Jim O’Connor. Jim O’Connor is a friend of Tom’s from the warehouse where they both work. Tennessee Williams describes him in his notes to the play as “A nice, ordinary young man.” Jim is the “gentleman caller” who is invited to dinner by Tom, and in whom Amanda places her hopes for finding a husband for Laura.

Jim was an outstanding success in high school, and everyone thought he would succeed in life. However, in the six years that have elapsed since he graduated, he has found life much tougher than he might have expected. At the warehouse, he is a shipping clerk, which is only a slightly better position than Tom’s. However, Jim is a cheerful, optimistic young man, who is determined to get on in life. He is studying public speaking and radio engineering at night school, and wants to go into the fledgling television industry. When he visits the Wingfield family, Jim does his best to draw Laura out of her shell, but his enthusiasm runs away with him and he makes the mistake of kissing her. He then has to explain that he must disappoint her because he has a steady girlfriend named Betty.

SCENE 1

[The Wingfield apartment is in the rear of the building, one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres of lower-middle-class population and are symptomatic of the impulse of this largest and fundamentally enslaved section of American society to avoid fluidity and differentiation and to exist and function as one interfused mass of automatism.