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영어

The female characters of Harold Pinter have developed from mere archetypal figures to existential individuals who struggle to establish their identities and create their ideal self-images in an active way. Deborah, in A Kind of Alaska, is one of the existential beings. Deborah is confronted with an unusual situation. Pinter tells the story of Deborah and her awakening after L-DOPA(an injection for cure) from a lethargic state which had lasted twenty-nine years. Deborah fell asleep when she was sixteen and comes back to life at forty-five. She suffers from being in different worlds between her ontological and her official age, between her adolescent fantasies and her adult body. Therefore, she has to patch together an existence of disparate moments, years apart in time. However, Deborah does not use the ways of previous female characters of Pinter. They just accept their physical world as their ideal world or escape from the real world to their fantasy world to make their own existential space. In the case of Deborah, she does not select one of two worlds passively but she makes her own choice in real world actively. In the process of her frustration, realization, re-ordering the materials of her life, Deborah is neither marginal nor secondary to her counterparts any longer. In A Kind of Alaska, Pinter develops his female characters into full-grown ones and, even allows them to be protagonists.