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Analysis Of The Book ' The Warehouse '

Decent Essays

prison that shackles all the basic impulses with which, he believes, men are endowed "Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter" (Williams). In the warehouse, Tom does not find any satisfaction at all "I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains than go back mornings!" (Williams) let alone amiable, intimate friendship or companionship. Even more stifling to his poetic creativity is his home where Amanda, prompted by her motherly solicitude and her fear for the family’s sole source of income, is the major obstacle to his creative concentration. Home is more like a cage as oppressive as the warehouse by Amanda’s austere parental control and over-protectiveness (Ng). During meals, she insists that he listen to …show more content…

The present does not satisfy him working 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, 190). Jim reminisces about his lead in the operetta and Laura asks him to sign her program. He signs it "with a flourish" (Williams 218). Only as Jim enters the Wingfield’s illusory world, can he become this high school hero again. Subsequently, Jim regresses to his high school days of wooing women as he woos innocent Laura by dancing with her and kissing her. While this might as well be an illusion, the situation’s reality is that Jim is engaged. Unlike the Wingfield’s, Jim can only live temporarily in the past. Thus, he leaves the dream world of the Wingfields. Amanda constantly lives in her past and generates devastating consequences for her children. The fate of Amanda’s children is her fault, crippling them psychologically and emotionally, seriously inhibiting their own quests for maturity and self-realization. Amanda lives in a fantasy world of dreamy recollections, and her children cannot escape from this illusory world either. She suffers from a psychological impulse to withdraw into a fabricated "lost" time. The present exists for this family only to the degree that it can be verified by

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