The Glass Menagerie is a book about a guy named Tom Wingfield who's telling his story through memory and lives in St. Louis with his mother, Amanda, and his sister, Laura Wingfield, who is crippled. Tom works in shoe warehouse to support his mother and is an aspiring poet but never really gets his dreams along with Amanda and Laura. The most important theme in the book I chose to write about is escaping reality. In the play the characters Amanda, Laura, and Tom all have real life problems and are desperately trying to achieve their dreams, but never quite get their and they create a fantasy world to escape from reality. For example when Laura was starting to get very close to Jim and was finally overcoming her shyness, She went back to her fantasy world of glass animals, listening to her mothers old records, and playing the Victorla. She did this wanting to escape her real-life situation with Jim, when he told her he was engaged.

Amanda, Tom's mother escapes reality by always talking about the past, such as Jim does, about how she was a very popular gentleman caller and got seventeen callers. And she is always acting as if Laura isn't crippled and different. She calls it,"a little-defect-hardly noticeable." And that is her way to get away from the harsh realities of her life. Another of the characters trying to escape from reality is Tom when he is in his depressed state because he can't fit in at his warehouse job and can't take his problems, every night he says, " I'm going to the movies, he is using that as an escape from his problems and dreaming of another world he would like to be in. Another way he escapes is when Tom's mother is nagging him he goes to fire escape to get from her and also writes poetry. Tom is really moving towards his father's footsteps to go out and venture out in the world, avoiding mental suffocation from his problems, leaving his family behind. And in the end Tom did follow his fathers footsteps and in hope that he would have that great free felling, he was extremely depressed from the guilt of leaving his family behind and didn't get the escape he wanted all along.