The role of the imagination and fantasy is critical in understanding each of the characters in Tennessee Williams" play, The Glass Menagerie. Each character relies on their fantasies and imaginations to escape from the reality of his or her own world. Amanda uses her imagination to go back in time to Blue Mountain, when things seemed better for her. Tom spends time on the fire escape in order to remove himself from the world that Amanda and Laura have in the apartment. He also goes to movies in order to enhance his imagination and fantasy world. Laura is completely lost in her world of small figurines, an act that prevents her from living in the real world. Jim"s role becomes important to the play because he illustrates how out of touch the Wingfelds are. .

             Tom exercises his imagination when he steps out onto the fire escape. He also escapes the "slow and implacable fires of human desperation" (Williams 968). He can also escape the world that his mother and sister have created in the apartment. Tom also feeds his imagination by going to movies because this allows him to be completely removed from the apartment. The movies provide Tom a place where he can stretch his imagination and dream of a life that is filled with desire and adventure. Tome does not especially want to be part of an imaginary or fantasy world because he sees what this has done to his mother and sister. However, sometimes it is all he can do to escape them. .

             Amanda"s imagination comes in very handy when she uses it to escape into the past. She is also living in a fantasy when she believes that Jim will be the man that will whisk Laura away and marry her. We can also see how Amanda uses her imagination when she thinks" that Laura"s handicap is only a small defect, hardly noticeable. However, it is the past that allows Amanda to use her imagination the most and the most freely. She recounts a day which she had "seventeen!–gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren"t chairs enough to accommodate them all.