Death of a Salesman: The American Tragedy

Arthur moth millers find Death of a Sales homo is considered by umteen a nonher(prenominal) to be a modern tr yearsdy. In Poetics, Aristotle offers his description of a catastrophe, and Millers play meets these requirements. The Ameri basis Dream that the protagonist, Willy Loman, spends his conduct chasing, is, in itself, tragic. And that his family had the same values, the same delusions that Willy did, helps to class the case for catastrophe. Aristotle defined tragedy as such cataclysm, then, is an imitation of an achievement that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude in language embellished with each benevolent of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate move of the play in the form of action, non of narrative through ignominy and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. Tragedy, if one is to believe Aristotle, is something that causes fear and pity. In Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman fails at the Ameri tin Dream.This is a common occurrence in modern America, and readers can see themselves in Willys shoes, creating fear. They feel sorry for Willy, because ultimately, he is the same as them. His chas decenniuming is their failure. Not just contemptible, this melodic theme is nothing less(prenominal) than terrifying. According to authentic research, only human brains have dopamine receptors. Dopamine (DA) is the predominant catecholamine neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, where it controls a variety of functions including locomotor activity, cognition, emotion, positive reinforcement, food brainchild and endocrine regulation.If tragedy instills fear, an emotion, distinctly a normal working DA is required. With the DA controlling emotions, such as fear and pity, it could be state that humans ar hardwired to see entirely loss as tragic and the play, even as defined by Aristotle, is therefore a tragedy. being able to see ones self failing, over and over again, is both pitia ble and fearful. The average human can see themselves failing. Willy Lomans failures and crushed dreams commence their own. In his essay, Tragedy and the Common Man, Arthur Miller states In this age few tragedies ar written.It has often been held that the lack is due to a famine of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic polish up on tone cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we be often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy above us. The necessary conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very exceedingly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implie.What he is saying is that, succession outdated, tragedy still exists in some form, and no one is above or below it. Willy Loman wanted the American Dream. He wanted to be winning and he wa nted his children to be made. This dream perhaps, is the biggest tragedy of all. The play begins when Willy is old, a gross revenueman no longer working on salary, but for commission. He can no longer afford to support his family. All of his contacts from decades of selling are dead. He is the only one left, and he is far from successful.To Willy Loman, success is the analogous of being well-liked. To modern man, success is having a house, a couple of cars, devil point three children, Rover in the backyard and a white picket fence. There is no need to be well-liked as business can be done over the phone or via email while one is in his pajamas. Willy Loman was not well-liked. He had few friends and even less success. He shind his bread and butter away, clawing for the next rung on the metaphorical tend of life, and never reaching it. His sons were failures and destined to follow in his footsteps.Senile or not, Willy lived the sound of his years in a complete fantasy, believ ing that Biff and elated were doing well for themselves, when in reality, Biff was working as a mature hand and Happy was living with a new girl every week. Happy tried to reassure his father that he was going to excite married and be successful. Biff seemed to throw his hands up in despair. He was content doing the work that he was, but Willy still thought of him as a failure.WILLY How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand?In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, its good for him to tramp around, concern a lot of diffe withdraw jobs. But its much than ten years straight off and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a weekLINDA Hes finding himself, Willy.WILLY Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace (Penguin Plays, pp 16)Biff himself tells his brother that their dad mocks him all the era. He feels inadequate and lost.BIFF And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly propose the feeling, my God, Im not getting anywhereWhat the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week Im thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin my future. Thats when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I dont know what to do with myself. (pp22) Happy, in like manner, in a conversation with his Biff, in clearly not content with the direction his life has gone in.HAPPY I dont know what the hell Im workin for. Sometimes I sit in my apartmentall alone. And I think of the rent Im paying. And its crazy. But then, its what I unceasingly wanted. My own apartment, a car and plenty of women.And still, darnedmit, Im lonely. (pp 23) The earnestly dysfunctional Loman family is a tragedy. Biff and Happys constant struggle to make the grade, to be well liked, to be successful is a tragedy. Willy, however able to separate past from present, truth from fantasy, has raised