Making Our Town Ours

The play Our Town follows the everyday lives of seemingly common characters who evolve individually, as well as demonstrate important concepts, during each of the three acts. By utilizing many literary aspects in Our Town including setting, symbolism, and plot, Thornton Wilder creates an allegory for the universal experience that appeals to human nature as a whole.

In Our Town, much of the setting is created by verbal narration, as opposed to being physically present, constructing an added level of connection between the audience and play. The narrator begins the first act by avidly describing the surroundings of the town Grover’s Corners with many gestures and descriptive words. In this way, Wilder creates a new level of audience interaction. This interaction is formed directly from the lack of physical scenery because it forces each audience member to imagine an individual image of Grover’s Corners. By utilizing minimal scenery, Wilder begins to show how Grover’s Corners is really an allegorical representation of the typical human experience. This implies the physical aspect of the universal experience is vastly unimportant compared to things that can’t be seen, such as relationships, impacts, and family ties, despite the fact that most people tend to feel “like they have to have scenery” (7). By focusing on the emotional aspects, Wilder forms a representation of the universal human experience, as well as prompts the audience to add their own experiences to the play as well. Even though Wilder only uses minimal props to allow the watcher to create relations, he utilizes many symbols throughout his writings to emphasize key points about his beliefs.

Through the use of many symbols such as the town’s Sentential Newspaper and a chu...

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... which will soon become the past, is worse than not being able to remember the experience itself. To be constantly worrying about whether or not it is possible to “look at everything hard enough,” (105) as Emily says, is to prevent the enjoyment of life. To truly enjoy life, it is important to live in the now, and humans choose simple, easy ignorance, rather than true understanding, in order to avoid the pain Emily experiences in the last act, and the shock she feels at the blindness she so eagerly accepted. Blindness has become the universal human experience because humans “don’t have time to look at one another” (108). In this final scene, Emily demonstrates the main point Wilder wants the audience to understand. With the conclusion of the play, Emily shows the audience "our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind, not in things and not in scenery.”