The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams (1944)
“The play that invented the memory play — and the most honest thing Williams ever wrote about guilt, love, and the people we leave behind.”
Character Analysis
Tom is both the play's narrator and its guilty conscience. He is trapped between duty to his family and need for his own life, and he chooses his own life — which is the only honest choice the play allows him, and one he spends the rest of his life regretting. His poet's sensibility is established in the first scene and confirmed by the lyrical beauty of his retrospective narration. He is becoming his father, and he knows it, and he leaves anyway. The final monologue is the play's moral core: he got out, and he cannot forget what it cost.
Shifts between the formal literary cadences of his private self and the flat working-class speech of the warehouse. Never sounds like a poet when he's being a son.