Disillusionment In Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming

Harold Pinter, a Nobel Prize winning English playwright, is one of the mostinfluential modern dramatists. With his highly personal style and originality, Pinterhas put new blood to contemporary drama and changed the nature of audienceexpectations. Differing from his contemporary working-class realistic playwrights,Pinter elevates the contemporary realistic theatre to a poetic level by probing intomystery, uncertainty and poetic ambiguity behind the seemingly naturalisticcharacters and their daily-life-like conversations. His innovation of writingtechniques and in-depth exploration of humanity assure him a solid position in theclassics of world drama.The Homecoming is widely considered one of Pinter’s masterpieces. It is one ofthe major productions of the Theatre of the Absurd. Under the seeming irrationalityof the characters, however, there are their various expectations of life and theirrespective disillusionments. Ruth, a college professor’s wife, is a fettered female whois chained by marriage and her social position. She expects to change her situation byher power struggles with the male members and her escape from marriage. However,her emancipation turns out to be disillusionment because the patriarchal structure hasnot been subverted. Teddy, the oldest son in the big family, feels confined by hiscrippled family and social class limitations. He expects to break through hispredicaments by leaving his birth family to pursuit success in America andestablishing a perfect family. Contrary to expectations, because of his cold-bloodednature, people leave him one after the other, leaving him dangling alone in this brutalworld. The big family, whose members are disharmonious elements in society, hasbeen suffering from the abhorrent domestic environment. They expect to alter theiradverse circumstances through family completion and individual success. However,they eventually suffer from disillusionment because of the uncontrollable woman, thedetached intellectual and their own unredemptible condition. Since the shake of religion conviction and the destruction of traditional values,modern world has become a spiritual wasteland. In this wasteland, man lacks ameaning, a purpose, and a center to attach to; therefore, he floats rootlessly andrandomly in the universe. In his forever floating, he continues his pursuits of acertainty. However, man’s insistent pursuits can only turn out to be variousdisillusionments eventually. Through depicting different types of disillusionments ofdifferent groups of people in The Homecoming, Pinter successfully communicatesthe total disillusionment of modern people.