, as is clear from the end of his last speech: "Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!" (529).
The setting of the play has great influence on the characters. The bulk of the action takes place in the 1930s, in the Wingfield small apartment in the lower middle class section of the city of St. Louis. 1930s was, in fact, the time of Depression. It was the time when the American economy was collapsing. It was also after the First World War and thus people were undergoing moral decline. The play deals with the downfall of social values, family responsibilities and the belief in religion. These downfalls naturally led the people to deeply experience insecurity. It is, in fact, emotional and financial insecurities that the characters suffer from. .
The characters are driven into illusionary world as the result of their emotional and financial insecurities. All the members of Wingfield family are unsuccessful in accepting the realities of the world in which they live. As a result, they withdraw into a private and illusionary world, the only place wherein they can feel secure and comfortable. According to Eric P. Levy:.
Each character is hampered in relating to others by the need to inhabit a private world where the fundamental concern is with self-image. Some characters (Amanda and Jim) use others as mirrors to reflect the self-image with which they themselves wish to identify. Other characters (Laura and Tom) fear that through relation to others they will be reduced to more reflections, trapped in the mirror of the other's judgment. In virtue of this preoccupation with self-image and the psychological mirrors sustaining it, the world of the play is aptly named after glass. (529).
Judieth Thompson, in Tennessee Williams: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, makes a connection between the existence of other characters and Tom's consciousness. According to Thompson Williams' characters "are representatives of a modern suffering humanity, victimized by their own conflicting drives and desires and existentially alienated from a world become a metaphysical 'heap of broken images' " (11).