Walter Mitty Reality Vs Reality Essay

The text from A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, both written by the renowned author Tennessee Williams, deal with the topics of life's pressures, and the desire to succeed in everything we do. Oftentimes, people place unrealistic expectations upon us and set the bar higher than we can achieve, or even want to reach. People end up developing mechanisms to deal with these stresses and tensions that have been created (Billington 2016). We find other unhealthy habits and vices to supplant the reality we are trying to escape, that hopefully will take away this pain and suffering we are experiencing. In both of these plays, the characters are not able to live in their present realities. Two of the main characters are closely listate.

Realism is “An attempt to reproduce faithfully the surface appearance of life, especially that of ordinary people in everyday situations” (Kennedy 2081). Realism is shown throughout the two following plays. The Glass Menagerie is a play written by Tennessee Williams, and it was published in the year of 1945. The play being compared is A Doll’s House, written by Henrik Ibsen it was published in the year of 1879. In A Glass Menagerie realism is shown through the fact that Tom’s family is struggling with money. Tom can be seen as the protagonist of the story. Similarly, in A Doll’s House Nora’s family was struggling with money up until this year. Nora can be seen as the protagonist in this story. In A Doll’s House the claims given about

     The plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun, deal with the love, honor, and respect of family. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, the caring but overbearing and over protective mother, wants to be taken care of, but in A Raisin in the Sun, Mama, as she is known, is the overseer of the family. The prospective of the plays identify that we have family members, like Amanda, as overprotective, or like Mama, as overseers. I am going to give a contrast of the mothers in the plays.

The narrator is given a sense of oppression from the beginning of the story by keeping a hidden diary from her husband as “a relief to her mind.” Throughout the story her true thoughts are hidden from the readers and her husband, which gives the story a symbolic perspective.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very present one” –Albert Einstein. This quote by one of the most impactful men in the world emphasizes that although reality is not set in stone and changes constantly, it is an unavoidable part of life. This means that if someone refuses to accept their realities, it is due to issues within them that are unresolved. Holden, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, has extreme difficulty with facing the world around him, thus resulting in the restriction of him growing and evolving as a character. This is due to multiple reasons which include the fact that he never experienced closure from his brother Allies’ death, he does not want to lose his childhood innocence, he feels as though he does not fit in with society and his damaging obsession with mortality.

In most of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories a number of characters have a hard time seeing an ultimate reality in their life. They tend to have a distorted grasp on reality but not all in the same way. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit and the Grandmother are prime examples. The actions and the way of life of the Misfit and Grandmother are mostly due to the fact that they are living in an false reality where they are in their own little world, where in the Misfit’s world everything goes with no worry of repercussion in the Grandmother’s case she can do no wrong because she has a false perception of what is right.

Everyone in the family sticks to their societal role, Tom takes care of the Amanda and Laura, Amanda does some work, but she does do a lot of work in the house, and Laura is attempting to find someone to marry so she does not have to go to work. When Amanda was younger, she tells the reader that she always had gentleman callers, and she is always hoping that Laura will get gentleman callers. An example of Amanda projecting this belief onto Laura is when Amanda says “"Resume your seat, little sister – I want you to stay fresh and pretty – for gentlemen callers! (1.14)”. However, having to take care of his sister and living with Amanda causes tension in Tom’s life. Tom works in a factory, as most men did in the 30s, and this meant that he worked long hours for little pay. Tom wanted to be a poet, but he had to keep working because he had to support his family. Amanda puts a lot of pressure on Tom to be there for his sister, to be his older sister’s guardian, and she gets upset when Tom is out late drinking and going to the movies as his

When the story begins, Mrs. Maloney is characterized as the epitome of the obedient and devoted wife that many people dream of. Though as the plot continues to develop, she undergoes events that change her into a woman whose internal devotions and actions are practically unrecognizable as she both kills her husband, and and realized that her true devotion is to herself and the safety of her and her unborn child, not to her husband. A pair of oppositional quotes that illustrate Mrs. Maloney’s difference of feelings related to her husband are, “For her, this was always a wonderful time of day. She knew he didn’t want to talk much until the first drink was finished, and she was satisfied to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house,”

In Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, a common overarching theme is Escapism. Amanda, Laura, and Tom Wingfield all attempt to escape the dull and depressing reality of their situation. They engage in escapism by fleeting into their own idealistic worlds which push them farther apart. Similarly, we can detect the same theme in Gaines book, Lesson Before Dying. In this book various people use escapism to leave their reality and enter this alternate headspace that allows them to feel free of all of their worries. However, it is soon realized that this facad will never last. In this book, Gaines shows how escapism can truly take over someone's

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces” (Sigmund Freud). Illusion can be a part of our lives; however, if taken to the extreme, it can lead one to forget reality. Every individual has problems in life that must be faced with reality and not with illusion, even though it might throw one into flames of fires. Tennessee Williams' play of a family reveals the strength of resistance between reality and desire, judgment and imagination, and between male and female. The idea of reality versus illusion is demonstrated throughout the play. Blanche's

An example of this is how in the beginning of the story she shows outward contempt towards female oriented house work and much prefers helping her father out on the farm. She states, “It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father’s service, was ritualistically important.” The narrator has a love hate relationship with her mother who constantly tries to get her daughter to be more feminine, and who wants her son Laird to grow up quickly so that he can replace the narrator as the fathers helper on the

Walter Mitty is a man who uses his active imagination to escape the pressures of his wife. Shrewd and controlling nature Walter is constantly emasculated as his wife controls him. Walter’s drab life forces him to cope with vivid imaginings of himself taking command in a dangerous situations, however his wife smothers this form of self expression too. A “Jury of Our Peers” is another story which emphasises the downsides and weaknesses of a marital relationships, but instead of fixating on the man’s perspective, like Walter Mitty, now the women’s outlook is explored.

In the words of Sigmund Freud, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The legendary psychologist saw dreams as an avenue to study one’s underlying motives for action. Similarly, in literature one finds striking significance from the illusions of protagonists that often predict the nature of one’s psyche. Two such examples present themselves in Blanche, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and the grandmother, from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. The former tale follows a lady without a home who finds herself reliant on her belligerent and bestial brother-in-law. The latter traces a family’s road trip South and their encounter with a wanted fugitive. Both Blanche and the grandmother find themselves tethered to their idealistic and often times hypocritical fantasies which signify their underlying mental instability and foreshadow their eventual ruinations. Williams and O’Connor examine their protagonists’ delusions through gender, clothing, and nostalgia.

What is reality? Did the past you remember actually happen? Can you exist in two realities at once? Are you who you think you are? Through his work, science fiction author Philip K. Dick implies that we will all be asking such questions soon. For Dick, reality is just one of his layers. All of his novels combined together accurately predicted the world we are in now.

Historically, humanity has been obsessed with discovering the nature of reality. Every person eventually develops their own worldview based on their beliefs, morals, and experiences. At one point in their lives, many people undergo a radical change in perception that forces them to change this view, eventually adopting a new perception of reality. Such a transformation occurs once one starts to question the fundamental nature of one’s own existence and that of the world around them. This realization begins with the disillusionment with one’s environment, continues with the questioning of one’s life’s worth, and concludes with the acceptance of a new worldview.