The glass menagerie

But for the characters living through the action of the play, the Paradise Dance Hall symbolizes hope. This scene, with Amanda and Tom sitting on the fire escape, wishing on the moon and surrounded by the music and lights of the nearby dance hall, is lyrical and beautiful. The rainbow-colored lights and the lively music point to a world of leisure, ease, and good times. Paradise, from this perspective, is not a thing lost and receding into the past, but is rather a thing that might be gained in the future. Amanda's life story, as she tells it, includes both kinds of Paradise: she longs for the idyllic world of her youth and her seventeen gentleman callers, and she longs for a future fairy-tale ending for her daughter.

Through the conventions of the stage, however, the dance hall is always just out of reach. The audience can hear the music, possibly see the lights, and hear characters' descriptions of the place, but the Paradise Dance Hall can only be suggested indirectly, as out of reach for the audience as "Paradise" is for Tom, Amanda, and Laura. With the narrator's added perspective and his remarks about the trouble that will engulf the world, we are made to see the illusory nature of the kind of "Paradise" represented by the dance hall.