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A Sense Of Nostalgia In Our Town By Thornton Wilder

840 Words4 Pages

Mohammad Hasan
Mrs. Loux
English 8 P
24 January 2023
Universality
Our Town is a play that most people in the world can find relatable due to its sense of universality. Thornton Wilder, the author of Our Town, wrote this play so that it has components that make everyone feel a sense of nostalgia. One of these many universal components is life. Everyone lives and dies, as do the characters in Our Town, but in real life, people do not get a chance to look back at their life. In this way, the characters in Our Town have the chance to at least regret their lack of appreciation. Thronton Wilder intentionally makes the story like this so that the reader can vicariously regret their life as well and use this as a reminder to fully live their life. In particular, Thornton Wilder uses Emily Webb, Simon Stimson, and the Stage Manager to display the idea of appreciating life while living it. …show more content…

She was living life carelessly until she died. After she died, she started regretting things she didn’t pay attention to while alive. Emily says, “ They’re sort of shut up in little boxes, aren’t they?”(Wilder 96). Through this quote, she conveyed that humans, while they are alive, don’t appreciate things until they’re taken away because in this case you can take the little boxes and think of them as standards or normal things. By saying they are “shut up in these” means that they don’t think about doing things that would make them happy and instead focus on fitting the standards. This matters because Emily was also like that when she was alive, but death, which took away these everyday things, made her appreciate them and want to experience them again like most real humans. Real-living people are also pretty careless about their life until

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