The Glass Menagerie

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

In this first line, Tom sets up the narrative as unstable and himself as an unreliable narrator. Rather than presenting the story in a realistic way—“illusion that has the appearance of truth”—he offers an account of the narrative that opts for locating a truth and presenting it through illusion. The point of Tom’s memory is to share this truth, which is less important than exactness and accuracy. In his production notes, Tennessee Williams suggests:

When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually our should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are (752).

Similarly, Tom is promising something truer than realism.

“The play is a memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

Tom identifies mankind’s tendency to romanticize memory, which seems like a trap in the attempt to relay truth. Rather than fight the impetus to sentimentalize, Tom embraces it. His memory is embellished, and as a poet, he admits that he likes to symbolize. But the truth of the story doesn’t lie in faithful representation, but rather the meaning of his interpretations.