Analyzing Wilder's Our Town

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One of Wilder’s prominent themes is the rapid passage of time. Time moves very quickly throughout the entire play. While Our Town spans the course of many years it also collapses its events into the span of one day. Wilder expresses that birth and death seem inevitable so humans need to make the most with what they have. Our Town represents human life on the matter that nobody can escape death. In the afterlife, Emily and Mrs. Gibbs both state that the living don’t know how special life really is.
Death is a fundamental part of life and was clearly prominent in Wilder’s Our Town. Emily was eager to try and go back to the living that she didn’t realize how painful it could be to watch herself re-live her life. Emily quickly learned …show more content…

Wilder begins to believe whether humans understand how blessed we are to have the earth and the delicate nature of life. In the very beginning of Our Town, the Stage Manager states “Daily Life,” this shows how many people believe life is boring and repetitive and don’t understand the true value of routine life: “Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners . . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you” (108). In this play Wilder expresses how the simplest things in life can be a blessing such as eating breakfast and pulling weeds in a garden. In Our Town Wilder shows how the characters’ don’t realize the hectic battle of everyday activities to be a gift. The characters are mostly unaware of the small details of their lives and usually accept them to be boring and uneventful. In Act I, The Gibbs and Webb families rush through the house to get ready for school, and the children rapidly eat their breakfast and race to school. Like most human beings, the Gibbs and the Webb family uphold the false assumption that they have an infinite amount of time on Earth. The reason for Mrs. Gibbs not convincing her husband for traveling to Paris is because she too believed she had many more years until she even has to think about death. This occurs in real life, people believe they have an unlimited amount of time until they die, and they then put off dream

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