One of the antagonists in this story is the false promise of the American Dream, not another person per se. Willy is unable to become rich and show his family his own worth through material possessions, despite his hard work and perseverance, which is a conflict to him because he believed that would happen. He believes that the company he has been employed by for decades will promote him, but instead he is fired. He has worked hard and struggled to provide for his family, yet his sons reject him. Willy learns that the truths he has believed in life are actually false promises. These conflicts are all caused by the antagonist of the play, and losing his job and income and therefore perceiving himself to have let everyone, including himself, down are his external conflicts. Willy is also conflicted internally, which he shows through examples such as his paradoxical opinion about his car, which goes from being the best car in the world to being useless. He is conflicted internally because he is trying to maintain an identity as a successful father, a providing husband, and an effective salesman, all of which do not coexist in harmony.
With Willy as the major protagonist of the play, he himself practically states the dramatic question of Miller's work out loud. When Biff returns to his parents' home, Willy asks why he is there.
This is the essence of the dramatic question, which is what caused the father and son relationship to fail between Willy and Biff, and can their separation be reconciled? This of course applies to the major theme of the play, which is about the failing...
Dunbar writes his entire poem in a dialect that is nearly indecipherable at first glance as well. All of the collective characters in Death of a Salesman, Beloved, and "Antebellum Sermon" have experienced some kind of difficulty in their pasts (some obviously more horrific than others); however, there is the commonality that all seem to oppress what they have faced in their pasts. Sethe and Paul D. choose to not
He continued to repeat the same behavior without at least trying to do something different. His dream probably kept him alive a little longer than he might have lived otherwise. As pathetic as his dream was, he owned it and believed he could reach it on some level. Willy's tragic flaw begins with a delusion. He chooses to foster that delusion instead of moving in another direction. He takes
Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" Perhaps no other play in American history has captured the essence of the nation's collective consciousness during a particular era than Arthur Miller's 1949 drama Death of a Salesman. Presented predominately from the perspective of aging salesman Willy Loman, this contribution to dramatic literature is at once absurd and tragic, with Miller employing several distinct authorial styles to tell the story of an increasingly
Pygmalion -- George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw -- one of the most well regarded playwrights -- wrote this comedy and first presented it to the public in 1912. He took some of the substance of the original Greek myth of Pygmalion and turned it into a popular play. In Greek mythology Pygmalion actually came to fall in love with one of his sculptures, and the sculpture suddenly became a living
Appearance vs. Reality Discrepancies between inner and outer realities: 1984 versus Death of a Salesman Both George Orwell's dystopian classic novel 1984 and Arthur Miller's realist stage drama Death of a Salesman create a contrast between appearances and reality in order to criticize the political and social structure that exists in society and its negative effects on the protagonists. In Orwell's novel, the world within Winston Smith's head is far more real than
Eugene O'Neill's play, "The Emperor Jones (1921)," is the horrifying story of Rufus Jones, the monarch of a West Indian island, presented in a single act of eight scenes of violence and disturbing images. O'Neill's sense of tragedy comes out undiluted in this surreal and nightmarish study of Jones' character in a mighty struggle and tension between black Christianity and black paganism (IMBD). Jones is an unforgettable character in his
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