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Character of Willy Loman on death of a salesman
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Character of Willy Loman on death of a salesman
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Delaina Yatoma
18 January 2017
Mrs. Borgquist
Evaluating Tragedy
Greek tragedy is a form of theatre, originating in the 5th century B.C, that focuses on human suffering, both mental and physical, bringing about catharsis within an audience. Through many of their plays, Arthur Miller and Aristotle illustrate their roles as theorists of Greek tragedy. According to Aristotle there are six main elements to tragedy, the most important being: action of the play, character qualities and musical accompaniments. Aristotle stands firm in his belief regarding each character's nature that is revealed throughout plot. His ideas refer to the downfall of a hero who is above average versus a low status man such as Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s “Death
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Sophocles, Euripides and Miller employ the elements of tragedy in their works by accomplishing a catharsis, introducing characters which posses a tragic flaw, and revealing the steps to a miserable downfall.
Oedipus from “Oedipus Rex” is a perfect example of Aristotle's classification of a tragic hero. Although Oedipus appears to have various flaws including his temper, curiosity and ignorance, the text reveals to us that his blindness and excessive pride induced his tragic downfall. After a plague strikes the city of Thebes, citizens look to their noble king, Oedipus, to take action in improving the conditions. Oedipus receives a message that the plague will end when the murderer of Laius,
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In comparison to Sophocles' and Euripides’ traditional plots , Miller’s work demonstrates more modern drama with themes crucial to present age. Miller utilizes the ideas from “Tragedy and the Common Man” to drag his audience through an emotional rollercoaster, making them fearful of dying without recognition. Aristotle classifies a tragic downfall for a man that is of high rank or of great importance in the world. Miller’s play raises a counter example to Aristotle’s characterization considering Willy Loman is a ordinary man working to achieve the “American Dream.” He strives at becoming the best version of himself, and hopes to be remembered after he passes; which motivates him to plant seeds. Miller used a common man, Willy Loman, as the subject of his tragedy verses a significant individual such as a king. Miller states, “… the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing- his sense of personal dignity.” The traveling salesman is extremely concerned in securing his dignity, in fact he was motivated to commit suicide in order to collect money for his sons to pursue their dreams. However, Willy has some flaws including his pride and his focus on his past dreams and desires. Also, Willy is hardheaded, disloyal ignorant about the real reasoning
Many dilemmas throughout the recent decades are repercussions of an individual's foibles. Arthur Miller represents this problem in society within the actions of Willy Loman in his modern play Death of a Salesman. In this controversial play, Willy is a despicable hero who imposes his false value system upon his family and himself because of his own rueful nature, which is akin to an everyman. This personality was described by Arthur Miller himself who "Believe[s] that the common man is as apt a subject for a tragedy in its highest sense as kings were" (Tragedy 1).
In the book Death of A Salesman, author Arthur Miller shows how cruel life can be through the life of Willy Loman, the main character. His feelings of guilt, failure, and sadness result in his demise.
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.
Willy Loman will bring his downfall upon himself as he entices his own disillusions and the bedrock of his values pertaining to success and how one can achieve it. His failure to recognize the fruitless outcome of his own idealism will seal his fated suicide and have a determining effect on the failures of his two sons that when adolescent, idolized their father as a guid...
Arthur Miller provides us with a character who is both pathetic and tragic. Willy Loman spent his life chasing a false dream. His failure to live the "true" American Dream was what brought about his own downfall.**
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman tells the story of a man trying and failing to obtain success for him and his family. Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, has been trying to ‘make it big’ for the majority of his life. Miller’s play explores the themes of abandonment and betrayal and their effects on life’s success. Willy sees himself as being abandoned by his older brother, Ben, and constantly views his sibling’s betrayal as one that changed his prospects forever. Willy, in turn, is guilty of a different type of abandonment and betrayal of his sons, especially Biff.
Arthur Miller uses Willy, a common man, whose only flaw is his inability to question the validity of the American Dream, to portray a tragic hero, and also to question the ideals of the American society. Willy’s conflicted, lonely and seemingly false character has been created with only one end, and it is through the story of his life, his denial and finally his death, that undeniably grants his validity as a character. As Miller writes, ‘tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly’, this feeling being evoked when we are ‘in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing- his sense of personal dignity’.
In brief, it is apparent that Willy’s own actions led to not only his own demise, but his children’s as well. The salesman tragically misinterpreted the American Dream for only the superficial qualities of beauty, likeability and prosperity. Perhaps if Willy had been more focused on the truth of a person’s character, rather than purely physical aspects, his family’s struggles and his own suicide could have been avoided. On the whole, Arthur Miller’s play is evidence that the search for any dream or goal is not as easy and the end result may seem. The only way to realize the objective without any despair is the opposite of Willy Loman’s methods: genuineness, perseverance and humility.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a tragic play about an aging and struggling salesman, Willy Loman, and his family’s misguided perception of success. In Willy’s mind, being well-liked is more important than anything else, and is the means to achieving success. He teaches this flawed idea to his sons, Biff and Happy, and is faithfully supported by his wife Linda. Linda sympathizes with Willy’s situation, knowing that his time as an important salesman has passed. Biff and Happy hold their father to impossibly high standards, and he tries his best to live up to them. This causes Willy to deny the painful reality that he has not achieved anything of real value. Willy’s obsession with a false dream results in his losing touch with reality and with himself.
“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.
In the play, The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller,Willy Loman, an unsuccessful business man struggling to support his family is completely out of touch with reality throughout the plot line. Many characters throughout this play and their interactions with Willy have showed the audience his true colors and what he thinks is important in life. His constant lying and overwhelming ego certainly does not portray his life in factual terms, but rather in the false reality that he has convinced himself he lives in.
Arthur Miller himself argued that Loman's situation - that of the formerly successful and now unemployed salesman unable to find a reason for continued life - was so general a quality of American life that he (Willy) was victimized "by our being what we are (Karl, p. 330)." According to Perkins (p. 710), Willy Loman's "fatal flaw" has been variously interpreted as a pitiable blindness to the realities of the American Dream, as the unrealistic hope of a doting father for his son's advancement to l...
According to Aristotle, a tragedy must be an imitation of life in the form of a serious story that is complete in itself among many other things. Oedipus is often portrayed as the perfect example of what a tragedy should be in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. Reason being that Oedipus seems to include correctly all of the concepts that Aristotle describes as inherent to dramatic tragedy. These elements include: the importance of plot, reversal and recognition, unity of time, the cathartic purging and evocation of pity and fear, the presence of a fatal flaw in the “hero”, and the use of law of probability.
Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman”, primarily focuses on the flaws and failures of Willy Loman, Millers’ main character in this story. Willy’s distorted and backward views of the American Dream, paired with his inability to let go of the past lead him down a road of regret and in the end his biggest failure which was his wasted life.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a play that follows the troubles of a salesman named William “Willy” Loman, whose overzealous definition of true success inevitably leads to his suicide. I feel that a few of Willy’s unique characteristics contribute to his downfall, but that his unstable point of view and completely misconstrued concept of reality make the greatest contributions.