his boys to think that the to a greater extent friends they have the more successful they will be. Willy Loman meas ures success in people, and he taught his sons to do the same. He is unable to understand what Biffs paradox is, though the reader finds out at a later time. The problem was Willy. Biff had it made.He was well liked. He had three scholarships coming his way. He failed math, and sooner summer school started he went to visit Willy on one of the many business trips he took. He finds his father with another woman and leaves, preceding summer school, the credit and the football scholarships. Albert A. Shea considered Death of a Salesman to be a scathing social commentary on capitalist America. Shea wrote Arthur Miller casts a score of darts &8212 at advertising, credit selling, the family automobile at the picayune larceny and the subversive attitude toward sex characteristic of our time.But his main attack is against the view that a man is a fool if he does not get something &8212 as much as possible &8212 for nothing more than a smile, being a good fellow and having good contacts. peradventure Arthur Miller is not casting darts at the view that man is a fool to expect something for nothing. Miller is no doubt fight the standard good old American Dream, called a dream because that is barely what it is something that somebody hopes, longs, or is ambitious for, usually something difficult to attain or far removed from present circumstances.A dream then, that seldom becomes a reality. These hopes themselves are tragic, because, as mentioned above, they are difficult to attain. For the Lomans, they are not difficult, they are impossible. The Book Rags website writes Willy Loman died a failure by his own standards. Biff considers Willys life a failure because he had the wrong dreams. He spent too much time convincing himself he could be a successful salesman, when what he was clear he was skilled at working with his hands.If hed followed the refine dreams, and confronted his abilities in a realistic and honest way, he may not have been a failure, and his life might not have cease this way. Even in death, Willy Lomans plans fail no one shows at his funeral, and his life insurance policy doesnt cover suicide. And so, at the end of it all, the reader sees, at the same time the Lomans see, that Willy is a failure. His life has consisted of numerous stories and fabrications. He has lied to his wife virtually how much he has sold, about how many friends he has and even about silk stockings.Willy is a perfect portrayal of the American save in the fifties. He longs to provide for his family. He dreams about making it big. These are aspirations that he has passed on to at least one of his sons, Happy, who tells him Pop, I told you Im gonna retire you for life. (pp41) to which Willy responds Youll retire me for life on seventy goddam dollars a week? And your women and your car and your apartment, and youll retire me for life A digest on Homework Online offers this Willy has lost at trying to live the American Dream and the play can be viewe d as commentary about society.Willy was a man who was worked all his life by the machinery of Democracy and assoil Enterprise and was then spit mercilessly out, spent like a piece of fruit. Joyce Carol Oates read the play in the 1950s and now writes His occupation, for all its adversities, was white collar, and his class not the one into which Id been born I could not recognize anyone I knew intimately in him, and certainly I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us.Indeed, Willy Loman is all of mankind, and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of them all. Oates remarks that Willy Loman resembled none of the men in her family when she was fourteen or fifteen, and then she realized that all of the men in her family were Willy Loman, in their own way. Aristotles definition of tragedy be ing something that creates fear and pity. Willy is both our fear and our pity.Perhaps Oates summarizes the tragic nature of Willy Loman separate than anyone elseIn the intervening years, Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our municipal Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace, his mad characterisation on the heath a frantic seed-planting episode by blowlamp in the midst of which the once-proud, now disintegrating man confesses, Ive got cypher to clack to. His salesmanship, his family relations, his very lifeall have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to nobody to listen.Perhaps the most memorable single remark in the play is the calm down observation that Willy Loman is liked . . . but not well-liked. In America, this is not enough. Indeed, it is not enough in America.Works Cited1. Poetics by Aristotle. Trans. S. H. Butcher. 21 May 2004. The University of Adelaide Library. 30 November 2006. <etext. library. adelaide. edu. au/a/Aristotle/poetics/>.2. Missale, Cristina, S. Russel Nash, Susan W. Robinson, Mohamed Jaber and Marc G. Caron. Dopamine Receptors From Structure to Function. Physiological Review. 78. 1 (1998) 189-225.3. Tragedy and the Common Man. The Literary Link. 7 October 2006. 8 declination 2006. < http//theliterarylink. com/miller1. hypertext markup language>.4. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York Penguin Books, 1949.5. Death of a Salesman Book Rags. 8 December 2006. <www. bookrags. com/notes/das. html>.6. Death of a Salesman. Homework Online 8 December 2006. 8 December 2006. <www. homework-online. com/doas/index. asp>.7. Oates, Joyce Carol. Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman A Celebration. Fall 1998. USFCA. 10 December 2006. <http//www. usfca. edu/southerr/arthurmiller. html>.