Tom is a character who exists outside (being the narrator) and inside the play's action at the same time. What this means is The narrator breaks the ideal "fourth wall" of the drama by addressing the audience directly. Tom also tells us that he is going to give the audience truth disguised as illusion, making the audience conscious of the deceptive quality of theatre.
When you see him standing on the fire escape close to the Wingfield apartment, Tom is the narrator. He is outside the action. He can be funny, as when he describes his runaway father as a,
"Telephone man who fell in love with long distances."
Out of his family, Tom favours his sister Laura who seems to have an effect on his affections for her. He says at the end of the play,
"Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!"
Memory is a strong force that Tom can't escape from. As the story develops we see Tom step over the bounds of a brotherly concern for Laura into a more hopeless relationship.
Because the whole play is Tom's memory brought to life on the stage, Tom may be the most important character. Tom sets the emotional mood of the play and reveals only what he wants you to know about his family. If Amanda or Laura narrated the play, we can only imagine how different it would be. We rarely see Tom in a cheerful mood. He complains, groans, sulks, argues, or pokes fun at others, especially at his mother, Amanda. He quarrels about inviting home a gentleman caller for Laura. He also hates it when his mother constantly talks of her past.
To cope with frustration and pain Tom sometimes uses bitter humour. When Amanda accuses him of leading a shameful life, he knows it's by now it is stupid to argue. So he jokes with his mother about his second identity as "Killer Wingfield" and "El Diablo," the prince of the underworld. Or when Amanda is about to start reminiscing about Blue Mountain, he comments ironically to Laura, "I know what's coming."
The whole play is set in the Wingfields' apartment, which faces an alley in the downtown slums of St. Louis. In the stage directions Tennessee Williams draws a vivid picture of the place. It's cramped and dark, almost like a jail cell. You can't tell it apart from the thousands of other apartments occupied by people trapped in dull and joyless lives. No one in the family wants to live there. But poverty forces them to. This is why “escape” is a major theme in the play. In the apartment there are the usual rooms and the fire escape, which Tom uses to enter and exit the place. There is a smiling photo of Mr. Wingfield displayed on the wall. It is strange that Amanda, who constantly ridicules her husband, keeps it there. Perhaps Amanda keeps the photograph as a remembrance from her past. To may see it as a reminder that escape is possible since his father did it.
Tennessee Williams says the screen is used for,
‘…bearing images or titles’
and the purpose of it is to,
‘…give accent to certain values in each scene’
The screen is used to emphasise the importance of something referred to by the characters. It is one of the play's most unique stylistic features is the use of an onstage screen on which words and images relevant to the story are projected.
For example, when an image of blue roses appears in Scene Two; sometimes it refers to something from a character's past or fantasy, as when the image of Amanda as a young girl appears in Scene Six. At other times, it seems to function as a slate for impersonal commentary on the events and characters of the play, as when "Ou sont les neiges" (from a French poem praising beautiful women) appear in Scene One as Amanda's voice is heard offstage.
What appears on the screen generally emphasises themes or symbols that are already established quite obviously by the action of the play.
The device thus seems at best ironic, and at worst somewhat arrogant. Directors who have staged the play have been, for the most part, very doubtful about the effectiveness and value of the screen, and virtually all have chosen to eliminate it from the performance.
According to Tom, The Glass Menagerie is a memory play—both its style and its content are shaped and inspired by memory. The Dim lights keep details from being seen because details fade from the memory first. The electric company turns off the Wingfields' power (Scene Six). The characters must then use candles, which soften the illumination and add the aura of romance to Jim's visit with Laura. Tom often associates images of Laura with candlelight. To rid himself of the haunting memories of his sister, he implores Laura to "blow out your candles." At the same time Tom may be urging Laura out of her dimly lit past. Her world of candlelight and little glass animals will no longer do, for "nowadays the world is lit by lightning." This could also be a reference to the war.
Music is used often in ‘The Glass Menagerie’, both to emphasise themes and to improve the drama. The music is comes from outside the play, not from within it and though the audience can hear it the characters cannot. For example, a musical piece called "The Glass Menagerie,” plays when Laura's character or her glass collection comes to the front of the action. This piece makes its first appearance at the end of Scene One, when Laura notes that Amanda is afraid that she will end up an old maid.
The music comes from inside play. It is a part of the action, and the characters can hear it. Examples of this are the music that comes from the Paradise Dance Hall and the music Laura plays on her record player. The Paradise Dance Hall plays a song called "The World is waiting for the Sunrise" while Tom is talking about the approach of World War II.
Laura’s glass menagerie is the play's central symbol. Laura's collection of glass animals represents some of her personalities. Like them, Laura is delicate, fancy, and somehow old-fashioned. The menagerie also represents the imaginative world to which Laura devotes herself - A world that is colourful and interesting but based on fragile illusions.
The glass unicorn in Laura's collection—significantly, her favourite figure—represents her strange character. As Jim points out, unicorns are "extinct" in modern times and are lonesome as a result of being different from other horses. Laura too is unusual, lonely, and doesn’t seem to fit in with the life she lives. The event involving the glass unicorn personifies what happens to her in scene seven. When Jim dances with and then kisses Laura, the unicorn's horn breaks off, and it becomes just another horse. Jim's advances contribute to Laura’s ‘change’, making her seem more like just another girl, but the violence with which this ‘change’ is thrown upon her means that Laura cannot become normal without somehow shattering. Eventually, Laura gives Jim the unicorn as a "souvenir." Without its horn, the unicorn is more appropriate for him than for her, and the broken figurine represents all that he has taken from her and destroyed in her.
I have come to the conclusion that the staging implications of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ are the foundation of which this play stands on. Because it is a play this is clear because it is a play we can also read what the screen devices show and see when the lights change, for example, and for what reasons. The music, light and screen give us an idea of how the play is set up and sets the mood of the whole scene.