The Homecoming is a play with an emphasis on being realistic, thus creating a wholly unrealistic outlook on life. The Homecoming's sparse realism evolves from there is no guarantee that a visitor will possess a visitor's card detailing all his personal information. The desire for verification is often satisfied in a dramatically conventional play but in The Homecoming, it is not. There is no hard distinction between what is real and what is unreal nor between what is true or false. The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression thus convincing the audience of The Homecoming being a series of individuals caught in the tangled web of life. When Teddy enters, the audience knows nothing about him and there are virtually no 'clues.' Neither Teddy nor Ruth brings up their relationship with the family until an indirect force causes Teddy to tell Ruth, "That's my father's chair." However, the lack of clarity makes the play seems unrealistically ambiguous.
             Throughout the play, we are looking for clarification of what we suspect about Mac and Jessie. There is none, just as we are forbidden the comfort of an obvious meaning to the play. "He was very fond of your mother, Mac was. Very fond. He always had a good word for her. Pause. Mind you, she 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."
             The pauses, as shown above, emphasize Pinter's naturalistic ability to hint at something and provoke the audience to recognize the complications of each character, making the language in the play often seem superficial. In this extract, the pause is Max's train of thought. The only way to link the two parts of speech is by realizing that Jessie must have done something terrible to make Max say "mind you". Perhaps he is trying to convince himself. "Anyway" and "even" serve the same purpose as "mind you" al...