Brick COAHTR
How does Williams present Brick’s struggle for identity in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’?
Throughout ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Brick is presented, through Williams’ stage directions and his lack of dialogue, as a character who has completely given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. He has distanced himself from his family through dependently drinking alcohol and is reduced to a daily, almost mechanical, search for “the click” which brings him peace.
As a reader, we don’t see a reason for his characteristics until later on in the play. At the end of Act 1, Williams has built up tension with the audience about the mysterious identity of Skipper and Brick’s obvious discomfort surrounding the subject. When Brick tells Maggie to “shut up about Skipper”(P.41), the audience knows there is something going on but it isn’t until Act 2 of the play when Brick is put in a position of discussion by Big Daddy, the hidden truth is finally revealed. Big Daddy’s suggestion that Brick’s friendship with Skipper was “not exactly normal” (P.75) is quickly denied by Brick but Williams’ direction of the reaction is that “Brick’s detachment is at last broken through,” (P.75). This could show a degree of uncertainty of Brick’s sexual identity. At the time at which the play was set in the mid-1950s, the topic of homosexuality was a very taboo subject and wasn’t often spoken about, “it was a love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly,” (P.42). This could suggest a reason why Brick didn’t want himself associated with such a difficult situation.
Brick is also an alcoholic which can be viewed as his coping mechanism for everyday life. He tells Big Daddy that his liquor problem is down to his desire to “kill his disgust” (P.70) at the mendacity system by which men live by. The definition of mendacity is untruthfulness and dishonesty and when Big Daddy reveals that Brick “started drinking when Skipper died”(P.75) it could suggest
Throughout ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Brick is presented, through Williams’ stage directions and his lack of dialogue, as a character who has completely given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. He has distanced himself from his family through dependently drinking alcohol and is reduced to a daily, almost mechanical, search for “the click” which brings him peace.
As a reader, we don’t see a reason for his characteristics until later on in the play. At the end of Act 1, Williams has built up tension with the audience about the mysterious identity of Skipper and Brick’s obvious discomfort surrounding the subject. When Brick tells Maggie to “shut up about Skipper”(P.41), the audience knows there is something going on but it isn’t until Act 2 of the play when Brick is put in a position of discussion by Big Daddy, the hidden truth is finally revealed. Big Daddy’s suggestion that Brick’s friendship with Skipper was “not exactly normal” (P.75) is quickly denied by Brick but Williams’ direction of the reaction is that “Brick’s detachment is at last broken through,” (P.75). This could show a degree of uncertainty of Brick’s sexual identity. At the time at which the play was set in the mid-1950s, the topic of homosexuality was a very taboo subject and wasn’t often spoken about, “it was a love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly,” (P.42). This could suggest a reason why Brick didn’t want himself associated with such a difficult situation.
Brick is also an alcoholic which can be viewed as his coping mechanism for everyday life. He tells Big Daddy that his liquor problem is down to his desire to “kill his disgust” (P.70) at the mendacity system by which men live by. The definition of mendacity is untruthfulness and dishonesty and when Big Daddy reveals that Brick “started drinking when Skipper died”(P.75) it could suggest