Both works “The Cats Table” and Death of a Salesman demonstrate that everything is not always as it seems. This idea is presented through the use of setting, point of view and symbols. There is always more to things than what meets the eye and everything is not always as it seems. Setting plays such a large role in initiating the story and setting the feeling, the entire story revolves around setting. Where the story is told from can change the story entirely, someone may over exaggerate, or even under exaggerate what occurs throughout the story. Symbols really help the audience to better understand the story, uprooting deeper meaning or plainly helping get a point across to us, the readers. All of these attributes will help to prove that not everything is black and white and that we as sceptics really need to look further, we need to look past what is above the surface to a greater, far more important meaning.
In both literary works, setting plays a large role by capturing the feeling and helping the audience better understand them. Willy Loman has always seen himself as a high class, hardworking man, although his very limited friends and family would beg to differ. “He’s a man way out there in the blue . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy.” This quote helps us better understand that Willy Loman is a small man in a big world and if he does not dream or over exaggerate at all he will not amount to much. Willy portrays himself as a very successful man, but realistically, Willy Loman is a failure who will never amount to anything. The Cats Table is a tale which involves much mistreatment and neglect to those who do not deserve it. “What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power”. Th...
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...wn simple ways. “Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.” ― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table. The boys boarded the vessel not knowing the journey ahead, not knowing that the memories and the friends they have made on this vessel with remain with them for the rest of their lives.
A very common saying is “Don’t judge a book by its cover” which essentially means that everything is not always as it seems, there is usually much more to the story than what meets the eye. Death of a Salesman and “The Cat’s Table” both involve major elements proving that not everything is black and white, including setting, point of view, and symbolism. All of these crucial parts of literature help in proving that there is always more to a story, and that people do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
The Cat’s Table follows the archetypal journey of innocence to experience. Michael boards the ship expecting a three week adventure without parents “free from the realities of earth”. (7, 2, 14-15) In no way was he prepared for the changes he would undergo as the voyage progressed. Michael’s immigration from childhood to adulthood is mirrored with that of the Oransay’s route. In the beginning, Michael and his two friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, are in high spirits. Life on the open ocean holds no end of excitement and there are plenty of opportunities to discover and explore. Two objects of interest fascinate them: there is a prisoner on board as well as a knight; Sir Hector de Silva who lies dying. The boys make it their mission to discover everything they can about these two men who, while at opposite ends of the social ladder, eventually arrive at the same fate during the voyage.
support is a pathetic effort to protect his identity. Linda will never admit to herself,
The phenomenon of the American Dream has been engraved into the American culture since perhaps the beginning of post-revolutionary America itself. The classic belief that if you work hard, you would be able to reap the material benefits of what you sowed, at least enough to live comfortably is a myth that has been propagated in many literary works, deconstructed in many American literary works as a mere myth. And in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, we see such deconstruction of the American Dream take place through both plays’ showcasing of the many complexities of the American life, complexities that are not taken into consideration with the black-and-white narrowing of the American Dream. While hard work does make up a part of the equation, it does not make up the entire equation of a comfortable lifestyle. That manifestation of the many facets of the American Dream is shown in both Miller’s The Death of a Salesman and Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.
Willy Loman which may sound Low Man- man, writers often select the names for a reason, has two personalities one strong and one weak dreamer. The dreamer is optimistic, enterprising, including content and happy and the other is inconsistent, insecure, hypocritical, and unconscious. Both appear in all the advice he gives to his children. He is very contradictory, he is a person with excellent manual dexterity that insists on getting into sales business. He does contrary to what he wants. He is a country man, likes nature but lives in the city.
Elementary school taught everyone that to compare and contrast two things, the best way to go about doing that is with a Venn diagram. Truthfully, this is an effective method, but it is quite rudimentary under the circumstances. "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy and "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller are two books that can become victims of the dreaded Venn diagram. The two stories are accounts of the lives of two families, each living out its version of the American Dream. The focus of both stories is on the father and how he interacts with everyone and everything around him. Bull Meechum of "The Great Santini" is a marine, raising his children as "hogs" and expecting only the best, if not better, from his brood. Willy Loman of "Death of a Salesman" also expects great things from his children, to the point that he refuses to believe that either of his sons is a failure, even when it is clear that they are. Although the two men themselves have many similarities, there are also other similarities between the two stories. One similarity is the role of the first son in the two anecdotes. Also, there is the role of the second child. Finally, both stories involve characters that are realizing what it means to be a man and what responsibilities come with the title.
BANG! Your father is dead. Within a few seconds, although he attempted many times, your father dies. He gave up. All the fights, all the disrespect, and all the struggles are behind you. However, all the hope, all the passion, and all the love is still there. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the main conflict is between Willy Lowman and his son Biff. Most of their struggles are based on disrespect; however, much of the tension throughout the play is also caused by the act of giving up.
