Abstract
Several of Pinter's plays incorporate multiple names for a single character, a single name for multiple characters, or names that appear across disparate works. These multiplying and collapsing signifiers recall repressed past identities and contribute to the uncanny sense of Pinter's plays. The Room erodes Rose's integrity through challenges to the names she calls her husband, the landlord, and even herself, while in The Lover the ominous splitting and reunification of the husband and his alter ego invoke the Freudian doppelganger. The boy Nicky, at first a victim, also threatens to become a double of the torturer Nicolas in One for the Road. When name repetition occurs across multiple plays, the signifiers carry their previous malice, becoming hysterical symptoms of a repressed trauma. Pinter implicates the reader or viewer's familiarity with his works to extend the uncanniness of his oeuvre beyond the confines of the page, stage, and diegetic realm.
