literature

Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman

2005

Arthur Miller 's masterpiece stimulates the minds of audience defining and articulating that a tragic hero as a phenomenon of classic literature should include the common man . Miller defines a tragic hero as one who attempts to gain his `rightful ' position in his society and in this utopian endeavor struggles for his dignity . Miller 's tragedy Death of a Salesman ' embeds in Willy Loman 's character a requiem of a common man , who in his fear of being displaced , his struggle to resolve his

problems , and in his death as a plea for dignity , can be considered not only tragic hero of contemporary world , but of classic one as well

In Death of a Salesman , society assumes the role of the gods to whom Willy gives allegiance . It constitutes what Heilman calls an imperative ' an obligation to a given , externally located code , that compels the tragic hero to act in direct opposition to an opposing impulse ' which Heilman characterizes as a personal or egocentric need or desire . The dilemma is underscored with irony , though , because unlike the traditional gods of tragedy , Willy 's gods prove to be morally indifferent . As Rita Di Giuseppe has written , they have metamorphosed . into the fat gods of consumerism (Di Giuseppe , 115 . Miller often frustrated critics by contextualizing the play in a realistic , if expressionistic , form that seems too reductive to allow for the grandeur of tragedy but he encloses within this realism a tragic rhythm that depends upon the integrity of his romised realism . The discovery of the moral law ' he wrote in Tragedy and the Common Man ' is no longer the discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity ' but is grounded in the nature of human experience itself (Miller , Theater Essays , 5 . Eric Bentley offered the much-repeated view in his In Search of Theater ' that Death of a Salesman ' futilely attempts to align tragedy with social drama , the one conceiving of the hero as responsible for his own fate and the other as the pathetic victim of a severely flawed society (Bentley , 32 . Miller has called what emerges the tragedy of displacement ' in which the tragic dimension surfaces in the protagonist 's struggle for a lost personal identity displaced by the social mask (Miller , Conversations , 347

Because Miller creates a naturalistic , almost Marxian view of American culture in the near-Depression era , some have reduced the drama , along with other Miller works , to social determinism . And the truth is , Miller does describe Willy as a childlike victim of the cultural values he adopts virtually without question . In Miller 's words , he carried in his pocket the coinage of our day ' as a true believer in the American dream of success (Miller , Conversations , 176 . And yet Miller grants Willy stature and significance because of - as much as despite - his dogged commitment to a pernicious ideal . One cannot take away Willy 's dream without diminishing him , Miller has suggested : The less capable a man is of walking away from...