This paper deals with the novel The Dwarfs by famous British writer, Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter. Relations between Pinter's novel and mythopoetic, metapoetic codes of European literature are being studied: the dwarfs' plot is observed in the context of Homer's Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost, Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, Joyce's Ulysses, Beckett's Watt. The article suggests that images of dwarfs have different functions in world literature: from referencing the mythological tradition to denoting metanarrative self-reflection. Different kinds of cultural and literal references are being described as well as their place in the narrative structure of The Dwarfs. Narrative devices that belong to the communication side of the work are being analysed. there are several conclusions about functioning of the intertext in the literature of the absurd.