The Treatment of Violence in Martin Amis’ Money and Pinters’ The Caretaker

Abstract

Towards the end of 1960s there was a huge hippie movement which was marked as Turbulent Decade. In Britain the labor party gained power in 1964, in France the protests in 1968 forced president Charles de Gaulle to leave the country. For some people in Europe, May 1968 meant the end of traditional collective action and the beginning of a new era to be dominated mainly by different social movement emerging at that time throughout the world (Brinkley, 1997; Erlanger, 2008).  Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and Martin Amis’ Money: The Suicide Note (1984) are embedded with violence and mistreatement among the main characters. With an attempt to reflect social dimensions of the society of that time, both novels deal with violence between very close people who have family or very close friendship ties. The Cartaker is the play in which people are portrayed as living on the edge, and are ready to accept any possibility at presented in order to fulfill their individual psychological needs. The Money is a novel about John Self, a film director, a man who makes deals, spends a lot of money, abuses alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, and as a result he is portrayed as extremely violent. This paper attempts to analyze the question of violence that is presented and described in these two works. More importantly, this paper uses socio-psychological approaches and the historical context in analyzing violence in these two works. An analysis of absurd and satirist worlds presented by Pinter and Amis is especially valuable because of their relevance for describing and tackling present-day violence in our societies.