Death Of A Salesman And Oedipus Rex

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Recommended: Character analysis of oedipus

Marco Convertini

Mr. Stokes

ENG 4U1-06

March 24, 2014

Investigating the hamartia shared between Willy Loman and Oedipus Rex
In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex both protagonists serve as tragic heroes in their respective literary works. Willy Loman and Oedipus are both men who let their excessive hubris get the best of them, and pride is the tragic flaw they both share. Willy and Oedipus follow the same pattern of success and failure, they both experience happiness in their lives and then let their pride spoil it. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, both Willy Loman and Oedipus are tragic heroes because they share the hamartia of excessive pride, which, in turn, causes their blindness in the face of reality and their eventual demise. Firstly, this is demonstrated in the way Willy’s and Oedipus’s pride causes their inability to accept help from other people. Secondly, both tragic heroes are blinded to the truth due to their pride and arrogance. Finally, the tragedy is exposed after the peripeteia is experienced by Willy and Oedipus. The pride possessed by Willy and Oedipus demonstrated by their inability to listen to others, results in their development of arrogance, leading to their change in fortune, and then their inevitable downfall.
In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus comes to power by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx, but remains ignorant of the fact that he has murdered the previous king and his father, Laius. When

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Oedipus consults Teiresias about the oracle, Teiresias tells him that he is the murderer he is looking for: “ Listen to me. You mock my blindness, do you? But I say that you, with both your eyes, are blind.You can not see the wretchedness ...

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...artistically made plot must necessarily be single rather than double, as some maintain, and involve a change not from bad fortune to good fortune but the other way round, from good fortune to bad, and not thanks to wickedness but because of some mistake of great weight and consequence, by a man such as we have described or else on the good rather than the bad side.(Aristotle 18)

Aristotle argues that the best display of a tragedy is a plot that draws emotions of pity and fear. Aristotle explains that the perfect definition of tragedy is where the hero experiences reversal of circumstance, due to a hamartia. Willy and Oedipus are both perfect examples of tragic heroes due to the fact that they fit Aristotle’s description, that is, they both share the tragic flaw of hubris, and let it blind them in the face of reality, and, in turn, cause their tragic demise.

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