Essay on Tom in The Glass Menagerie -- Glass Menagerie essays

The Character of tom in The Glass Menagerie Tom Wingfield has a dual division in The Glass Menagerie. The first Tom is the narrator, who introduces his second self, the character. In his twenty percent soliloquy, Tom the narrator indicates that time has detached him from the drama, for time is the longest remoteness between two places (Williams 1568). In the closing soliloquy Tom recounts how he lives and re-lives the story in his memory, though he is detached from the participants in the received affair. Like his father, a telephone man who fell in passion with long places, (Williams 1523), Tom has fallen in love with the long distance that is time. Tom is a sensitive, artistic man who is forced by mass into a phenomenological situation. He is compelled to live and re-live the situation of the play, in which he desire for and found what he believed to be freedom. Although he escapes the situation, he does not get hold freedom his consciousness forces him to dwell upon th e situation until he finds meaning in it. Because Mr. Wingfield, Laura, Amanda, and Jim are parts of ...