Totalitarianism, the Destruction of Love and the Family, and the Trace of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road

Harold Pinter’s chamber piece One for the Road, his indictment of the Turkish government’s mistreatment of its political prisoners, anatomizes how a totalitarian state dismantles, reintegrates, and absorbs the nuclear family into itself as the authoritarian regime’s “loving” subjects. The chief interrogator Nicolas usurps familial love by inserting himself and the autocratic state as the new focus of devotion. Through this process, the intellectual dissident Victor is verbally and physically reduced as a man, father, and husband; Gila is debased, violated, and possessed by the totalitarian state as a woman, mother, and wife; and Nicky, it appears, is conscripted and reeducated as a soldier by the state military. Nicolas’s figuration of the state as an alternative family, his hypocritical anti-Semitism, and his invocation of Hamlet indicate profound moral blindness and psychological damage. Crucially, this article argues that Pinter owes an unrecognized debt to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. By drawing upon O’Brien’s horrifying techniques in Room 101, Pinter has Nicolas rupture private bonds of love to redirect commitment to the state. Ultimately, both Pinter and Orwell demonstrate totalitarianism’s pathological end: the absolute supersession of human attachment to arrogate all loyalty unto the regime.