In Our Town, in Act I, what does Rebecca's quotation of the address on Jane Crofut's letter from the minister mean? REBECCA: I never told you about...

In
Act I of by , George and Rebecca, brother and sister, are introduced.
George is a prominent character who marries Emily, Mr. Webb's daughter. George and Emily want a
marriage that epitomizes "happily ever after," and in a way they succeed.

In Act I, Wilder introduces an ingenious literary device that works asand as the
adhesive that thematically holds a seemingly random series of events together. Rebecca and
George are in conversation, however the audience only hears a small, seemingly meaningless,
snippet of it. Rebecca says,

"I never told you about
that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick€¦on the envelope the address was
like this: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grovers Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United
States of America....Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar
System; the Universe; the Mind of Godthats what it said on the envelope€¦And the postman brought
it just the same."

George replies: "What do you
know!...What do you know!" Act I ends. Act II opens with the Stage Manager introducing the
morning of George's marriage to Emily.

In Act III, George throws himself down
in tears on Emily's grave and here we finally learn the reason for and the meaning of Rebecca's
seemingly nonsensical contribution in Act I. The address on the letter is two things. It is the
foreshadowing of the early death of Emily in the reference to the "Mind of God." It is
also the vehicle for one of Wilder's themes: the transcendence of the soul of humankind over the
trivialities  and mundane activities of daily life on Earth.

So, what it
means literally is that working from the smallest unit--Jane Crofut--outward to the greatest
unit--the Mind of God--the individual person is a component of something very big and very
important, making the individual important and big, too. What it means as a literary device is
that there will be within the play a merging of at least one character--and one related to
George, the hearer of the lines--with the Mind of God, which occurs through death for the
character. What it means thematically is that which has already been said, each individual
transcends the mundane and trivial because each is part of a greater whole that has similarly
great and significant parts--the Mind of God.