Essay On The Character Of Brick In Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams presents Brick as another tragic figure who is profoundly damaged because he is living a lie. Like April, he finds himself unable to conform to the role society hands him out here because of his repressed homosexuality at a time when America did not tolerate relationships outside the heterosexual norm.
The dramatic form is able to visually convey key messages in a way that novels cannot and
Williams symbolises the root of Brick’s isolation through the marital bed and through Brick’s crutch.
All of the scenes take place in Maggie and Brick’s bedroom, a constant reminder of what society expects of them. Big Mama confirms this when she ‘points at the bed’ and declares that ‘When a marriage goes on the rocks, the rocks are there, right there!’

We see Brick ‘fighting for possession’ of the crutch and ‘he utters a cry of anguish’ when it is removed, which perhaps suggests that he desperately wants to conform.
Unlike the remoteness of April, Williams lays Brick bare for the audience so that we clearly see how society’s expectations are isolating him. His dialogue with Big Daddy reveals his knowledge that his homosexuality is unacceptable: ‘Don’t you know how people feel about things like that?’ and a fear of being called ‘A couple of ducking sissies’, ‘Queers’ or ‘Fairies.’ He questions resignedly ‘Why can’t exceptional friendship, real, real, deep, deep friendship! between two men be respected as something clean and decent?’ Like April, he concludes that to be true to yourself is isolating: ‘friendship with Skipper was that one great true thing’ but ‘any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal.’ Brick’s way of coping with living a lie is to withdraw from society into an alcoholic haze, which means drinking until ‘a click that I get in my head…makes