What role do time and death play in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
The inexorable march of time and the inevitability of death cast their shadows over the play. Brick, although he is only twenty-seven, already feels that his best days are behind him. He can no longer play football and nor does he want to continue doing sports announcing. He sees his life as a contest with time, which he has lost. He says to his father, “[T]ime just outran me . . . got there first . . .” (p. 115). If life is defined as a race against time, no one can ever win. Big Mama expresses herself in similar fashion when she finally has to face the truth of Big Daddy’s terminal illness. “Time goes by so fast,” she says. “Nothin’ can outrun it. Death commences too early-almost before you’re half acquainted with life-you meet the other” (p. 161). Big Daddy, when he feared that he had cancer, was also forced to think about mortality. His vision is a bleak one. “[T]he human animal is a beast that dies” (p. 91), he says. There is no Christian consolation of an afterlife, only the brut
