Analysis Of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman Essay

This American drama was root premiered in 1949. It was an instant success and it similarly won Arthur milling machine a place among genius of the better(p) American symbolisewrights of the 20th century. It was a satirical fight on the Great American Dream of successfulness and material wealthiness and had also ch aloneenged the ideals of the past clx years that constituted much(prenominal) dreams. This exemplary encounter by Arthur Miller is a modern masterpiece, in which the inherent cultivates of hu patch existence and a boisterous battle to fight through it, is lived by the maven Willy Lo humankind, that fin entirelyy ends in a disaster cal conduct, death.Willy Loman is a disillusi wholenessd sixty three year sr. man who has trouble distinguishing between past and present, and globe and illusions. His illusory opinions draw an iron curtain originally his sensibilities and he refuses to see the humankind of his abject conditions. His cataclysm lies in the fierce d etermination to fight an unthinkable battle and to seek facile solutions to his severe stinting problems. In his relent slight pursuit of an impractical dream Willy Loman submerges himself in a complete dis prosecutement from humans that brings an end even more(prenominal) sad than his tone. being an irrepressible old man he never really evaluates or get a lines the false and incomplete set of a venal American society. He fails to understand the vacuous idea behind the Great American Dream and his limitless hope. A similar write up had been portrayed in The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) where Gatsby was corrupted by money and dishonesty, and the Great American Dream of rapture and individualism disintegrates into mere pursuit of wealth.Although Gatsby had the power to bending his dream into truth, the character of Nick discovers that both Gatsbys dream and the American dream is over. In the selfsame(prenominal) way, Wills persistent struggle against the forces of mho in hi s liveness leads him to neuroticism, and ultimately suicide. Theater is an imagined world, dwell by imaginary characters, but disaster strikes one and all, and the nature of tragedy is to hit our deepest consciousness and beset our sensibilities with its prolonged stay.Robert A Martin says in his essay, The Nature of cataclysm What the performance of a play gives an audience is less a set of ideas, propositions or abstraction to the highest degree life and how to live it than what Arthur Miller has called a snarl experience, the imaginative sharing and participation in the lives and actions of imaginary characters. In support of what Robert A Martin says, Willy Lomans character pulls the audience along with its chain of tragedies and leaves one with a feeling of acute distress, but more than a felt experience it also gives one an insight into the inherent realities of human tragedies.In stopping point of a salesman the audience watch the tragic founder of a single indivi dual and the tragedy of the broad(a) family, right before their eyes. The audience leave the auditorium with a whole new set of les give-and-takes in life and as Martin says how to live it. In his article Robert A Martin also elaborates on the vicarious influences of a tragedy, on the person, who watching it with a detached nose emerge of belongingness. He says, Theatre is the art of the possible and as we get the play we believe that Willy Lomans tragedies be non unbelievable or fictitious although his character was an conceit of the playwright Arthur Miller.As Aristotle said that Tragedy is something that evokes the emotions of sorrow and caution in the presence of an action of a certain magnitude. Willy Loman also travel into the trap of tragedy and as the nature of tragedy is, it brings about a fear in him. Willy tries to run away from that fear and refuses to get hold of his misfortunes and his failures. It mostly happens with dramatic experiences that our thoughts and emotions often concur with those of the characters we watch in a play we weep, work a face and get moved by their performances. It continues to stimulate and engage us directly in our social, moral and semipolitical questions.The audience too goes through an inveterate riff of pity and fear inside his mind as he watches a human being go through a painful hell, which is in Millers view due to his own obduracy. decease of a salesman is non severe a bosh of tragedy that happens to a broken, exhausted man, but is also a caustic attack on the American Dream of achieving wealth and success with no regards to principals and value of life. Willy Loman became a household name after the play was released and became a profound example of a tragic life, bowed down by struggles to cope up with a capitalistic society.Willy Lomans tragedy does not lie just in his miserable stinting condition, but also in his misplaced sense of fleece. In the play he takes loans from his neighbor Cha rley to make both ends meet, but refuses to accept the offer of a better job from him. His warped sense of pride grows in the way of his chances to improve his conditions. His refusal to accept reality is a tragedy bigger than his dismal life, and it exasperates his son Biff with whom he had a troubled relationship. Willy refused to accept that his sons are also failures such as him, and in order to make their lives better he falls into a trap of further hopelessness. A mans descent to failure is horrendous to contemplate. some(prenominal) line of work you are in, we are all salesmen, selling our products, our services, our selves.Says Wills meighbor Charley , in a line that crystallizes the anxiety of uncountable men everywhere, not just in America And when they start not pleased back. employers, partners, customers- Thats an earthqauke. ( Kilnghoffer, Undying Salesman, 1999). Willy Loman suffered from a feverish and unrealistic hopefulness and guilt of having failed his son s, and also the refusal to accept certain facts of life.The neurosis that set in him affected his life, and also him led to suicide. His death was perhaps a bigger tragedy than his life because it proved to be the final quench to the grief stricken family. Due to his persistent will power he believed the notion that one is often expenditure more dead than alive (Miller, Pg76) and commits suicide, so that his family gets the redress money and his sons lead a better life with that money, than he did when he was alive. Willy did not realize that damages money is invalidated when a person commits suicide.As Biff says at the graveyard, He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong. In this play tragedy is on 2 fronts. One is literal, when Willy dies after an unrelenting twine with his fate, and another is a symbolical death, that was the death of the American Dream, or ridding of a false notion of perfection. Willys guilt, his idolization of his sons and his constantly haunting memory of his sidekick turns his life into a pitiful tragedy and he lives through it all with an immature sense of unreality.In trying to project himself as an ideal take and salesman he plunges himself into an illusory world where he never really grew up. Im gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. Its the only dream you can have- to come out number one man. He fought it out here, and this is where Im gonna win it for him. (Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act2) The misfortune of Willy was that he tried to retrieve his baffled dignity and his familys love and also a magnified image of himself as an ideal salesman and father, on the last day of his life, and loses all.His complete disengagement from reality is what the tragedy is all about. It evokes the pity and fear that Aristotle mouth about in Poetics (330 BC). The character of Willy Loman is befitting the concepts of Aristotles Tragedy. True to life (realistic), consistency (true t o themselves) meaning, once a characters motivation and personality are established these should continue throughout the play. Necessary or probable meaning, characters must be logically constructed fit to the law of prospect or necessity that regularize the actions of the play.Finally, true to life and yet more pulchritudinous (idealized, ennobled). Death of a Salesman has that true to life aspect, delineation the fact that any middle class man with limited means, would get into the delusionary world of dreams and aspirations of more wealth and the terrifying darkness that lies coiled beneath such unrealism. Consistency of the portrayal is apparent in Lomans relentless pursuit of an elusive life.The necessary probability is the fact that such a dogged belief in illusionary world nearly forever creates a graph of downward slide in a persons life. True to life, is the condition of tension that is life and human existence. Death of a Salesman is a modern masterpiece that celebra tes, as Chris Bigsby expressively states, the miracle of human life, in all its bewilderments, its betrayals, its denials, but finally and most significantly, its transcendent worth. (Poet, 723).