Avoiding Reality in The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams presents us with four characters whose lives seem to consist in avoiding reality more than facing it. Tom uses the movie theaters and dreams of a better life to avoid the harsh fact that he has nothing. Laura uses her victrola and collection of glass animals to help maintain her fantasy world. She would much rather pretend to be somewhere else than actually be somewhere else. Amanda lives her life through her childrens lives. This helps her to avoid seeing how truly sad her state of life has become. And Jim, who probably has the least need to escape reality, by avoiding telling people whats really going on in his life. Instead of telling Laura that he is engaged, he takes her memories of him as the high school hero and feeds off them. All the characters seem to separate themselves from the cruel realities of their lives. Their efforts to escape serve only to distract them from their problems. Laura is till an introverted, dependent, sad girl. Tom still faces a dead-end life, though he runs away to find his dream. Amanda still has no means to support herself and Laura and remains beset by a past colored by fantasy. Jim leaves the stage and we wonder if he ever leaves the warehouse. The play, like our own lives , is filled with possible escapes. The characters, like so many of us, try to find their ways out but succeed in tangling themselves in their problems. And we the audience wonder at it all.
The Pharcyde is an alternative rap quartet from South Central Los Angeles founded by MCs/producers: Tre "Slimkid" Hardson, Derrick "Fatlip" Stewart, Emandu “Imani” Wilcox, and Romye "Booty Brown" Robinson (AllMusic). In the late 1980s, Hardson, Robinson, and Wilcox worked together as dancers and choreographers in the Los Angeles underground club circuit (AllMusic). Stewart joined the group in 1990 and under the guidance of a high school music teacher they gained knowledge of the recording process and the music industry (AllMusic). The Pharcyde “maintained a willfully weird vision” with their music in contrast to a large number of West Coast rappers in this time period that focused primarily on the “gangsta’ rap” image (The Pharcyde). In 1991, the group signed a record deal with Delicious Vinyl and released their debut album Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (AllMusic). They released their second album, LabCabInCalifornia in 1994 and although it did not reach gold status as their first album had, the single “Drop” produced an innovative music video.
Firstly let us consider conflict. In each act of the play, we see the overpowering desire to belong leading to a climax of conflict amongst the characters, which has the consequence of exclusion. Conflict is a successful literary technique, as it engages the audience and focuses our attention on the issue of conflict and exclusion, brought about by the characters’ desires to be accepted by their community.
...le for them throughout the play, and it came to a head at the end of their lives. This play highlights the importance of identity, by showing what happens without it. Without your identity, you will pass through life with no purpose, until you stopped living.
Richard Millhouse Nixon, 37th president of the United States (1969-1972) was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon was one of the most controversial politicians of the twentieth century. He built his political career on the communist scare of the late forties and early fifties, but as president he achieved détente with the Soviet Union and opened relations with the People's Republic of China. His administration occurred during the domestic upheavals brought on by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. He was re-elected in 1972 by an overwhelming margin, but less than two years later, he was forced to become the first man to resign the presidency amid the scandal and shame of Watergate. He staged a difficult political comeback in 1968, after purportedly retiring from politics, and by the end of his life, he had shed some of the scourge of Watergate and was again a respected elder statesman, largely because of his record on foreign policy. He died on February 22, 1994. His writings include three autobiographical works, Six Crises (1962), RN: the Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), and In the Arena (1990).
Richard Milhous Nixon was born to Frank and Hannah Nixon on January 9, 1913. He was the second eldest son of five sons and was born and raised in Yorba Linda, California. His father worked as a jack of all trades until buying a family operated store where Richard worked as a child. Hannah Nixon taught Richard to read young, and by age five he was solidly progressing in the three R's. Throughout school Richard was always among the top of his class and upon graduation from Whittier High School he was offered financial scholarships to both Yale and Harvard. The scholarships covered tuition only and Richard was forced to decline them because he would be unable to afford the cost of living while away at school. Instead he attended Whittier College in 1930 and was either President of Vice President of his class three of the four years he was in school. He then was awarded another scholarship to Duke Law School in 1934. In 1937 he graduated form Duke and moved back to California. Three years later he married Patricia Ryan on June 24,1940.
...1998 for his long and successful career in music (Elton John). He continues to perform “Your Song” in all of his concerts and once said, “I don’t think I’ve written a love song as good since.”
...usual life such as Emily who turned into a murderer, killing her own boyfriend and Louise Mallard dead after living her "real life" for one hour, feels her feeling free from repression during her husband death and finally died of heart disease when she knew that her husband is alive.
The play is a brutally honest reflection of our own lives and the world in which we appear—dumbfounded and gullible, and bombarded by “truths” (best guesses, opinions, and whatever scientific data has been amassed so far) on which to form our basic understanding. We are reminded that everyone, to varying degrees, must deal with an environment that is impossible to truly understand. Babies may be fed with no knowledge of farms, as senior citizens may wander the halls of nursing homes, slowly forgetting the family that left them there. Every path and decision we laboriously choose, our environment and all that it contains, our entire existence itself, is due to circumstances far beyond our control or comprehension, forged from elements whose origins we have no power to reveal. Perhaps most importantly, we are reminded that regardless of our efforts, in the end, we will die. Like the bumbling tools of royalty Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all of our questions, thoughts, and lamentations will disappear with our bodies as we reach our fated ends.
