In Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation, Harry Rasky uses extensive interviews with Williams to explore the playwright's intent. Through these interviews, Rasky presents a glimpse of the playwright's life-world and the driving force behind his creations. Rasky reports Williams as saying:

"I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect, anyway, and I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge on hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person" (134).

This statement supports the idea that Williams incorporates something crippled into all his major characters. In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams portrays a crippling mother and child relationship comprising fundamental themes of dysfunctionalism. He poignantly illustrates that none of the characters are capable of living in the present. They believe their functionality and life's happiness lies in their repeated quests for escape from plight. As such, they retreat into their separate worlds to escape life's brutalities.

Gist, Richard. The Glass Menagerie 5 April 1997. .

Ng, Ben. "Dreams and the Notion of Escape in the Glass Menagerie." Home page. May 1999 .

Amanda obsesses over her past. The moment Tom or Laura worry her, she uses her Mississippi Delta childhood memories like a cooling balm. She flashes back to her days dancing at the governor's ball in Jackson, Mississippi and recalls the gentlemen's "chivalric nature" during her youth. (Ghiotto) She constantly reminds Tom and Laura about that "one Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain" when she receives seventeen gentlemen callers (Williams, 148). The reader is not confident that this actually occurs. However, it is clear that despite its possible falsity, Amanda has come to believe it. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as "a little defect¾hardly noticeable" (Williams, 157). Only for brief moments does she ever admit that her daughter is "crippled" and then she resorts back to denial.

Accordingly, Judith Thompson, in Tennessee Williams: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, believes that memory is the avenue Williams uses to approach the collective unconscious. Through Tom's recollections, Williams demonstrates how powerful memories revolve around characters whose actions reflect the inner turmoil of the person doing the remembering. Thompson states that Williams' characters "are representatives of a modern suffering humanity, victimized by their own conflicting drives and desires and existentially alienated from a world become a metaphysical 'heap of broken images'" (11). These "representatives" form the constituency of Tom's consciousness; the suffering in each character reflects Tom's pain.

Laura, Amanda, Tom, and Jim resort to various escape mechanisms to avoid reality. Laura, fearful of being denigrated as inferior by virtue of her innate inability to walk, is shy and detaches herself from the unfeeling modern world. Amanda tries every means to integrate her into society, but to no avail. She sends her to business school and invites a gentleman caller to dinner. She is both unable to cope with the contemporary world's mechanization represented by the speed test in typing and unable to make new acquaintances or friends due to her immense inhibition with people. Her life is humdrum and uneventful, yet it is full of dreams and inundated with memories.

Thompson, Judith J. Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Jim, though not as severely as the Wingfields, also reverts to his past as he looks through high school yearbooks with Laura and recalls the days of his heroism. The present does not satisfy him¾working at the same warehouse as Tom, despite Tom's prediction that he would "arrive at nothing short of the White House by the time he was thirty" (Williams, 190). Tom realizes that he "was valuable to him [Jim] as someone who could remember his former glory" (Williams, 19

Some common words found in the essay are:
Laura Laura, Tom Jim, Williams Unable, Wingfields Amanda, Kapcsos Laura's, Tennessee Williams, Thompson Williams', Harry Rasky, Blue Mountain, White House, glass menagerie, tennessee williams, outside world, tom laura, illusory world, williams portrait laughter, glass unicorn, williams 190, gentleman caller, fantasy world, nov 1997, tennessee williams portrait, wingfield's illusory world, memory myth symbol, portrait laughter lamentation,
Approximate Word count = 2022
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)