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The classic Tennessee Williams story, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about human experience in a society, which tries to dictate to people how they should live.
The story of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof begins with Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a homosexual couple who in 1919 took in a young vagrant (Big Daddy) to help them to run their cotton plantation. As the plantation grew Pollit (Big Daddy) rose to become overseer. Then Ochello's partner after Straw's death and finally sole owner to the plantation. He got married at 25 to Ida who bore him two sons eight year difference. He hated the first one (Goopper) but loved the second one (Brick). By the time they were in college, Pollit who left school at ten was a multi millionaire and the plantation stretched over 28000 acre of a rich Delta soil.
The son he hated, became a lawyer, married and has 5 children was a success in the world at 35. Whereas the son he loved was 'a has been' at 27. The handsome Brick, an athletic star at college, became an alcoholic after short-lived career as professional football player and sport announcer. He was married reluctantly to a girl of shabby, genteel background (Margaret) who held only a lukewarm attraction for him. Even Before their marriage he was far more interested in a fellow athlete (Skipper) with whom he imagined he had a "pure" relationship. When Brick is hospitalised for back injury Margaret, who began to feel like the cat on the title, pairs off with Skipper. Margaret demands that Skipper either leaves Brick alone with her or that he makes him to confess his true feelings. Skipper tried to reveal his hidden desire to Brick. Brick would not listen. The rejected Skipper died soon after of drugs and alcohol and Brick stopped sleeping with Margaret. Thinking that she was responsible for his friend's ruin gave him a reason and excuse not to get intimately involved with Margaret toward whom he had been indifferent from the beginning of their relationship and marriage.
At the same time Big Daddy stops sleeping with his wife Ida. In the five years since then he develops cancer but when the play begins he does not know yet. Indeed he and his wife have been told that the results of the tests are negative.
The events take place on Big Daddy's Birthday in and about the plantation house at which the family is gathered. Goopper afraid that his father will leave him noting has a plan in his briefcase to get control of the estate. Brick having tried to jump the hurdles at his high old school the previous night hobbles about on a crutch with one foot in a cast.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is two dialogues (Act 1 and Act 2) and an ensemble. Because the drama is over at the end of the second act the ensemble is an appendix to Act 1 and Act 2. It contains no intrigue because Williams is interested not in the plot but in the revelation of characters through confrontation.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof refers to a particular fantasy of femininity and feminine desire or of an uneasy or agitated state. The story's primary cat is Maggie, a typically, lonely dissatisfied woman who begs for love before Brick. Maggie's loneliness has made her a "cat", hard, anxious and bitter.
Margaret bitterness rests also in her childlessness, which calls her status as a normal wife into question. Without a child her and Bricks place in Big Daddy household is not assured. Maggie could not allow going back to being poor as she was born and brought up.
However, Maggie is determined to win over her husband, "What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?" she asks. "Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can."
This leads to the lie where Maggie claims that she is pregnant and is ready to do anything to force Brick to make her pregnant.
Maggie sketches the triangle between her Brick and Skipper in her speech in Act 1. As this speech makes clear; the only true love in Brick's life lies between him and his friend Skipper. Maggie has spent her life accompanying the two football heroes for the benefit of the public - she has been the consummate the trophy wife. The dead man continues to intervene between husband and wife and Maggie's protests that she is alive are not heard. According to Brick Maggie is to be blamed for destroying the Brick, Skipper and Maggie triangle by forcing Skipper to admit his true feelings about Brick. Brick believes that she ultimately caused his death. Note how it is not clear in Brick's confession of jealousy, which of the two (Maggie or Skipper) he is jealous about.
The favourite son and lover, Brick possesses the charm to those that have given up and assumed a pose of indifference before the world. Brick represent the typical masculinity of the self-possessed, self-contained, and untouchable. Before this indifferent block, characters find themselves in full with desire (Maggie, Mama) or in state of aggression (Daddy).
At the same time, Brick is an obviously broken man. Turning from his homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper, brick has depressively withdrawn from the world behind a screen of liquor. He is reduced to the daily, mechanical search for his click that gives him space. Thus he would locate himself on the far side of the family drama.
