"The Glass Menagerie" p. 1119 #1

This play combines a variety of realistic and nonrealistic conventions. The characters seem to be mostly realistic in a sense that the family's situation is possible in real life; a mother, son, and crippled daughter could have been abandoned by their father. Laura is realistic because her handicap has left her shy and self-conscious. However, her actions are sometimes slightly nonrealistic when she overreacts to certain situations. For example, she attended one day of business college, but she was able to trick her mother for a long time that she was still attending. "The first time we gave a speed-test, she broke down completely - was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash-room! After that morning she never showed up any more. We phoned the house buy never got any answer" (scene 2, page 1242). The picture is nonrealistic. It is always proudly displayed in the home of the family he left; one would think he would be forgotten and never spoken of again due to the pain at being abandoned. However, his grinning picture is ironically seen throughout the play. The time of the play is also nonrealistic. It cannot be set in a certain time period because the whole play is told as Tom's memory. This also means that there is a biased narrator who was not even present in all of the "memory" scenes of the play. The entire play may or may not be factually true; it all simply occurs as Tom perceived it to be.