The Glass Menagerie - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

"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."

The play is introduced to the audience by Tom, the narrator and protagonist, as a memory play based on his recollection of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura.

Amanda's husband abandoned the family long ago. Although a survivor and a pragmatist, Amanda yearns for comforts and admiration she remembers from her days as a fêted Southern belle. She yearns especially for these things for her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp and tremulous insecurity about the outside world. Tom works in a warehouse doing his best to support them. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and spends much of his spare time going to the movies at all hours of the night. Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor for Laura, who spends most of her time with her collection of little glass animals. Eventually Tom brings home an acquaintance from work named Jim, who Amanda hopes will be the long-awaited suitor for Laura. Laura realizes that Jim is the boy she loved in high school and has thought of ever since. After a long evening, Jim and Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for electricity to be restored. During their long scene together, Jim diagnoses Laura's inferiority complex and kisses her. Jim and Laura then share a quiet dance, and he accidentally brushes against the glass menagerie, knocking the glass unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. Jim then reveals that he is already engaged to be married and then he leaves. When Amanda learns that Jim was engaged she assumes Tom knew and lashes out at him.

As Tom speaks at the end of the play, it becomes clear that Tom left home soon afterward and has never returned. In Tom's final speech, he bids farewell to his mother and sister, telling Laura to blow out the candles in her room, which she does as the play ends.