Everybody wants to be the best. However, how can we be the best when all we look at is personal desire? In order to succeed in the society we live in, as individuals, it is necessary that we learn to compromise our happiness in certain situations. We all urge to succeed and strive to win. But success, comes with sacrifices. Success means, giving up and compromising your happiness for what’s right. In “Advice to the Players”, Bruce Bonafede demonstrates this concept in the lives of the characters of his play. He displays that the idea of conforming, is in an individual’s best interest, even if at times it is a hard decision to make. Not everybody has enough courage to compromise their happiness, when the option of pursuing your happiness is available. These two ideas continuously conflict with each other and lead to risky choices made by the characters Robert, Oliver and Tyler. This modern drama explores the idea of how these individuals deal with numerous dilemmas choosing to either compromise their happiness, or letting personal desires come first. Bruce Bonafede, displays many ways in which the characters of this text make difficult choices throughout the play, in order to protect those who they care for, make the safer decision which also is beneficial to the individual. The characters accomplish this through sacrifice and compromise. The reader explores the obstacles these characters face in which they choose to compromise their happiness and put the happiness of others before them. The author demonstrates the unique power of this throughout this text and we explore the numerous ways in which these characters compromise their happiness.
... as it unfolds. It is saddening to see these characters fail again and again to understand each other, and themselves. Within our own lives however, we are not so different from the characters of the play. Many things are beyond our comprehension, and it is easy for suffering to arise when people are without understanding. Alas, Shakespeare has given us fair warning of the tragedy that could spring from incomprehension. It would be unwise to take this warning for granted; perhaps a pursuit of greater understanding will correlate with less tragedy among our lives.
In the play there are no signs of life, as we know it. It is filled with empty words. The expletives add to the theme of emptiness. They are empty words. They do not complete thoughts. The characters very seldom complete a sentence. They never complete a deal and the play does not really complete itself. The readers are left wondering about things that might happen. It is incomplete. There is no growth or resolution by any of the characters. Things rearrange in the character's lives but nothing changes. No one is complete or happy. No one has made any substantial gain. There is no satisfaction for the reader. The play is not rewarding but merely a window of a world that has ruined life and is completely incomplete.
Generally when some one writes a play they try to elude some deeper meaning or insight in it. Meaning about one's self or about life as a whole. Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" is no exception the insight Williams portrays is about himself. Being that this play establishes itself as a memory play Williams is giving the audience a look at his own life, but being that the play is memory some things are exaggerated and these exaggerations describe the extremity of how Williams felt during these moments (Kirszner and Mandell 1807). The play centers itself on three characters. These three characters are: Amanda Wingfield, the mother and a women of a great confusing nature; Laura Wingfield, one who is slightly crippled and lets that make her extremely self conscious; and Tom Wingfield, one who feels trapped and is looking for a way out (Kirszner and Mandell 1805-06). Williams' characters are all lost in a dreamy state of illusion or escape wishing for something that they don't have. As the play goes from start to finish, as the events take place and the play progresses each of the characters undergoes a process, a change, or better yet a transition. At the beginning of each characters role they are all in a state of mind which causes them to slightly confuse what is real with what is not, by failing to realize or refusing to see what is illusioned truth and what is whole truth. By the end of the play each character moves out of this state of dreamy not quite factual reality, and is better able to see and face facts as to the way things are, however not all the characters have completely emerged from illusion, but all have moved from the world of dreams to truth by a whole or lesser degree.
In Williams, Tennessee’s play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda’s image of the southern lady is a very impressive. Facing the cruel reality, she depends on ever memories of the past as a powerful spiritual to look forward to the future, although her glory and beautiful time had become the past, she was the victim of the social change and the Great Depression, but she was a faithful of wife and a great mother’s image cannot be denied.
In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the roles of the members of the Wingfield family to highlight the controlling theme of illusion versus reality. The family as a whole is enveloped in mirage; the lives of the characters do not exist outside of their apartment and they have basically isolated themselves from the rest of the world. Even their apartment is a direct reflection of the past as stories are often recalled from the mother's teenage years at Blue Mountain, and a portrait of the man that previously left the family still hangs on the wall as if his existence is proven by the presence of the image. The most unusual factor of their world is that it appears as timeless. Amanda lives only in the past while Tom lives only in the future and Laura lives in her collection of glass animals, her favorite being the unicorn, which does not exist. Ordinary development and transformation cannot take place in a timeless atmosphere such as the apartment. The whole family resists change and is unwilling to accept alteration. Not only is the entire family a representation of illusion versus reality, each of the characters uses fantasy as a means of escaping the severity of their own separate world of reality. Each has an individual fantasy world to which they retreat when the existing world is too much for them to handle. Each character has a different way of dealing with life when it seems to take control of them, and they all become so completely absorbed in these fantasies that they become stuck in the past.
... into the power of temptation. The entertainment of the play hides the lessons being portrayed in the play.