Death Of A Salesman Analysis Essay

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The Dream, the Truth
This paper will be an analytical, interpretive essay about Death of a Salesman (1949), the most profound work by author and playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005). Death of a Salesman received the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the year of its creation and has been reproduced over seven-hundred times. This analysis will concentrate on Willy Loman the central character of the play but also on the play as a whole. It will show that Arthur Miller’s critiques of American society still hold true to this day. That he was not just making a statement about the corporate social structure failing those that served it, or about how the American Dream in which those agencies perpetuate was dying. He was stating that the American Dream had never existed at all.
Miller’s interpretations on these subjects were not only true of the changing world at the time of the plays inception but have with an eerily truth echoed through to the present day. According to the cultural context in the LIT Student Edition “at the time, Death of a Salesman was written in 1949 the United States was experiencing the largest economic expansion in its history. After World War II, soldiers were returning home and women were leaving the factories where they held jobs while the men were away fighting the war. More and more consumer goods were being made and manufactured and as a result, companies were being consolidated, large impersonal corporations were taking over the mom and pop businesses.
The foot soldiers for these companies were the traveling Salesman who moved from town to town and covered large territories in a relentless effort to produce sales” (LIT.ED 606). Miller was showing us how these “impersonal corporations” didn’t care abo...

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...upply to cover their costs of living. As dysfunctional and backwards as all of this might seem there is still one thing we have omitted from this equation. And it is this element of the structure which reveals the truly fraudulent nature of the system itself, the application of interest.”
Regardless if you want to believe or not, we are all slaves, we are not free, we do not live in a free nation and it is this that Arthur Miller knew, it was what he wanted to express through Death of a Salesman. Through Willy, he wanted to show us that like most of us Willy too believed in the American Dream it is why he worked his whole life away, it is why we choose to attend work, or college, to become a teacher or a student. But just like Willy, we are being manipulated into believing in something that is a lie, a fairy tale, something that is as fictional as Willy himself.

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