Are they pretending to know each other? Why would they be doing this? Once again, reality is difficult to discern, especially since dialogue from drunken men is the only text available. Soon younger men, Foster and Briggs, join the crew and also begin to drink.
To add another layer to the reality, or lack thereof, Hirst begins to recount a dream in which someone …show more content…
The men are in the in-between. They are not alive but they are not yet dead. The no man’s land that Spooner describes has two meanings in that it is a land for no men, as in no men want to be there but it is also a place for men who have no substance or who are not very sure of their identities. The men may be switching back and forth between opinions and pasts because it does not matter to them what is real and what is not. They are so far past reality that it no longer matters what is the truth. The men are drinking and expressing emotions simply to feel alive. They are constructing multiple realities in hopes one of them will stick. It is clear that this will not happen, however, and the cycle will continue on. Hirst almost seems encouraged by Spooner’s statement about no man’s land and raises his class in celebration. Alcohol seems to fuel this transition from reality to No Man’s