Character analysis
Brick Pollitt
in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
Brick Pollitt is the passive yet crucial center of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once a college football star, he is now an alcoholic who moves through the play on a broken ankle, symbolizing his stunted growth and unwillingness to engage with life. He drinks methodically, waiting for the "click" in his head that brings numbness, deflecting every emotional confrontation with cool, one-word responses.
Brick's journey is one of forced, partial reckoning. In Act Two, Big Daddy strips away his son's evasions in the play's most intense scene, pressing Brick to confront the truth about his relationship with his deceased friend Skipper. Brick insists their friendship was innocent, yet he struggles to explain why he ignored Skipper's urgent phone call—a silence he knows contributed to Skipper's death. In a moment of retaliation, Brick reveals Big Daddy's terminal cancer diagnosis, a cruel act that uncovers his capacity for cruelty hidden beneath his passive exterior.
His defining trait is mendacity—the very word he throws at others—because he lives within the greatest lie of all: that he is blameless for Skipper's demise. Whether his connection with Skipper involved repressed homosexual feelings is left intentionally unclear by Williams, but the guilt is unmistakable; it has completely paralyzed Brick. By the play's end, Maggie announces a pregnancy he has not agreed to, and Brick neither confirms nor denies it—a final image of a man still refusing to embrace life, yet perhaps, for the first time, no longer actively escaping it.
Connected characters
- Maggie Pollitt ("The Cat")
Brick's wife, whom he has shut out of his bed and his inner life since Skipper's death. Maggie's relentless vitality—her famous monologue that opens the play—is the force Brick most visibly resists. He is contemptuous of her survival instincts yet, by the final curtain, does not stop her from engineering the false pregnancy announcement, leaving their relationship suspended between estrangement and a fragile, possible renewal.
- Big Daddy Pollitt
Brick's father and the play's other dominant figure. Their Act Two confrontation is the emotional core of the drama: Big Daddy loves Brick with a raw, unguarded pride he shows no one else, and he alone has the authority to force Brick toward self-examination. Brick repays this intimacy with the devastating disclosure of Big Daddy's cancer—an act that mirrors the very mendacity Brick claims to despise.
- Skipper
Brick's deceased best friend and the ghost haunting every scene. Brick's guilt over refusing Skipper's final phone call—and his inability to name what their bond truly was—is the source of his alcoholism and emotional paralysis. Skipper exists only in dialogue, yet his absence drives the entire play.
- Big Mama Pollitt
Brick's mother, whose effusive affection he tolerates with the same detached politeness he shows everyone. Big Mama's desperate love for both Big Daddy and Brick underscores the family's pattern of love expressed through denial, though Brick remains largely unmoved by her appeals.
- Gooper Pollitt
Brick's older brother and rival for the Pollitt inheritance. Brick's passive indifference to the estate battle stands in sharp contrast to Gooper's scheming, and the family's clear preference for Brick—despite his dysfunction—fuels Gooper's resentment throughout the play.
- Mae Pollitt
Gooper's wife and Brick's sister-in-law. Mae's pointed surveillance of Brick and Maggie's marriage—and her eagerness to expose their childlessness—makes her one of the primary antagonists of Brick's already fragile domestic situation.
- Doctor Baugh
The family physician who holds the truth about Big Daddy's cancer. Doctor Baugh's presence is a structural irony: he possesses the medical fact that Brick ultimately weaponizes against his father, linking the doctor indirectly to the play's most destructive moment of honesty.
- Reverend Tooker
The opportunistic minister circling the Pollitt estate. Brick barely registers Tooker's presence, but the reverend's hollow piety embodies the 'mendacity' Brick rails against—making him a background symbol of the social hypocrisy Brick uses to justify his own withdrawal.
Key quotes
“Truth is pain and sweat and paying bills and making love to a woman that you don't love any more.”
Brick PollittAct Two
Analysis
This raw, anguished line comes from Brick Pollitt, the emotionally stuck ex-football star at the heart of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Brick utters it during one of the play's intense confrontations—most likely in Act Two, the lengthy and brutal truth-telling scene with his father Big Daddy, who pushes Brick to reveal why he drinks and has withdrawn from life, including from his wife, Maggie. The quote reflects Brick's deeply cynical and defeated perspective: to him, "truth" is not freeing but rather punishing—a relentless buildup of adult responsibilities (financial, emotional, sexual) carried out without real feeling. It highlights the play's core themes of mendacity versus truth, emotional repression, and the heavy burden of social expectations in the American South. Brick's inability to love Maggie "any more" also hints at the unspoken sorrow surrounding his friend Skipper, whose death weighs heavily on him. Williams uses this line to illustrate that Brick's alcoholism isn't a sign of weakness but a conscious escape from a truth he can't bear, making it one of the play's most significant confessions.
“Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an' death's the other.”
Brick PollittAct Two
Analysis
This powerful line is delivered by Brick Pollitt, a former athlete grappling with emotional detachment and alcohol dependency, in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Brick shares it during a pivotal confrontation, particularly in his intense, truth-seeking exchange with his father, Big Daddy, in Act Two. For Brick, drinking goes beyond mere escapism; it represents a conscious, albeit self-destructive, reaction to a world he perceives as entirely built on deceit — deceit regarding his friendship with Skipper, the truth about Big Daddy's terminal cancer, and the illusions surrounding love and success in the American South. This quote encapsulates the play's central theme: mendacity, or systemic dishonesty, is not simply a personal moral failure but woven into the very fabric of social existence. Brick feels he has only two options — dulling his pain with alcohol or facing death. Williams employs Brick's grim outlook to critique the mid-century American culture's relentless craving for comforting illusions, making this line one of the most thematically rich in modern American drama.
“I've lived with mendacity! Why can't you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there's nothing else to live with except mendacity.”
Brick PollittAct Two
Analysis
This intense line is delivered by Brick Pollitt to his father Big Daddy in Act Two of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The two men engage in the play's most brutally honest confrontation — a rare moment when family pretenses fall away. Brick, an alcoholic ex-football star grappling with guilt over his friend Skipper's death, is pushed by Big Daddy to confront his own self-deception. Instead of facing this challenge, Brick deflects by arguing that mendacity — the habitual lying and self-deception — is simply the universal state of their reality. This line is thematically crucial because it encapsulates Williams's main argument: that American family life, especially in the mid-century South, is built on layers of comfortable lies (regarding illness, sexuality, inheritance, and love). Brick's resigned acceptance of mendacity sharply contrasts with Big Daddy's fleeting desire for truth, implicating the entire Pollitt household — and by extension the audience — in this same moral compromise. The quote remains one of the most frequently cited critiques of hypocrisy in American dramatic literature.
“I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage, that's all.”
Brick PollittAct One
Analysis
This powerful line is delivered by Brick Pollitt to his wife Maggie (Margaret) in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), during a charged opening confrontation in Act One. Brick, a former football star grappling with alcoholism and unresolved grief over his friend Skipper's death, uses this line to highlight the emptiness and lack of love in their marriage. Instead of outright rejecting Maggie, he likens their living situation to something instinctual and unavoidable — a cage — stripping away any notion of intimacy or choice. This metaphor is deeply layered: it resonates with the play's themes of entrapment, performance, and dishonesty. Maggie is the "cat on a hot tin roof," desperately trying to find her place in a marriage and family dynamic built on deception, while Brick is a man frozen by repression and guilt. This line encapsulates Williams's central theme — that people can be physically close yet remain completely estranged — and establishes the suffocating tension that permeates the entire drama.