SOURCE: Bernard, Kenneth. “Pinter's The Homecoming.” Explicator 52, no. 2 (winter 1994): 116-19.

In the following essay, Bernard comments that Pinter's The Homecoming is structured around a contrast between America and England, according to which America represents a fantasized promised land and England represents the harsh realities of life.

Harold Pinter's The Homecoming derives much of its impact from its calculated assault on the viewer's normal expectations about family life. Pinter's lower-class English family is in no usual sense a family. Instead of a home, the house is a cage in which the inmates snarl and scratch at one another; life there is a community of vituperation. In what obviously passes for everyday discourse, Max, the family patriarch, describes his dead wife as having a “rotten stinking face,” himself as a “lousy filthy father,” his brother as a “tit” and a “maggot,” his daughter-in-law as a “pox-ridden slut,” and her husband...