Our Town Themes
After reading Thornton Wilder's book, Our Town, I believe that it focuses mainly on the changes that we see in human life, for example, in the play of Our Town, we see the milkman always talking to the paperboy. Mostly about the stability of Grover’s Corners, each time they do, there appears to be almost no changes much in the town, as if time had stood still. In this, we see Howie and Crowell as the illustration of the consistency of small town life since they appear in all of the acts from act 1 to act 3. Because Grover’s Corners is Wilder’s microcosm of human life in general while Howie and the Crowell's represent not only the stability of life in Grover’s Corners, but also the stability of human life in as well. The milkman and the paperboys embody the persistence of
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The song is first shown when a choir is practicing at their church, simultaneously during the same time that George and Emily were having a conversation through their open windows as they are doing their schoolwork in the first act. It is also sung during the wedding ceremony that George and Emily had in the second act. The last we hear it is when the play shows Emily’s funeral just as her body is being put among the dead in the cemetery, leaving George behind in the land of the living. By associating play’s critical moments with this particular song Wilder is showing that the notion of a relationship as an essential, even a divine feature of human life. The hymn may add some degree of Christian symbolism to the play, but Wilder, for the most part, downplays any discussion of specifically Christian symbols. He concentrates the hymn not on an illusion that the fellowship has between Christians in particular, but rather on what it says about human beings in general and how important it is, just like the bible
The song is first shown when a choir is practicing at their church, simultaneously during the same time that George and Emily were having a conversation through their open windows as they are doing their schoolwork in the first act. It is also sung during the wedding ceremony that George and Emily had in the second act. The last we hear it is when the play shows Emily’s funeral just as her body is being put among the dead in the cemetery, leaving George behind in the land of the living. By associating play’s critical moments with this particular song Wilder is showing that the notion of a relationship as an essential, even a divine feature of human life. The hymn may add some degree of Christian symbolism to the play, but Wilder, for the most part, downplays any discussion of specifically Christian symbols. He concentrates the hymn not on an illusion that the fellowship has between Christians in particular, but rather on what it says about human beings in general and how important it is, just like the bible