Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Sophocles' Oedipus the King
An overwhelming desire for personal contentment and unprecedented reputation can often result in a sickly twisted distortion of reality. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a man well-known for his intellect and wisdom finds himself blind to the truth of his
life and his parentage. Arthur Miller's play, The Death of a Salesman, tells of a tragic character so wrapped up in his delusional world that reality and illusion fuse causing an internal explosion that leads to his undoing. Each play enacts the strugg
of a man attempting to come to grips with his harsh reality and leaving behind his comfortable fantasy world. In the end, no man can escape the truth no matter how hard he may fight. In choosing the fragility of illusion over the stability of reality,
th characters meet their inevitable downfall.
At the moment of his birth, Oedipus receives a prophecy from the Delphic Oracle which states his destiny, "to grow up to murder his father and marry his mother (Sophocles 22)." Shocked and dismayed by this horrific prophecy, his parents King Laius and een Jocasta of Thebes try to elude this inevitable curse by turning the infant over to a loyal servant, a Theban shepherd, to take Oedipus to "a woody dell of Cithaeron" to be killed (63). After riveting his ankles together and leaving him to die of the
lements, the old shepherd has a change of heart and hands the child over to a traveling shepherd from Corinth to take back to the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope to raise as their own son. For the next twenty years, Laius and Jocasta rule in The
s believing their son to be "done away with (69)." Unfortunately, Hera sends a drought associated with a sphinx to bedevil Thebes. A desperate Laius travels back to the Delphic Oracle for a reading while, in Corinth, Oedipus grows to manhood believing Pybus and Merope, the King and Queen of Corinth, to be his real parents. Soon, he too learns of his dreadful fate and seeking to avoid it, he flees Corinth. As fate would have it, along the road, Oedipus crosses Laius' path in a chance meeting and after arly being "jostled off the road" by Laius, feels "infurious and land[s] him a blow" that kills him, unwittingly fulfilling the first half of the prophecy (54). Traveling on to Thebes, Oedipus saves the city from the drought by solving...
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...eving success, rather than dreaming up stories to tell. However, Willy never achieves success because of the simple fact that he cho
es to bring down his life and the lives of those around him by choosing illusion over reality. In the end, this tragic choice leads to Willy's collapse in a final, heartwrenching and self-destructive cry for help.
An overwhelming desire for personal contentment and unprecedented reputation can often result in a sickly twisted distortion of reality. In choosing the fragility of illusion over the stability of reality, people meet their inevitable downfall. No one
rson has what can be classified as a perfect life. Everyone has conflicts in his or her life they must face at one time or another. The way people choose to deal with these conflicts can differ just as much as the people themselves. Some people feel the
eed to attack the problem, to get it out of the way, while some choose to ignore the problem, preferring the comfort of fantasy over the harshness of reality. The tragic characters of Oedipus and the memorable failure, Willy Loman serve as living proof
at bypassing truth instead of facing it will ultimately lead to one's undoing.
After seeing both his father and brother find success, Willy attempts to prove himself to his family by chasing after his own version of the American dream. Willy grows up in the “wild prosperity of the 1920’s” when rags-to-riches tales inspire everybody, making them believe that “achieving material success [is] God’s intention for humankind (Abbotson, Criticism by Bloom). Willy’s father, a “very great” and “wildhearted man,” made a living traveling and selling flutes, making “more in a week than a man like [Willy] could make in a lifetime” (Miller 34). Even though Willy barely knew his dad, he built him u...
In Oedipus the King, Oedipus is told that he will marry his mother and murder his father. He is told by the Delphic oracle this information but he wants to change his fate so he banishes himself from what he believes is place of birth. As he is wondering, he stumbles across a caravan. After some arguing, due to his hubris, he kills all the men in the caravan. One of the men in the caravan turned out to be his father, King Laios. Oedipus at the time did not know this. He then entered the city of Thebes and broke the plague of the sphinx by solving its riddle. Because of this he was awarded the recently widowed Queen Iocaste, who is actually his mother. He married Iocaste and had children with her.
