The play is introduced to the audience by Tom, the narrator and protagonist, as a memory play based on his recollection of his mother AAmanda's husband abandoned the family long ago. Although a survivor and a pragmatist, the sometimes voluble Amanda yearns for the comforts and admirationAmanda is obsessed with finding a suitor (or, as she puts it, a "gentleman caller") for Laura, whose shyness helped lead her to drop out of high school and a subsequent secretarial course, and who spends most of her time with her collection of little glass animals. Pressed by his mother to help find someone, Tom eventually invites an acquaintance from work named Jim home for dinner. Laura realizes that Jim is the boy she was attracted to in high school and has thought of since — though the relationship between the shy Laura and the "most likely to succeed" Jim was never more than a fairly distant teasing acquaintanceship. Initially, Laura is so overcome by shyness that she is unable to join the others at dinner. After dinner, though, Jim and Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for the electricity to be restored (Tom, planning to escape his family, has failed to pay the power bill). During their long scene together, Jim diagnoses Laura's inferiority complex, urges her to think better of herself, and kisses her. Jim and Laura then share a quiet dance, and he accidentally brushes against the glass menagerie, knocking the glass unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. After Jim reveals that he is already engaged to be married, Laura asks him to take the broken unicorn as a gift and he then leaves. When Amanda learns that Jim is engaged she assumes Tom knew and lashes out at him.
she remembers from her days as a fêted Southern belle. She worries especially about the future of her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp and tremulous insecurity about the outside world. Tom works in a shoe warehouse doing his best to support them. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and struggles to write, while spending much of his spare time going to the movies — or so he says — at all hours of the night.
manda and his sister Laura.
As Tom speaks at the end of the play, it becomes clear that he left home soon afterward and did not return. In Tom's final speech, he bids farewell to his mother and sister, telling Laura to blow out the candles, which she does as the play ends.