Tennessee Williams is a playwright well familiarized with using symbols and extended metaphors to hint at a greater truth. For an outside example, the whole play of A Streetcar Named Desire is a symbolic entity of the moral destruction that actual desire can do. In this work, the "cat on a hot tin roof" is a blatant extended metaphor for being stuck in a harmful situation but not having the will to escape from it.
The two main characters in the play portray the sad truths of many modern young couples today. Brick is an alcoholic with a numb outlook on life and love. Margaret is still hopeless devoted to Brick and lusting after him, though he carries no affection for her anymore. Margaret, while expressing her unrecognized want for Brick, then questions "what is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? . . . Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can (31)." What is the point in fighting for a harmful relationship when someone's still going to get burned? Margaret is so blindly devoted that she doesn't get the hint when Brick tells her to "jump off the roof" because "cats . . . land on their four feet uninjured" and to "find a lover (40)." He's telling her that she's better off without him, yet she stays trapped on the hot tin roof, like the cat she suggests.
Word Count: 200 (minus passage citations)
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