Before Oedipus was born a profit to his dad the Kings that he would be killed by his own son and the son would marry it mother. The king ordered the baby to have stack drove into its feet then thrown in to the sea. The man who was supposed to do it didn’t. In stand he took baby Oedipus to the maintains in left him. Oedipus was fond and given to a different king in Queen to raise. When he was a young man he told the king in queen were not he real parent and went to find the truth from another profit. Oedipus was not told whether the king and queen were his real parent but only that he would kill his dad and marry his mother. He ran away from home to the city Thebes. On the way he kills a man and his group of workers. He then wins a battle of wits against the sphinx. The city of Thebes name him the new king he marry the queen Jocasta and has four kids. Thebes fall into a pelage in to fix it Oedipus go to the seer for help. The seer tells him he killed the old king. From that point he finds out the king was he father and that he had married his mother and had kid with her. Jocasta kills herself, Oedipus guts out his own eyes and leave the city. In the case of Oedipus, he and everyone around him goes to every extreme to make sure the prophecy won’t come true but it does anyways. This just show that no matter how much he tried his free will and decision could not undo
Oedipus Rex”, by Socrates, is a play that shows the fault of men and the ultimate power of the gods. Throughout the play, the main character, Oedipus, continually failed to recognize the fault in human condition, and these failures let to his ultimate demise. Oedipus failed to realize that he, himself was the true answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus ignored the truth told to him by the oracles and the drunk at the party, also. These attempts to get around his fate which was determined by the gods was his biggest mistake. Oedipus was filled with hubris and this angered the gods. He believed he was more that a man. These beliefs cause him to ignore the limits he had in being a man. Oedipus needed to look at Teiresias as his window to his future.
In the story of Oedipus, the myth begins with King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes worried if they are going to be able to conceive a child and King Laius decides to find the Oracle of Delphi for a prophecy. The Oracle gives the prophecy of the child with the vision that he will kill both of them if he was to be born, so later on when Jocasta does give birth to a baby boy, King Laius pierces the baby’s ankles to not allow him to crawl in order to escape the prophecy. The baby boy was then to be sent into the mountains alone where he shall die, but a shepherd saves him and hands the baby over to Polybus and Merope. Later, he meets with the Oracle and is told he would kill his mother and father. Then, on his way towards Thebes, he comes across King Laius on a chariot and their charioteers end up
Born to King Laius and Queen Jocasta in the city of Thebes, Oedipus is surrounded with controversy after a prophecy shows that Oedipus will be destined to murder his father and marry his mother. Fearing the potential consequences of the prophecy, Oedipus’ parents made the decision to abandon their baby at the top of a mountain to die using one of their servants. The servant’s consciousness, however, causes him to instead deliver the baby to a shepherd, who in turn sends him to King Polybius and Queen Merope of the kingdom Corinth. After raising the child as their own, Oedipus becomes suspicious that these weren’t his biological parents and leaves Corinth upon hearing the prophecy by the oracle Delphi. As he unknowingly travels to his birth city, Thebes, Oedipus murdered a man along with his servants after a dispute between them. Before entering Thebes, Oedipus is confronted by the guardian of the city’s Gates, the Sphinx who presents him with a riddle. If he solves the riddle, he will be able to pass. If he doesn’t, he’ll die. Oedipus’s superior intelligence and cleverness allows him to easily solve the riddle, however unbeknownst to him will be a foreshadowing of his tragic downfall. The citizens of Thebes praise Oedipus and Queen Jocasta offers to marry him since her husband was mysteriously murdered. Upon marry Jocasta and becoming the King of Thebes, a powerful plague decimates the citizens of
He murders his father and marries his mother unknowingly. While it may seem to some that Oedipus was destined to carry out his fate, it is also true that Oedipus’ personality led him to his fate. It is clear to see that Oedipus is an impulsive and passionate man, which causes Oedipus to fulfill the prophecy that haunts him. He flees the kingdom of Corinthian in order to avoid his fate. Along his journey he comes to a crossroad that is blocked by a chariot, and “in a fit of anger” Oedipus kills the father he never knew (Meyer 1422).
