Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Mortality Quotes

Maggie makes a complex point here about how people come to understand their own death. She seems to say it's not enough just to tell someone he is dying. People have to be tricked into reckoning with and understanding this fact. Death complicates things so much that comprehending it takes cunning and sophistication .

With these words, Maggie heralds quite boldly and clearly the unavoidable death to come. Her treatment of death reveals a strong woman who does not fear it, but sees it as a fact of life.

In a world full of three ghosts, a dying patriarch, a deteriorating family, a crumbling society, and a man hovering between life and death, Maggie is the outsider, and she glows with life. She beckons Brick out of his shadows and tries to help him see how he can live his life with truths instead of lies.

Big Daddy can't stop talking about his new-found appreciation for life. The world is transformed before his very eyes, and things like the sky look different to him (though that's not surprising since the sky changes colors more often than an everlasting gobstopper in this play). Big Daddy is very scared of dying. He isn't ready, perhaps because he hasn't found "life everlasting" yet on earth.

It's just a little bit weird that, in a play where things are dying left and right, no one speculates as to what happens after you die. Even the reverend, the spiritual man, and the man that we would usually turn to for guidance in through hard times, is about as shallow as a kiddie pool. He talks about air conditioners and fancy stained glass windows, but that's about all. Here, we catch a glimpse of Big Daddy's understanding of what happens when you die, and it is depressingly bleak. Big Daddy believes nothing happens when you die. You are simply "no where." No wonder everyone's clamoring to stay alive.

Big Daddy is obsessed with death. He cripples mentally when trying to understand or cope with his mortality. He fears death and the unknowns it heralds. He is not a man of faith or religion. He lives in the here-and-now and is obsessed with wealth.

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.

In saying this, Maggie not only recognizes the dying patriarch, but she also reminds us of the fact that Straw and Ochello both died in each other's arms in the very bed where she will sleep with Brick. In this way, Maggie is about to stop the cycle of death and lies.