The Coffin

In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Tom talks about the magic show, specifically about a  coffin. He compares his life to a coffin. He talks about how he is trapped in his home now because he cannot leave until he finds a man for his sister. I think that he compares his home to a coffin because no matter what he tries right now in his life he cannot escape from his house. He talks about how the man at the magic show was nailed into a coffin. "We nailed him to a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail" (Williams, 1249).  The man in the magic show that was trapped in the coffin is very similar to Tom's situation right now. The idea of escaping the coffin without removing a nail symbolizes Tom leaving the family without breaking the family. Since Tom is crucial to his delicate family, he is trying to find a way to leave his family without breaking them and destroying what they have together. Tom struggles with this throughout the novel and the reader never truly learns  how Tom deals with this struggle of escaping the family without breaking it.