Big Daddy: …When you are gone from here, boy, you are long gone and no where! The human machine is not so different from the animal machine or the fish machine or the bird machine or the reptile machine or the insect machine! It's just a whole God damn lot more complicated and consequently more trouble to keep together. Yep. I thought I had it. The earth shook under my foot, the sky come down like the black lid of a kettle and I couldn't breath!—Today!!—that lid was lifted, I drew my first free breath in—how many years? (Act Two)

Basic Set Up:

Big Daddy Pollitt, the patriarch in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, describes to his son Brick a near-death experience he had.

Death is a huge theme in Williams's play. Characters constantly talk about death, and in particular, they speculate about Big Daddy's death. He's old and sick and wealthy, so everyone's pretty interested in what's going to happen.

Given that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a Southern Gothic work, this should come as no surprise to us. After all, Southern Gothic authors are totally into writing about decay and disintegration—and that includes human decay and disintegration.

Here, we see Big Daddy dwelling on the possibility of his own death. He thinks that he's escaped death for now, but boy is he wrong.

Big Daddy's statements about death are ironic for a couple of reasons. He's had a near-death experience ("The earth shook under my foot, the sky come down like the black lid of a kettle and I couldn't breath!"), but he thinks that, since he has come through it, he's A-Okay. As he says: "Today!!—that lid was lifted."

Yeah, well, sorry to break it to him, but we all know that Big Daddy's going to die. The guy is old and sick, and it happens to the best of us. So even though Big Daddy thinks he has a new lease on life, his words are ironic because—guess what—by the end of the play he is going to realize that's he's already got one foot in the grave. He's going to die—and very, very soon.