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Summary: Who is most real, though not enough on any character..
Review: When one thinks of The Glass Menagerie, the first characters that solidify in one's mind tend to be either Tom or Laura Wingfield. If, however, the reader takes a pause, a moment to glance back upon the entire play as a whole, the most realistic of all three characters is not Tom, Laura, Amanda, nor even Mr. Wingfield, but Jim. Jim, the charming young man whose life has flown by him, and who at first seems to live in a world of dreams, shadows, and the past, is in fact, the most "lifelike" of all of the characters in the play.
Jim's life is much like reality at times. His life shows that the only way to go once "at the top" is all the way back down again. It's a combination of Newton's Law and Murphy's Law. He was the hero in his age, but his age is past-like dinosaurs, dodo birds, and thousands of other things, time has washed him away. He is no longer significant, but merely one of five billion people living, breathing, dying on earth. At his high school, yes, he was the hero. In comparison to the rest of the world though, he is only one person, nothing more. Such is Reality. It's just that people rarely realize this. Instead, humans have a tendency to focus everything upon themselves-it's natural to be somewhat egocentric-it's actually survival.
The second way that Jim is very "real", is that he is the only one who is blunt. He tells what is real, and tells it "straight-out". He is rather sincere about what he does and says. He doesn't lie, whereas all of the other characters have either hidden things or lied about them. Tom hides things from his mother and sister, and hid his pain from himself for so long that it built up to the point of an explosion. That is why there is an argument between Tom and his mother; Tom's finally snapped. If he had been honest with himself, he would have realized he hated his job much earlier, and tried to quit much earlier instead of now, when half his youth has been wasted. Amanda exists in a world of lies. She dreams of the past, and lives in it-it's dream she can't wake up from, a dream which she keeps repeating. She will probably live and die in the "past". Not only does she live like that, but she also tries to hide her age, and hide the fact that she Laura's mother by calling Laura her "sister". Laura, who is an introvert, hides from the entire world. She lives like her unicorn-in a glass menagerie, where the slightest disturbance would shatter her mind. She does not fit in, nor does she try, because she is afraid of getting hurt. She shies away from the world not merely because she is crippled, but because she is both a bit agoraphobic and xenophobic. She lies to herself and to others by over-exaggerating her slight handicap to a kind of crippling disease, which eats away at her self-confidence and the sanity of those around her. Jim however, tells Laura that he is to be married, even though he realizes that this may hurt Laura's feelings.
The way that Jim turned out, too, is very realistic-what seems "too good to be true", usually isn't. Jim seemed to be a "Prince Charming", a "Knight in Shining Armor", come to save Laura from the glass castle that imprisoned her mind, body, and soul. It wasn't so much that Jim lied to everyone, but rather that some things are not what they appear to be.
Jim is not innocent, fragile, or sweet like Laura, nor as enduring and selfless as Tom, but he is the one who is the most realistic, and whose actions and words are true. Tom lives a lie-he gives up himself and tries to convince himself that he is "happy." He tries to believe that what he is doing will do some good, but in reality, his sister is as useless as the glass unicorn-a lovely ornament, delicate, exquisite, but useless, nevertheless. Tom, not seeing this at first, sacrifices everything for his sister Laura. Jim, being more realistic, realizes this, and sacrificed Laura's feelings for his own life, his own world, his own "everything." In this way too, Jim is the most real and realistic of all of them-he may not be the most loving character, nor the one which the reader sympathizes with the most, but he is definitely the most "practical", shrewd, realistic, and real of all four of the characters.
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