The Homecoming

“[Your mother] wasn’t such a bad woman. Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn’t such a bad bitch. I gave her the best bleeding years of my life, anyway.”

This early utterance from Max is doubly shocking. Its misogyny lends us unmistakable insight into the way Max treats women. It also plunges us straight into Pinter’s world, where a character’s words or behavior can turn almost instantly from affection to malice. In his reply, Lenny accuses Max of being “demented” (9). This might be true, but Max’s erratic behavior is the result not only of physical decline but of a wider social and moral decline too.

. “LENNY. Oh, Daddy, you’re not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don’t use your stick on me, Daddy. No, please. It wasn’t my fault, it was one of the others. I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad, honest. Don’t clout me with that stick, Dad.

Lenny mocks his father Max as the pair argue. Here, Pinter’s “Silence” gives the audience a moment to let Lenny’s sarcasm register and his impertinence to fester. This is not a family as most people know it; rather, it is one where traditional filial loyalties are fast eroding. Since Max’s walking stick is a phallic symbol, Lenny’s mockery of it is a challenge to both his manhood and his position as family patriarch.

“…I told this man today I was in the second world war. Not the first. I told him I was too young for the first. But I told him I fought in the second.”

Sam recounts with pride how he forged a connection with a passenger he drove to the airport. World War II provides a shared experience for the men in Pinter’s world to bond over, but when referenced in retrospect, it also becomes a class signifier.