Brick's broken soul is materialised in his injury, a broken ankle incurred while jumping hurdles on the high school athletic field. In a sense, it is an injury incurred out of nostalgia for the early days of his friendship with Skipper, the time of what Maggie describes as their Greek legend. This injury, a wound in his otherwise intact masculinity, is also a figure for his surprised homosexual desire.
Brick is brought to judgement on his desire twice in the place: first by Maggie in Act 1 and then by Daddy in Act 2. When Daddy approaches what has been carefully repressed, Brick desperately attempts to dodge him, emptying his words of all significance. As he tells Daddy, their talks never materialise: nothing is said. When Daddy presses him, Brick reveals why he is looking for "solid quiet", why he would deny that their talks take place anywhere or refer to anything: they are painful. As Williams's notes, Brick's horror at the thought of being identified with the epithets that he hates marks the extent of his internalisation of the lie of conventional morality, the lie to which Mama pathetically clings and on which Maggie places her bets at the end of the Act 3.
Big Daddy is the representative of the American Dream and trough his character Williams shows how American society has sacrificed all values in the temple of the most popular value in the world: money. The American Dream has an ugly face and Big Daddy is a commercial success, but a failure in every other aspect. He has failed as a human being in that he centred his little empire on himself and became blind to the needs and feelings of those around him. Big Daddy himself acts as if money is his only value as a human being, or perhaps he's afraid of being worthless as shown by the question "Y'know how much I'm worth!"
An invisible struggle takes place within Big Daddy as he tries to approach Brick as a loving father approaches his needy child, exposing his innermost tenderness and insecurity. The conflict is between his love for his child and his determination to get to the truth and the mentality of his upbringing in a poor family where the father was usually an unapproachable, distant figure. This is hinted in William's stage directions: "glancing quickly, shyly, from time to time, at his son", "pressing his head quickly, shyly against his son's head, and then coughing with embarrassment." (Displays of affection are "embarrassing to him").
Through the difficulty of Big daddy and Brick to talk openly and not go around the subject, Williams displays the lack of communication between people, which leads to loneliness and isolation. The timeless, dramatic question is raised: "Why is it so damn hard for people to talk?" No human being can answer this question or any question concerning the infinite mystery of the human soul. The two men prove this as they talk while saying nothing of essence and not listening to each other most of the time: "Communication is awful hard between people". As Brick says: "We talk, you talk in circles! We get nowhere, nowhere!"
However, Big Daddy's care and willingness to understand is fierce and so is his determination to communicate with his son: "Don't let's leave it like this, like them other talks we've had.it's always like something was left not spoken".
Both men are about to find out that when they don't avoid talking of the truth its "painful", and as Big Daddy says, "Yeah, it's hard to talk".
Big Daddy and Brick are to some extent tragic characters, but if the play were a typical tragedy, they wouldn't be the leading figures, the world, as a whole would have the leading part. William skilfully incorporates the tragedy of the world. The tragedy of the world makes Brick's problems seem petty. However, Brick's problems are directly related to the world (society) that glorified him, a world he loved so much that he adopted all its prejudice. When he was no longer young and perfect, this same world dropped him like a hot brick. Now he's disgusted with the world, disgusted with him for being part of it and so he isolates himself from it. Big Daddy accepted the ugliness and mendacity in the world, which made him hardened and cynical.
Trough Big Daddy's explosive outburst of truthfulness, Williams explores the depth of human feeling and the melancholy and drama of a man who has to live as the world dictates it. Williams explores that mendacity in human behaviour and questions institutions that are taken for granted. For example, we are brought up with the firm belief that our family must love us and we must love our family. Trough Big Daddy, Williams shows that love sometimes doesn't come between family members. He wants to explore if it's not so unnatural to feel this way.
Through their marathon dialogue Big Daddy all does manage to penetrate to the truth. The violent confrontation with the truth results in both father and son losing their "crutches", the safety device, which helped them avoid the truth Brick feels guilty for killing the false hope of life within his father, and tries to excuse his truthfulness by saying: "being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful". A moral question is raised here: should a man be told he's dying? (Given that it is implied in the play that an "alive" man cannot be a "truthful" man). Is the truth a helpful force in such cases? If the truth kills all hope, should we accept it?
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