Word: torments
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...Their torment is increased by the suggestion of incest, and by the fact that their father killed their mother and committed suicide. Outwardly, this seems like native dramatic country for Tennessee Williams. But the new note is a Pirandellian ambiguity as the characters continually shift between their two poles of reality. Are these actors 'playing a mad brother and sister, or are they a mad brother and sister playing actors? In any event, the psychic locale of the play is a kind of streetcar named despair; the loaded revolver that glints with menace in the closing scene...
...Shmuel is dead, and the father later emigrates to Israel. But the Nazi camp commander has not actually killed Daniel; his aim was only to torment the father. Saved by a whim, the embittered youth also descends upon Israel. There the tensions of filial hatred and paternal remorse are unstrung against the sun-scorched background of today's Beersheba, city of patriarchs. Author Dayan's hard-bitten way with the English language raises this novel well above the sagging sentimentality of the Urises and Micheners...
...proved an eerie enterprise. Moving down the corridors between the evenly spaced, parallel rows of trees, the troops were frequently brought up short by jungle birds whose screeches mimicked the whine of bullets. The almost purple earth underfoot teemed with a fierce breed of red ant whose bite meant torment. But the battalion soon did some tormenting of its own. Running into a company of Viet Cong, it killed 83 in a four-hour firefight that left the bullet-punctured rubber trees bleeding white...
Pinter's play patterns coalesce about three recurring elements and phases-the room, the torment, and the expiation. The room is the setting, the torment is often an extended abrasive comic put-on, and the expiation is usually an act of physical or psychic violence. The room is a square womb. Though lighted, it seems dark, partly because it is sometimes windowless or tightly curtained against any blade of outside light. Outside this haven of refuge lurks the nameless, faceless intruder who will violate the safety and innocence of the room...
...torment is often comic, but it is no laughing matter. In Pinter as in Kafka, punishment presupposes guilt, even if the crime is unspecified. The act of atonement is always arbitrary. In expiation, a Pinter hero-victim may lose his life, or his wife, or his mind. Kafka's religious overtones find no echo in Pinter. To him, the universe runs with the remorseless senselessness of a concentration camp...