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A Streetcar Named Desire’s dialogue consists of two contrasting styles: straightforward and naturalistic, spoken by the more down-to-earth characters like Stella and Mitch, and poetic, spoken mainly by Blanche. The first type of dialogue contains flat, simple statements that directly express the speaker’s feelings or observations. The vocabulary is colloquial, and words are sometimes used in grammatically incorrect ways. For example, Mitch frequently says “don’t” instead of “doesn’t,” as in, “She don’t go to sleep until I come in.”
The poetic dialogue has a lyrical quality. The frequent repetition of words or phrases establishes a songlike rhythm: “You’re going to reproach me, I know that you’re bound to reproach me.” The language is verbose and rich with abstract metaphor, such as when Blanch describes love-letters that are “yellowing with antiquity” or an hour that’s “a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands.”