Oedipus’ doom was already predetermined by an Oracle at Delphi before the moment of his birth; thus, despite what choices the people who played a part in his fate made, it became one step closer in bringing about his doom. The prophecy was first given to his parents, Jocasta and Laius, saying that their son was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. This, of course, struck fear into the hearts of Jocasta and Laius. As a result to escape this fate, they had decided to order a henchman to leave the baby on a mountainside with his legs bounded so that he would die of exposure. They believed that their actions of doing so would increase the prophecy not being fulfilled; however, the parents were oblivious at the fact whether or not the baby died or lived. With pity, the henchman instead took the baby to the city of Corinth to be raised under the throne of Polybus and Merope, whom Oedipus grew up thinking he was a legitimate child of. The actions of Laius and Jocasta played the major role in the development of fulfilling the fate prophesied. Laius and Jocasta believed the Oracle, but they had also believed they could control their fate. S...
Oedipus was born with a terrible Prophecy. From the start it was foreseen that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother. His parents, Laius
...up the question of the value of truth, and whether the pain of knowing an awful truth is more important than the bliss of ignorance. This also applies to Death of a Salesman: while Oedipus chooses to pursue the truth, Jocasta and the Lomans try to live in naïveté and not face reality. The play also questions the increasingly proud leaders of the Athenian society who challenge the higher powers, i.e. men against the gods, when Oedipus reviles the oracles. The gods, he indicates, will always triumph when men, using their intellect, oppose them. One of the themes is that the course of things is partly based on the character's actions but mostly fate.
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a story about the dark side of the "American Dream". Willy Loman's obsession with the dream directly causes his failure in life, which, in turn, leads to his eventual suicide. The pursuit of the dream also destroys the lives of Willy's family, as well. Through the Lomans, Arthur Miller attempts to create a typical American family of the time, and, in doing so, the reader can relate to the crises that the family is faced with and realize that everyone has problems.
Willy throughout the course of the play, daydream he is conversing with his successful brother Ben. Willy memories of Ben, are a constant reminder of how he falls short of his American Dream. Consequently the real tragedy wasn’t Willy failing to achieve the American dream, but rather his American Dream ignores the love of his family. It’s quite ironic that Willy literally kills himself for money at the end of the play. “Willy: After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”(Act II) Desperately trying to escape the deception and lies he has been facing all of this life from his own doing, Willy decides that he will take his life in order for his family to collect on the life insurance policy.
From the very beginning, Oedipus was destined to fulfill Apollo's prophecy of killing his father. Even though King Lauis tries to kill Oedipus to stop the fulfillment of this shameful prophecy, fate drives the Corinthian messenger to save Oedipus. What the gods fortell will come true and no human can stop it from happening, not even the kings. Oedipus is once again controlled by this power when he leaves the place of his child hood after he hears that he is to kill his father and marry his mother. "I shall shrink from nothing...to find the the murderer of Laius...You are the murderer..." Oedipus tried to stop the prophecy from coming true by leaving Corinth and only fate can make Oedipus turn to the road where he kills his true father. Leaving Corinth makes Oedipus lose his childhood by making him worry of such issues young people should not have to worry about and becoming a king of a strange land. Last of all, Oedipus carries the last part of the prophecy out, marrying his mother. " I would... never have been known as my mother's husband. Oedipus has no control over the outcome of his life. Fate causes Oedipus to have known the answer to the Sphinx's riddle and win his marriage to his mother, Jocasta. Had fate not intervened, the chances of marrying Jocasta would have been small since there is an enourmous number of people and places to go. Oedipus loses his sense of dignity after he discovers he is not only a murderer, but also that he had committed incest.
In Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, the age-old confusion of the impact of the free will of man on their seemingly unchanging destiny manifests itself in the scattered emotional war zone that is our protagonist. Oedipus is directly responsible for the fiery mass of rubble that his once joyous life became because he allowed his excessive ego and self worth lead him to a reckless lifestyle of impulsivity and arrogance.
When Oedipus was born he was taken to an Oracle, this was custom for the rich. The Oracle was to tell his fate. The Oracle said that when Oedipus grows up he will marry his mother and he would also kill his father, "... Why, Loxias declared that I should one day marry my own mother, And with my own hands shed my father's bool. Wherefore Corinth I have kept away far, for long years; and prosperd; none the less it is most sweet to see one's parents' face..."(p36 ln1-6). When his parents herd this they gave Oedipus to a man and he was to get rid of the baby by leaving it in the forest, but an servant of Polybus, the king of Corinth, finds the baby and brings him to the king. The king falls in love with the baby and takes him in as one of his own.