“Time is the greatest distance between two places”.
Tom’s final speech takes us back to the beginning, reminding us that “this is a memory play”, and that there is a great distance back to our past. Tom’s memories are full of pain and regret; regret that he cannot fix the past, especially for his sister Laura. The guilt he feels about his abandoning her haunts him – his memory won’t let him go. “I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be”.  He seeks any diversion that will allow him to escape the memory of her: “anything that can blow your candles out”. His final plea “Blow out your candles, Laura” is to ask her to finally leave him alone.

All of the characters in the play fail to bridge the distance to their past in a way that allows them to truthfully connect with their present. Amanda’s memory of her romantic past is overshadowed by the reality that she chose the wrong man with disastrous consequences. Laura has a false memory of herself at school, over estimating the notice that others made of her disability, tragically inhibiting herself. The whole memory play affirms the impossibility of our accurately reconstructing our past. As Williams tells us memory is “non-realistic”; it is “seated predominantly in the heart”.

The play in its time
As we learn from Tom the play is set sometime around 1938-9. He makes specific references to Picasso’s painting of Guernica, painted in 1937 following the indiscriminate bombing of the town by Nazi war planes allied with General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in September 1938. At the time the play premiered in 1944 Tom would have been speaking to the audience from the vantage point of the war that followed from these events, and which America was now engaged in.

Tom’s references to Guernica and Chamberlain carry some moral judgement, his implication being that America and the Allies were fatally complacent in their responses to Hitler or Franco. At the same time he is telling us that it is art, such as Picasso’s, that draws attention to the truth. Tom refers somewhat elliptically to the explosive changes in the world that the characters don’t see coming, although of course the audience will know what he means when he concisely and poetically identifies the impending change as being “caught in the folds of Chamberlain’s umbrella.” The cataclysmic world changes that Tom describes are aligned with his own youthful urge for adventure. The war is somehow “compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or adventure.” A time when “adventure becomes available to the masses”, as he says to Jim.

It’s a naïve idea about war as adventure, indicating perhaps the depth of Tom’s desire for change in his life, and in the society around him. Williams himself propounds an idea of himself, Tom and the artist as exceptional individuals who will distinguish themselves from the masses and lead more truthful and energetic lives. His view of the masses as stuck in their impoverished lives for lack of initiative is suggested in the description he gives of the Wingfield’s tenement building:
“It is one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centers of lower middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.”

But has Tom’s bid for adventure, to distinguish himself, succeeded? In fact he “didn’t go to the moon”…he only “left St Louis”. The picture we get is of his drifting, swept along “like dead leaves”. In fact as he addresses us in 1944 he is wearing a sailor’s uniform, and as he tells us “nowadays the world is lit by lightning”. Perhaps he is about to find the adventure he seeks.