Life In Small Town

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The play Our Town, illustrates the true meaning of small town living. When living in a small town, people see a familiar face wherever they go and know everyone’s business. The life in a small town can lack options for entertainment at times. A person living in a town such as Colby might fall into a daily routine. The citizens of Grover’s Corners live a basic life throughout the majority of the play. The play portrays the daily life, love and marriage, and how delicate life can amount to. The life lived today in Colby compared with Grover’s Corners depicts several similarities as well as differences. Each person in the small town live a simple life that includes their basic needs: working, their political philosophy and their religious …show more content…
Our Town demonstrates love and marriage as a joyous occasion. In the small town of Grover’s Corners, Emily and George marry at a young age compared with Colby where people marry a little later in life. Just before George and Emily become married, the two experience “cold feet”. In the same way, young couples today sense this uneasiness of getting married. Additionally, the characters of Our Town practice the same tradition of not seeing their groom or bride on their wedding day. Toward the end of George and Emily’s wedding, Mrs. Soames explains the importance of love. This appears in the following line, “The important thing is to be happy” (Wilder 49). With this, people in the small town of Colby don’t always have a happy marriage. In addition, in Colby, marriages take place on the weekends rather than Tuesday, exhibited in Our Town. Besides the marriage that takes place, the fragility of life shown in Act III displays how a life can end very …show more content…
The fragility of life shows very true for Emily. Her unexpected death during childbirth leaves her husband and family members to grieve her loss. Likewise, the community of Colby pays respect to loved ones through funeral services. More importantly, the characters in Our Town have regrets while dying just like people today. Later, Emily goes back in time to reminisce over her past life. Although the characters persuade her not to relive the past, Emily looks back to her twelfth birthday. Emily realizes her mistake in the following lines, “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another” (Wilder 62). This explains how in a small town no person truly appreciates or remembers the simple things in life. Also, Emily died in childbirth due to the lack of medical intervention. Seldom do women die in childbirth today because of modern medicine. Act III emphasizes the importance of how life can flash before a person’s

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