Tragedy In Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman

One of the most popular forms of theater is tragedies, dating back to Greek and Shakespearean times. Tragedy is linked to Gods and Goddesses, kings and queens, princes and princesses, each their own struggle at their high social standpoint. However, Arthur Miller has brought tragic theater back to perspective with his modern work Death of a Salesman. Instead of glorifying the tragedy of one from a high social class, Miller writes about the average, everyday man struggling against life during the depths of the Depression. Deviating from the classic form of aristocratic tragedy, Miller focuses on the flaws of the protagonist. In the work of Death of a Salesman, does Arthur Miller deviate from the tragic genre as a whole, or tackle with our views

The basic conventions of a tragedy begin with the fact that the plot involves a protagonist, desiring something like love, power or wealth but gets blocked from his path of fullfillment by a series of obstacles, and needs to undergo several challenges to reach this, which the protagonist fails to achieve, ultimately failing and destroying him. A standard tragedy has at least one protagonist who plays the role of the tragic hero, someone who holds the position in the world placing him near the top of humanity. The tragic hero is someone the reader empathize or sympathizes with as otherwise the dramatic tragic fall, where they fall from their high social standpoint, would not be as effective. The tragic fall is the outcome of hamartia, the protagonist’s existential frailties or weaknesses. And lastly, a tragedy wouldn’t be a tragedy if it did not have end with some form of alienation, division, wreck, exile or

Willy was fixed on his dream that he was going to be successful someday, and that he was very well liked and that it would pay off one day. The dramatic and somewhat depressing ending however, suggests differently. Killing himself to pay off the future success of his sons, only for no one to show up to his funeral shows how his whole life was some sort of illusion to what he had dreamed to be, dying at the hands of his tragic flaws. The purpose of Miller’s modern tragedy was so that the audience would be able to relate to, seeing Willy as a property of all men instead of someone of nobility such as a king or prince or God. In the post-war times when the play was written, it was easier to relate to someone average, or even below average, than someone as strong as a