Master Harold... and the boys Coming of Age Quotes

In order to fully capture the irony of this scene, we have to imagine it being staged. Two 40-something-year-old men are arguing, messing around as they work, and the seventeen-year-old is their supervisor, telling them to act their age and disciplining them. Hally's trying to step into adulthood by lording it over Willie and Sam. It's very jarring when you see the play—this kid bossing around the older men and knowing he can get away with it.

Hally's nostalgia for Sam and Willie's old room at the Jubilee Boarding House is about feeling safe. He wants to feel like he can handle life, like its problems aren't too big for him. In the years since, as he's entered adolescence, things have gotten "complicated." Hally probably knows that his relationship with his black friends will get more complex now that he's growing up.

Just as he told Willie and Sam to act their age earlier, here he is instructing his mother to treat his father like a child. We can see that Hally's been prematurely pushed into adulthood by having to take care of his alcoholic and disabled father and managing his mother's inability to deal with the situation. But he's still a kid; he shouldn't have to be in this position and he feels pretty helpless about it. His solution is to become bossy and controlling, when he's really feeling out of control of his life and his world.