Blending of Past, Present, and Future in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Blending of Past, Present, and Future in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

The most significant and challenging aspect to Death of a Salesman is its structure. In reading and watching the play it may appear at first that Miller is relying on the tried but true "flashback" technique in dramatizing the events of the play. In reality, Miller is actually attempting something much different. He is actually trying to fuse the past, present, and future into, what David Biele has aptly termed, a "constant state of NOW." It's not too unlike the Buddhist notion of living in the "eternal present" - meaning, whether we are conscious of it or not, everything that happens, happens now. If you are remember something in the past you are remembering it now. If you are dreaming of something in the future you are doing in now. Miller describes that state as this:

I've never been able to make time real for myself. I can't remember whether something happened two weeks ago or three years ago. Or when I was in England the last time. The calendar doesn't seem to exist in my head. It all melts together. It always has. It's probably a form of insanity. I thought I would try to write that way - simply melt the days, the months and the years, because I really do believe that we move through the world carrying the past and that it's always alive in the back of our head. We are making constant references between what we see now and what we saw then, between what we hear now and what we heard then ... one asks a policeman for directions: as one listens, the hairs sticking out of his nose become important, reminding one of a father, brother, son with the same feature, and one's conflict with him or one's friendship come to mind, and this all over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one wants to go.

The play then becomes an attempt to dramatize the way, to Miller at least, that the mind actually works. In fact, he originally thought of calling the play, "The Inside of His Head." He wanted the resulting form to "carry the whole freight of a man's life," moving the play forward not chronologically, in a "narrow discreet line, but as a phalanx, all of its elements moving together simultaneously.