Compare the effect of Tom abandoning his home in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and the effect of Troy Maxon's death in Fences by August Wilson.

Both Troy Maxon from Fences and Tom from The Glass Menagerie are characters that feel burdened by their responsibilities to their families. Perhaps Tom is a bit more justified in his frustration. Being beset on all sides by an absent father, a delusional mother, and a nonfunctional sister, his frustration is more understandable. In the case of Troy Maxon, he is the delusional and absent one, carrying on an affair and believing in his dreams of playing professional baseball despite being far too old. Regardless of their differences, Troy and Tom have very similar effects on their families when they depart from their lives forever. In the case of Tom, his mother and sister are left in financial ruin and have no choice but to band together to face whatever may come. Since it is a memory play, Tom, and by extension the audience, never know what happens to his family or what they think of Tom thereafter. Much in the same way, the Maxon family comes together after the death of Troy. In this play, however, it is clear that the family offers his memory some kind of forgiveness and attempts to remember him fondly.

When Tom Wingfield finally leaves his mother and sister behind in The Glass Menagerie, he does so to escape the restrictions and limitations that both his family and the setting of the play, the Great Depression, place upon him. By abandoning his family before his mother, Amanda, can secure gainful employment, and his introverted and anxiety-ridden sister Laura has found a husband, Tom leaves both women to the mercy of an era when the country was suffering from high unemployment, income inequality, and a lack of economic growth. Amanda will have to care for Laura entirely on her own and will need to find some means by which to pay the rent for their measly apartment.
Worst of all, Tom leaving his family is reminiscent of his own father’s abandonment of their family years earlier --- “He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances” (Scene 1). Tom was forced to take on the role of the “man of the house,” a role that he was both unprepared and ill-equipped to take. The never seen but always present Mr. Wingfield is memorialized by his WWI portrait hanging on the wall which looms over the family as a stark reminder of what they had lost and what that loss had cost them. Tom despises his father but finds himself following in his father’s footsteps by the end of the play. Unfortunately, Tom is incapable of finding the happiness and the “American dream” that he searches for and instead finds only regret and remorse for leaving his sister behind.
Troy Maxon’s death in August Wilson’s drama Fencescan be compared to Tom Wingfield’s departure in the sense that both men leave a dysfunctional family mess in their wakes. Troy’s fraught relationships with his wife, Rose, his sons Cory and Lyons, and his bastard daughter Raynell lead to multiple intercharacter conflicts before Troy’s death. The anger that burns bright through Troy’s life --- an anger borne of his sense that his race and his generation have robbed him of the greatness he was due --- is manifested in his stubborn battle against death, a battle that he inevitably loses. Unlike Tom’s departure which leaves his family worse off, Troy’s death reunites his family in a way that couldn’t have been done while he lived. Cory returns from the armed services for his father’s funeral, and Rose, who has taken in Raynell, a product of Troy’s infidelity, raises the girl as if she were her child. It is Raynell who represents the bridge that will allow the Maxon family to find peace within their family and their world.

After Tom abandons his family in The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, his mother, cares for his sister (and her daughter), Laura. Amanda stops hoping that Tom will take care of them and she becomes the bedrock of the family and the person on whom Laura, who is disabled, can rely. The two remaining members of the family draw closer together after Tom leaves, as they know that they cannot depend on Tom.
Similarly, when Troy Maxson dies at the end of Fences, the family members who remain, including his wife, Rose, his son, Cory, and his brother, Gabriel, forgive him and are drawn closer together. Cory returns home after a long absence to go to Troy's funeral. Therefore, like Tom's departure, Troy's death functions to bring the remaining members of his family closer together.