Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Mortality Quotes Page 3

Death holds a power over characters in the play, forcing them to come to terms with certain truths in their lives. Big Daddy perhaps does not want to confront these truths. The first time he thinks he is going to die, he is so distraught that, when alone with Brick after being told he's going to live, Big Daddy tells him all the truths that his flirtation with death had dredged up: the corruption he saw when traveling through Europe, his experimentation with other men, and his only two loves: Brick and the plantation.

Here we see just how much death reigns in the Pollitt household, such that Maggie and Brick are staying in the very room where the plantation's ancestors died. The bedroom is therefore the fulcrum of the plantation and the tomb that encloses two dying men. Death permeates everyone and everything throughout the play.

This is the first time we ever hear Big Daddy, or anyone for that matter, discuss the afterlife or what happens after death. That Big Daddy locates death's country on "the other side of the moon" becomes significant when we remember that Brick often sings to the moon throughout the play. We don't know about you, but the moon doesn't seem like such a deathly place. However, at the time of the play's publication, a human would not walk on the moon for another ten years. The moon, therefore, is unknown, foreign, and scary. However, it is also a real place, and not a fantastical or biblical imagining of what death would look like. This perhaps reflects the interest of Americans at the time on science and on space exploration.