Tennessee Williams explores his guilt through Tom's story in the play Glass Menagerie. Similar to Tom, he also abandoned his sister Rose and mother in search for freedom and adventure. However, as the play travels through the three concentric time spheres of the WWII, depression and Amanda's golden era before the great war, the audiences sees how both Williams and Tom have not been able to escape from their guilt towards their sisters. In the denouement of the play, Tom reveals that just seeing 'a glass bottle', some 'shattered glass' reminds him of Laura. The play Glass Menagerie is very much about the contrast between illusion and reality. Almost every character of the play, excluding Jim, escapes into their own illusional world when they are incapable of facing the brutal reality. Amanda constantly remembers her youthful years when she still lived in Blue Mountain with her 'seventeen gentlemen callers'. Her illusional world is the past as her dialogue and costumes constantly demonstrates how she clings onto another time and place. Unlike Amanda, Tom wishes for the future and the outside world beyond the fire escape. He believes that 'man, by instinct, is a lover, a hunter, a fighter' and none of this is satisfied in his warehouse job. At the introducing scene of the play, the audience is already acquainted with his eventual escape as Williams places Tom in the Merchant Sailor's uniform to produce dramatic irony. Williams' constant stage direction reference of Tom moving out to the fire escape also emphasizes Tom's desire for escape from the 'slow burning of implacable fire of human desperation'. In comparison, Laura is wishing to escape from the outside world, as when she attempts to step out of the apartment, she ‘slipped’. She is like the ‘blue rose’ and ‘unicorn’ that belongs to another world. Her ‘unearthly prettiness’ is unfitting in the world around her. She ‘lives in her own world of small glass ornaments’. Like these glass animals, she is fragile and easily broken. Her fragility is emphasized through Williams use of the reoccurring tone of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and the soft ‘pool of light’ which is always associated with Laura’s entrance. To me, personally, the play is powerful in its delivery of the individual characters’ internal emotional struggles. Through an expressionist play, Williams showed me a play that rather demonstrates ‘truth through the pleasant disguise of illusion’. Throughout the whole play, the characters’ decisions and reasons are all clearly shown with a complexity that brings them to life on stage. The most important essence of each character including Laura’s lack of confidence due to her physical defect, Tom’s wish to escape from the burdens of responsibility and Amanda’s nagging due to her extreme love for her children are all captured in Williams’ ‘memory play’. The play truly captures the depression of their time.