Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (Barron's Book Notes)

Category: Books,New, Used & Rental Textbooks,Humanities

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (Barron's Book Notes) Details

Analyzes the plot, characters, setting, themes, form, and influences of Death of a salesman and supplies advice on writing term papers and preparing for tests on the play

Reviews

Enter the cult of the salesman's society. A salesman needs to dream and lives in a completely fake smiling world when meeting his customers. Unluckily this alienation, because to smile on command is an alienation, can invade the salesman's private life and then life becomes a lie, becomes a solitude, becomes hell and blazes. Enter the cult of the urban sprawl. You may have had a nice house in the middle of some open space, but the city grows out and grows up and your house is soon surrounded by skyscrapers and sprawl and you live in a totally dehumanized and cold environment in which sunshine has become a vague recollection fading away with time. Enter the cult of the oedipian tragedy. The father is the dominating boss of the family, the bread winner, the meaning giver, the future designer and definer. The sons are zealots of the father and have to follow him in his tracks, or at least in what they think his tracks are, and trying to preserve his self-esteem and illusions by manipulating his ego as if it were a fragile fresh egg of some endangered bird species. One will accept the model and the other will find out all this is a lie, a fake, an illusion, but this latter will sink in some kind of maniacal depression that will leads him from one failure to another, from one intentional failing procedure to another, just to prove to himself and the world his father is great and he is nothing. And this will go till he finds the courage to look out and step away, once and for all, and become himself, finally free of the lie. Or, because there is always an alternative, till the father decides to step out of life, of his family's life, which will liberate the horizon and the perspective, though it will reveal marvellously how the mother had locked the father into that lie by killing his dreaming power and his enterprising spirit to having a house built, paying for the mortgage, footing the insurance bill and a few others like the refrigerator's, the car's and the washing machine's, etc. The mother (and here the play is extremely misogynistic) is the direct representative of the consumer's society that enslaves us to short-term needs and evacuates all imagination from this life, except when we manage to blow our tops and fly up into the sky of derangement. Enter the cult of private initiative seen as the only excape from this dictatorial ideology. There is always some wild country where you can go and become rich overnight. There is always some profession that can only be reached through hard work and heavy studying and in which only knowledge, competence and performance will count. There is always an outer and an inner frontier that the happy hardworking few will be able to cross and then to come back from enriched and empowered with a vision and a future. But woe to those who do not have that vision, who do not have that personal force, who do not have this special competence, who do not have this particular knowledge that gives them the opportunity to become the leaders of the world, their local world or the global world, or any stage in between these two extremes. What comes out of this play is that those who fail in this world only get what they deserve because they are failing themselves and the world by telling tall tales, by spreading lies, by not seeing that illusions are poisonous to the human mind. And yet how hard it is to be imaginative, competent, self-conscious and self-righteous, compassionate and humane, realistic and strong enough to know how to lie in order to save not one's public image but the truth. And by the way what is the truth in a society that considers the virtuality of an ever-evading potential to be more real than the material reality of an aim killed in our very act of reaching it ?Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne

Share this post