【正确答案】正确答案：In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses the theme of escape to help drive the play forward. None of the characters are capable of living in the real world. Laura, Amanda, Tom and Jim use various methods to escape the brutalities of life. The fire escape helps develop the theme of the story. This entrance into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the characters. The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to escape the apartment and get away from his nagging mother. Amanda sees the fire escape as an opportunity for gentleman callers to enter their lives. Laura" s view is different from her mother and her brother. Her escape seems to be hiding inside the apartment, not out. Laura finds herself escaping at every turn. She induces sickness in her typing class and even as a gentleman caller waits in the living room. Another escape for Laura is her glass menagerie. Her collection of glass represents her own private world set apart from reality, a place where can hide and be safe. Even when it appears that Laura is finally overcoming her shyness with Jim, she is unable to cope with reality and she escapes back into her fantasy world of old records and glass figurines. Amanda is obsessed with her past, and uses it to escape reality, as she constantly reminds Tom and Laura of the time she received seventeen gentlemen callers. She refuses to acknowledge that her daughter is crippled and refers to her handicap as "a little defect hardly noticeable". A-manda doesn" t perceive anything realistically. She believes that Jim is going to be the man to rescue Laura. When Jim arrives, Amanda regresses to the childish, giddy days of entertaining gentleman callers. Amanda uses her past as a means to escape the reality she does not want to face. Tom escapes reality in many different ways. The first and most obvious is the fire escape that leads him away from his unhappy home. He also escapes into his world of poetry writing and movies. The more Amanda nags, the more Tom seems to need his movie escapes. They take him to another world, where mothers, sisters, and runaway father do not exist. It is getting harder and harder for Tom to escape real life. Amanda eventually pushes him over the edge and he leaves. Unfortunately, Tom realizes that leaving home was not the true escape he wanted all along. Jim uses his past as a means of escape. Only by entering into the Wingfield" s world can Jim become this high school hero again. Unlike the Wingfields, Jim lives only temporarily in the past, therefore he leaves the dream world of the Wingfields. Mr. Wingfield is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of the family is still living in. Tennesse Williams uses the theme of escape throughout his play to demonstrate the hopelessness of each character. Tom, Laura, and Amanda all seem to think escape is possible. In the end however, no character can completely escape their illusionary world. Perhaps Williams is trying to send a message that running away is not the way to solve life" s problems. The only escape in life is solving your problem, not avoiding them.

【答案解析】解析：(本题考查了对田纳西·威廉斯逃离主题的掌握。)