Martin LutherKing in his Nobel Lecture, delivered in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo on December 11 1964 said "Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it."
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
To sum, violence has been considered by some theorists as a legitimate weapon of state apparatus to repress its dissenters or anti-socials whereas there are others who consider it as an influential and powerful tool to bring about a revolution or social change and progress in the state. There are also theorists and activists, who consider violence to be an unjust and bloody way of bringing about social change, and …show more content…
In Pinter’s comedies of menace we find a narration of physical violence. For example towards the end of the play The Room, direct physical violence can be seen when Bert makes a fatal, violent attack on the blind Riley without any provocation from the seemingly harmless negro. In The Birthday Party, we find physical violence when after the harrowing interrogation round Stanley loses his self-control and kicks Goldberg in the stomach. Not only does he initiate this physical attack, he also tries to strangulate Meg, the owner of the boarding house, in the Blind Man’s Bluff game, after which he resorts to sexual assault on Lulu, a young woman in her twenties. In the play The Caretaker, violence can be seen in the first meeting between Mick and Davies. In order to take Davies by surprise and to intimidate him, Mick resorts to violent behaviour as illustrated …show more content…
In the play The Caretaker, Davies resorts to psychological violence when he threatens Aston that he might be again sent to a mental asylum for his erratic and insane behaviour in the line “They had you inside one of them places before, they can have you inside again... They can put them pincers on your head again, man!”(p.70). In the play The Homecoming, Lenny tries to intimidate Ruth by accounts of two violent encounters that he had with two women. In the first account, he narrates how he assaulted a pox ridden, sexually driven woman with his belt and boot,owing to her amorous advances towards him and in the second account he narrates how he gave a short-arm jab to the belly of an old woman who had asked him to lend a helping hand to shift a heavy iron mangle from the front room to the back room of her house. In the play One for the Road, Nicolas tortures Victor mentally with narration about the sexual assaults on Gila, Victor’s wife, and the murder of their son, Nicky. In the play The Party Time, Terry threatens his wife, Dusty, with physical punishments when she does not stop asking him questions about the whereabouts of her brother, a political dissenter. The purpose of the threat is to scare