In his book The Frog and the Ox, Aesop states that "Pride leads to self-destruction", which means that excessive boasting and exaggerating about oneself could be the cause of your eventual self-destruction. This quote could be best used to describe the situation that takes place in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Many of Tennessee Williams' works deal with the difference between reality and perception, and his play A Streetcar Named Desire was no exception. It depicts Blanche Dubois as a sexually promiscuous, emotionally disturbed fabricator who must continually go back and forth between reality and the fictional world she created. In her attempts to escape reality Blanche exaggerates her status in society while subtly mocking her sister and husband's living environment. Haunted by secrets from her past, Blanche puts up a facade to avoid any discussion involving the circumstances of her move to New Orleans. Eventually, Blanche's lies become too much to handle and she becomes unable to determine what is real and what is an illusion that is leading to her downfall. Blanche arrives in New Orleans and immediately begins telling the stories she conjured up. The moment she sets foot in Stanley and Stella's apartment, she creates this upper-class world that she comes from, deliberately avoiding any discussion involving Belle Reve. One of the first lies Blanche tells is that consuming too many drinks is not good for a woman's reputation when we know for a fact that she already consumed a cup of whiskey before Stella walked in. Blanche drank the whiskey instead of sipping, which suggests that she is used to drinking it, but hides it so as not to ruin her illusion of Southern women. However, Stanley doesn't do it for a good... middle of paper... Allan was never okay, he was never really in love with her. Ultimately, due to her lack of understanding of life, it was Blanche who ended up harming herself. Blanche's downfall in A Streetcar Named Desire was inevitable. He never had a clear understanding of how life worked. So much had happened in her past that she had to escape into an illusion, but even that couldn't save her from her ultimate reality. During the show she tells so many lies that she begins to believe them herself. Blanche tried to maintain her image as an ideal Southern woman, but that image was lost for her in Belle Reve when she began having sexual relationships with various men and abusing alcohol. Every time a lie he told began to unravel, he found comfort in his fantasies again. Ultimately it was her habit of going back and forth between reality and fantasy that led to her downfall.