Through the course of this play we get an inside look at the mind of Willy Loman, a salesman from Brooklyn, New York. Willy has worked for almost everything he has, and maintains most of his property by himself. He worked almost his entire life as a traveling salesman, and developed a wholehearted belief in the American Dream which he carried with him until the day he died. Despite Willy’s best efforts, neither of his sons are able to fulfill his vision of success and much less even carry his hope of a better life onwards. Throughout the play we are able to observe his deterioration into madness that accompanies the decay of his mental
Have you ever worked long and hard on a project, only to realize that it was effort wasted and the project was totally meaningless in the end? That is just what occurred in the play The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Willy Loman, the protagonist, spent decades in mind numbing work, only to discover that he had “built his life on shifting sand” (Nicholas). Through the course of his journey, Willy kept on the straight and narrow highway, which he thought would bring success and happiness. He often contemplated when he would draw his last breath and if he should. Willy begins to realize the futility of his journey when his son Biff Loman returned from college after he had flunked out. Willy had a prevailing hope that his son would amount to something, that he would be successful and become someone great. The cold and brutal reality was that both Biff and Willy were still living in the past. It takes until the final scenes in the play, for Biff to finally comprehend what his dad wanted for him; which was for him to go get a job in business instead of chasing his senseless dreams of being a rancher in Texas. It is in those final moments that Biff steps
“The American dream is, in part, responsible for a great deal of crime and violence because people feel that the country owes them not only a living but a good living.” Said David Abrahansen. This is true and appropriate in the case of Willy Loman, and his son Biff Loman. Both are eager to obtain their American dream, even though both have completely different views of what that dream should be. The play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller shows the typical lives of typical Americans in the 1940’s. Miller’s choice of a salesman to be the main character in this play was not a coincidence, since it represents the typical middle-class working American, some of which have no technical skills what so ever. Miller’s play gives us insides on the daily lives of many Americans, this through the eyes of Willy and Biff Loman, he also shows what kind of personalities, what dreams they have, and their different points of view of what the American dream means.
Like countless characters in a play, Willy struggles to find who he is. Willy’s expectations for his sons and The Woman become too high for him to handle. Under the pressure to succeed in business, the appearance of things is always more important than the reality, including Willy’s death. The internal and external conflicts aid in developing the character Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Of Mice and Men and the Death of a Salesman have different types of dreams which are incorporated in a variety of different ways. In Death of a Salesman, the dreams held by Willy, Happy and Biff have the same traditional American dream where you can become a wealthy, powerful and respected American. Willy is committed to his dream, as Happy Loman states “it’s the only dream you can have” and to be the “number one man”. In contrast, the characters’ dreams in Of Mice and Men, are extremely humble as George and Lennie only desire to have a 2 acre plot of land and a small home and “live off the fatta the land”. Whilst Lennie’s ambition is to have some rabbits and alfalfa,
“Death of a Salesman” written by Arthur Miller in 1948 attempts to give the audience an unusual glimpse into the mind of a Willy Loman, a mercurial 60-year-old salesman, who through his endeavor to be “worth something”, finds himself struggling to endure the competitive capitalist world in which he is engulfed. Arthur Miller uses various theatrical techniques to gradually strip the protagonist down one layer at a time, each layer revealing another truth about his distorted past. By doing this, Miller succeeds in finally exposing a reasonable justification for Willy’s current state of mind. These techniques are essential to the play, as it is only through this development that Willy can realistically be driven to motives of suicide.
Willy Loman stands in, so to speak, for every American male who defined himself as a man, husband and father with respect to his success in the workplace and his capacity for grabbing a share of the material American dream. Willy Loman is a man who has deluded himself and has judged himself more harshly than his wife or his son. His tragedy is that he comes to an understanding of this delusion too late to make any changes in his life. Whether or not we as readers or as members of the audience agree with his judgment is irrelevant. It is Willy's own failure that is important in this play.
Willy Loman is one of the most tragic heroes in American drama today. He has a problem differentiating reality from fantasy. No one has a perfect life. Everyone has conflicts that they must face sooner or later. The ways in which people deal with these personal conflicts can differ as much as the people themselves. Some insist on ignoring the problem as long as possible, while some attack the problem to get it out of the way. In the case of Willy in Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, the way he deals with his life as a general failure leads to very severe consequences. Willy never really faced his problems in fact in stead of confronting them he just escapes into the past, whether intentionally or not, to those happier childhood times where problems were scarce. He uses this escape as if it were a narcotic, and as the play progresses, we learns that it can be as dangerous as a drug, because of its ability to addict Willy, and it’s deadliness.
Willy Loman’s tragic flow leads him to purse the idea that reputation in society has more relevancies in life than knowledge and education to survive in the business. His grand error of wanting recognition drove him crazy and insane and lead to his tragic death. Willy’s hubris makes him feel extremely proud of what he has, when in reality he has no satisfaction with anything in his life. Willy Loman’s sons did not reach his expectations, as a father but he still continued to brag about Biff and Happy in front of Bernard. Willy Loman caused the reader to empathize with him because before his tragic death he did everything he could for his family. Empathy, Hubris , and Willy Loman’s tragic flow all lead him to his death that distend for him the beginning.