The Importance Of Tom's Life In The Glass Menagerie

The physical setting was especially hard for Tom and made him feel trapped. Imagine if eternal happiness was waiting right outside? The setting is supposed to show how close he is to being free but his family has trapped him. The only places Tom went, besides the movies, was the warehouse and home which were the two places he hated most in the world. He had to pass paradise every day to get to work and home, which was extremely hard for Tom. In the play, Tom says, “Across the valley was the Paradise Dancehall….Here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like chandeliers and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows” (Williams 32-33). He was looking at all the fun that …show more content…
The “brief deceptive rainbows” Tom refers to is the way he looks at the world, it is pretty for a short period of time but then all that happiness disappears. That is what happened in Tom’s …show more content…
All of these characters have their own psychological conflicts and different ways of desperately trying to cope with their problems. The most influential theme in this play is escaping, the idea seems to motivate every important decision these characters make in their lives. Every character has their own way of escaping reality rather it be a glass menagerie, a bottle of alcohol, or a slew of memories from the past, every character is clinging to something. The symbolism displays the freedom that Laura and Tom were chasing from their broken reality. The characterization shows the different actions taken by the characters to deal with their everyday sadness. The setting is to help the reader visualize when and why it was so difficult for Tom to resist external temptations. Tennessee Williams writes the play in which symbolism, characterization, and setting are the most influential literary devices used to display the overall theme of escape from