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Thornton Wilder’s in our town
Thornton Wilder’s in our town
Analysis of the "Our Town
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Thornton Wilder's Our Town
Our Town is play written a while ago, but it relates to any time. Showing that routine is a part of everybody’s life. No matter what day and age you live in your going to have a routine. This play shows an example of two families and their daily routines. The whole play relates to routine even the different acts.
Our Town takes place in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire around the turn of the century. (1900’s). This play uses a lot of flashbacks. There’s one with George and Emily when they first fall in love at Mr. Morgan’s shop. It also uses foreshadowing. When they told of how everyone died. Another flashback is when Joe comes back after about ten years and they talk about the dead and everyone’s lives.
George was one of my favorite characters. He’s really the only one I could relate to. He seems to be the only one that isn’t caught up in the routine thing as much as the other characters. He plays baseball and loves Emily. He is the protagonist. Emily was a round static character too. Simon the town drunk was an antagonist, flat, and dynamic.
There were 3 acts. These three acts are all different days that are years apart. A cycle, born, get married, and die. In Our Town Act one was the beginning of a day and the childhood of George and Emily. Act two was in the middle of the day years later where George and Emily get married. Finally Act three is the end of the day when Emily is dead and goes back for her twelfth birthday. The stage direc...
The theme of this play is centered around time; the value of the little time we have been given and how that time should be used to live for what is right and what truly matters.
Structure – The work is formatted to be a play. It has three acts, each beginning with stage directions.
In a short story called, “Thank you ma’am”, the author is trying to convey the theme, or message, of the importance of showing random acts of kindness towards others to help institute change. Mrs.J show one act of kindness when she washes his face. Another when she makes Roger food at her house. Mrs.J is kind and shows multiple examples throughout the story.
The first half of the play concerns a celebration - twins Girlie Delaney and Dibs Hamilton are celebrating their 80th birthdays, and with the gathering of their families comes the eruption of simmering resentments and anxieties about the future of Dibs and Farley Hamilton's farm, Allandale. The second half starts with a funeral and portrays the shattering of the tenuous links that held the family together.
The scenes, which cover thirty years of the characters’ lives from eight to thirty-eight, each revolve around an injury that Doug has acquired through his accident prone life. The play progresses in five year intervals, jumping backwards and forwards, in a nonlinear progression. As they travel and run into each other’s lives, the two characters face new injuries. As the play progresses every five years, a new injury is added to one or both characters. Their lives intersect through these injuries, leading them to compare their wounds, both physical (Doug) and emotional (Kayleen), and drawing them closer together. With each new scene, old injuries and problems may have gotten better or resolved, but some became permanent. Yet, through these experiences, they are bonded together through bloodstains, cuts, and bandages.
The first character that stood out the most for me was Peter also known as “The Boy” because his character changed the most from the beginning to the end of the show. At the beginning of the performance, we saw a hopeless, nameless, and friendless orphan who expressed a lot of anger and frustration not only through his words but through his physical actions. I could
The first character that intrigued me, probably because I could relate to him the most was Andrew, the "jock." A jock is the group of people that are athletically inclined and are usually part of a sports team. When all the students were confessing what they had done he seemed the most regretful of his actions. Andrew being a great wrestler at school saw an unsuspecting teammate that was much smaller than he was and decided to jump on him and start beating up on him. What made his case so extreme was that not only did beat up on his teammate but he taped his butt cheeks together. The perception that I, as well as the members of the breakfast club, had of Andrew was that he couldn't think for himself. He also thought the same thing because he said that he felt pressured by his dad to do something mischievous because he (his dad) used to get into mischievous acts often while he was in high school. So while he was looking at his smaller teammate he said that all he could here was his father telling him about being a winner and doing so many unnecessary things just because he was an exceptional athlete. When Andrew told his story it seemed that all the other people were going to cry because they could see that he regretted doing what he did.
In the road of life, the right path may not always be where the road signs lead. The road to self-discovery is found by following one’s heart and mind and to wherever they may lead them. Within the plays Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and Our Town by Thornton Wilder, parallel pathways and contrary connections can be established between the characters coinciding in both. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is the portrait of a sixty year old man reflecting upon his past, one of lies and hopelessness. Upon coming about his past, he finally and fatally, discovers himself at the end of his life. Mr. Webb from Our Town plays the figure of an editor of Grover’s Corner Sentinel and loving father of Emily. Early in the play, he displays knowledge over his own self-discovery, which he hopes to tell others. The self-discovered Mr. Webb raised Emily coherently as a woman who in the end recognized the value of life. Married to George Gibbs, her life was very much comparable to Linda Loman, married to Willy Loman. Linda Loman was a woman dedicated to the needs of her spouse, but also therefore blind to the real needs that Willy desired. In the end, she still was left wondering why or what had gone wrong. Interlocked by protruding parallel traits of progressive self-awareness, these characters promoted the two plays to a higher level of understanding.
The theme of Our Town is that people do not truly appreciate the little things in daily life. This theme is displayed throughout the entire play. It starts in the beginning with everybody just going through their daily life, occasionally just brushing stuff off or entirely not doing or appreciating most things. But as you progress through the story you begin to notice and squander on the thought that the people in the play do not care enough about what is truly important. By the end of this play you realize that almost everybody does not care enough for the little things as they should, instead they only worry about the future, incessantly worrying about things to come.
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
The theme of the play has to do with the way that life is an endless cycle. You're born, you have some happy times, you have some bad times, and then you die. As the years pass by, everything seems to change. But all in all there is little change. The sun always rises in the early morning, and sets in the evening. The seasons always rotate like they always have. The birds are always chirping. And there is always somebody that has life a little bit worse than your own.
People has times that they are looking forward to. The times such as childhood, schooling help lead us through our life. While this way of thinking has many positive side, we forget the appreciation of all details of the moments. We see the moments in Thornton Wilder's play “Our Town”. This 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 to our lives. After looking through the events in the play we might have see as big and important described as relatively simple and straightforward, we begin to question how important that these events are in our life. Not like Emily realize how much of life was ignored until death. But after death, she can see how much everyone goes through life without noticing the events that are occurring all the time.
An ironic ending is also foretold by the town’s setting being described as one of normalcy. The town square is described as being “between the post office and the bank;” every normal town has these buildings, which are essential for day-to-day functioning. The townspeople also establish a normal, comfortable setting for the story. The children are doing what all typical kids do, playing boisterously and gathering rocks. The woman of the town are doing what all stereotypical females do, “exchang[ing] bits of gossip.” The men are being average males by chatting about boring day-to-day tasks like “planting and rain, tractors and taxes.”
All My Sons by Arthur Miller During the course of this essay I will be investigating a play called
The characters I feel show the idea of good is George, Slim and Lennie. I gathered that these three show very powerful elements of good. I suggested George because of his