Arthur Miller's Willy Loman and Tennessee Williams' Amanda Wingfield are two characters surprisingly parallel in structure. In the plays Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie, Willy and Amanda, respectively, are incessantly affected by their pasts and find it difficult to maintain focused on their present lives. The state of Willy and Amanda's current lives negatively contrast to their pasts. This causes them to dwell on how their lives used to be and they are only content living through their memories. The two characters are, however, different in one respect: the reasons behind their fixations with the past, which is why Willy Loman can be described as a tragic figure and Amanda Wingfield cannot.

In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield is a single mother of two who, in her younger days, was quite popular with the "cream of the crop" society boys. She constantly received gentlemen callers...