The Illusion of Truth in Tennessee William’s Play “the Glass Menagerie.”

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ENG 113 8 December 2009 The Illusion of Truth in Tennessee William’s Play “The Glass Menagerie.” We become aware of the delicate balance between truth and illusion from the moment the play begins. In the first scene Williams introduces Tom Wingfield, who serves as a character in the play as well as the narrator, delivering a speech to the audience: “ Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (972 ). (Rusinko). Tom feels imprisoned by his life and is suffocating. He tells his sister Laura about a magic show he saw the previous evening. Tom recounts the magician’s best trick of the night, one in which he got himself out of a coffin which had been nailed shut, without removing a single nail (Panesar ). He tells Laura: “There is a trick that trick would come in handy for me-- get me out of this 2-by-4 situation!” (985). Tom relates to the magician on a personal level feeling as though his family and his job at the warehouse have put him into a coffin of sorts. Tom attempts to escape the drudgery of his mindless job and the pressure of supporting his family by creating a fantasy word. He writes poetry at work, spends his evenings at the theatre, and drinks whiskey to numb his mind, all attempts to escape his reality. The play shifts back and forth from past to present balancing “illusion with reality, fragility with brutality, mind with body, [and] freedom of the imagination with imprisonment of the real world” (Rusinko). Williams uses the fire escape as a representation of the connection between the world of illusion each character has created and the real external world. Rusinko comments that Tom goes out on the fire escape to smoke, stepping out of the suffocating feeling he McCall 2
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