Applying Nietzsche’s Concept of “Self-Creation” to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: A Postmodern Study

Abstract

The main tenet of Postmodernism is its insistence on the multipolarity of reality; postmodernists maintain that there is no definite, transcendental truth to be discovered and followed by individuals, instead there are plurality of truths made by people based on their needs and desires. According to Nietzsche existing realities, good and bad, are governmentʼs constructs and are created as tools to impose power on people and suppress peopleʼs creativity and potentiality. Nietzscheʼs solution in this chaotic world is “Self-Creation” which means individuals should live up to their own standards, not societyʼs. Williamsʼs characters are fragile and maladjusted wanderers who due to their inability to encounter facts and solve their problems take shelter in a cocoon of fantasy as a means of self-defense, to protect themselves instead of creating their own characters. The researcherʼs aim is to prove the cause of the protagonistʼs downfall was her traditional way of thinking, such as every woman needs a man to protect her, though in a postmodern world in which anything goes, everything is acceptable and as valid as the other things, there is no absolute truth.