Important Moments In The Play Our Town

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Everyone has a moment that they are looking forward to. Times like weekends, holidays and days off help guide us through our life. While this way of thinking has many positive aspects, we lose the appreciation of all details of the moments that pass us by. Because we may see moments like holidays as "better" moments, we often fail to see the quality of the smaller ones that we overlook. We see these "small moments" in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. The play takes us to a small town in New England and we see how simple it is, to the point where we may get bored due to the similarity to our lives. After witnessing events in the play we might have formerly perceived as big and important portrayed as relatively simple and straightforward, we begin to question how important these events are in our life. Not until death does one of the characters realize how much of life was ignored. But …show more content…

In Act II, we see the wedding of Emily and George. During the ceremony, Mrs. Soames turns around to talk to us. "Don't know when I've seen such a lovely wedding," (p.77) she says. Although Mrs. Soames is enjoying the wedding, it seems like a typical wedding to us. Mrs. Soames has built up the idea in her head that the wedding will be "lovely", so when it turns out to be a routine wedding, she assumes it is "lovely." From this we see that when we expect enjoy an event, we usually do. Unfortunately, we also tend to have the opposite expectation of other regular days. When we plan on having a normal day, we fail to notice the simple pleasures of the day; we simply pass them off as routine. Wilder wants us to appreciate every day for the way it is, not to just label the important days "good" and ignore the rest. Every day of our lives are unique, the ones with large events may seem more important, but they are really just as significant as any other

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