Double-crossing Time: Pinter Roughs Up the Past

Abstract One productive way to interpret Pinter's Betrayal as emanating from and building on the modernist tradition of what Suzanne Guerlac calls “thinking in time” is through a Benjaminian lens in which a traumatic confrontation triggering the sudden shifts in reverse chronology disrupts the expectations of realism. Pinter relies on a disruptive nonlinear narrative that moves toward disillusion and revelation, denies the distortion of nostalgia, and culminates in reclaiming what was lost and fixing what was found forever in his art.