Explain with reference to Death of a Salesman how Miller's tragic vision is distinctively modern.
According
to the old, traditional view, the tragic hero was to be a person of high rank
or status, so that his downfall could produce the appropriate emotional effect
on the audience. Besides, the old view of tragedy emphasized the element of
fate as being responsible for the misfortunes of the tragic hero. Even in the
plays of Shakespeare, although the character of the tragic hero is largely
responsible for his undoing, the mysterious working of fate is distinctly
brought into focus. In other words, Shakespeare attributes human misfortunes
mainly to the weakness or flaw of the sufferers themselves but partly to the
hidden forces which we describe as fate or destiny. Miller departs from both
these concepts of tragedy. In the first place, the tragic hero in Death of a
Salesman belongs to the middle class which means that this play is a bourgeois
tragedy. Miller does not believe that a tragic effect can be produced only by
the downfall of a highly placed individual. It is not the high social rank of
the individual but the intensity of his commitment to an idea or system that is
important. Secondly, although Willy is to some extent himself responsible for
his tragedy, the chief villain is society, which means that we have here a
social drama. Miller's tragic vision is thus distinctively modern because the
emphasis in this play is firstly on an ordinary man, and secondly on the social
context, in which he lives, suffers, and dies. We are here far away from both
Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy.
As
a tragic hero, Willy is a victim of what is known as the American dream. The
phrase "American dream" means the view held by most Americans that it
is possible for a man to rise to the top through good looks, personality,
attractiveness, winning manners, and social contracts. The American dream in
this play is personified by three different figures. First, there is Ben,
Willy's brother. Ben is a self-made man who became fabulously rich by his own
initiative and his adventurous spirit. At the age of seventeen he went into the
jungle and by the age of twenty-one had already become exceedingly rich. Ben is
the totally self-confident man who knows what he wants and would tolerate no
ethical obstruction on his way to material success. His motto is: "Never
fight fair with a stranger." For Ben, ruggedness, rather than personality
or even personal integrity, is the key to success. But the American dream is
also symbolized by Dave Single man, who lived on trains and in strange cities,
and who, by virtue of some irresistible personal charm, became popular and
wealthy. Finally, the American dream is symbolized by Willy's father, who not
only ventured into a pioneer's wilderness with no security or certainty of
success, but who was also a creator. (He made flutes and high music).
Willy
is a victim of the relentless social system which drives people to frantic,
all-consuming dreams of success. Willy is doomed not only by the grandiose
nature of these dreams but also by their inherent contradictoriness. As a
social victim, Willy is given his elegy in the last scene by his friend and neighbor,
Charley, who, ironically, has succeeded within the American system by a kind of
indifference and lack of dream. Willy's fate shows that Miller seems to be
disapproving a system that demands total commitment to success without regard
to human values. It is a system-having just one motto "eats the orange and
throw the peel away." Miller in this sense attacks the society that says,
in the words of Howard: "Business is business." It is a society in
which the cruel inhuman son (Howard) has replaced his kindly father (Wagner)
and can say to a long-time employee (Willy), the man who gave him his Christian
name: "Look, kid, I'm busy this morning."
In
the play, Willy has no traditional religion. His religion has been the American
dream. His gods have been Ben, Dave Single man, and his father, but they are
now all dead. When Willy goes to Howard to demand his just due and confronts a
babbling tape-recorder, which he cannot turn off, he is confronting the
impersonal technological society which metes out its own impersonal justice.
But he is also confronting a world without justice, a world where final truth is”babble".
The
play shows a conflict between youth and age, private and public life, optimism
and suicidal despair. Willy perceives that he has accomplished nothing, but
America is still the greatest country in the world even if personal
attractiveness gets you nowhere. He perceives that the competition is
maddening, but he refers here to the uncontrolled birth-rate only. His second
son, Happy, is also a salesman, already lost to liquor and sex, and obsessed
with the empty word "future" always on his lips. His elder son is yet
struggling to find himself, and one is not sure whether, at the end of the
play, he has really found himself.
The
modernity of this play has been established by another kind of approach also.
According to one critic, Miller is a tragic artist who, without knowing it, has
been confused by "Marxism" Exactly the reverse view has been
expressed by another critic who sees Miller as a "Marxist" confused
by "tragedy" According to this critic; it is the capitalist system
that has ruined Willy. The scene in which he is brutally fired after
thirty-four years with the firm comes straight from the communist writings of
the thirties, and the idea emerges clearly enough that it is the particular
American form of money- economy that is responsible for the absurdly false
ideals of both father and his sons. However, one cannot help pointing out that
to interpret the play in Marxist terms is to twist or distort it. The scene in
which Willy is dismissed by Howard can hardly have been intended as a criticism
of the capitalist society.
Besides
the salesman-ideal of success in a modern capitalist-commercial society, there
are two other ideals in the play which also indicate its modern character.
There is the pioneer ideal of success in the "great outdoors"
represented by both Ben and Willy's father. And there is the popular-ideal of
success through distinction in sports: Biff the hero of the football team is
another dream whereby Willy seeks his own identity. Miller is very careful to
insist on all these ideals as Willy's.
The
modern character of this play is seen, further, in the fact that Willy is by no
means an extraordinary or exceptional individual. He is emphatically a
representative figure, much more of an American Every-man than any of Miller's
other characters. Willy is just the average American, and he is drab His
drabness is seen in his commitment to the standard ideals, the standard
commercial products, and even the standard language. His fidelity to the great
American dream of success is at the very heart of the play. He believes in this
dream in its simplest, its final, form. He believes, with Dale Carnegie, that
success comes to a man who is impressive, persuasive, well-liked, and self-
confident. His misfortune is one of the poignant and inevitable misfortunes of
American society of our times. Miller also seems to be saying in this play that
modern competition is no better than theft. Biff is the particular exponent of
this view. Imbued by his father with the spirit of competition, he steals a
football, a box of basket-balls, a suit of clothes, and a fountain pen. This
equation between competition and theft is afterwards made by a waiter when
Happy tells him that he and his brother are going into business together. The waiter
approves of the idea and says: "'Cause what's the difference? Somebody steals?
It's in the family"
Miller's
modern outlook is seen also in the peculiar technique employed by him. It is
not only the sociologists who have felt interested in this play. A neuro-psychiatrist
has praised this play as a "visualized psycho-analytic interpretation
woven into reality, a masterful exposition of the unconscious motivations in
our lives." The emphasis of this play on the importance of the
hallucinatory memory-sequences constitutes one of Miller's original
contributions to dramatic structure. This past, as a hallucination, comes back
to Willy not chronologically as in flash-back, but dynamically with the inner
logic of his erupting volcanic unconscious. The inter-weaving of past and
present in this play succeeds because of the organic relevance of the
remembered episodes to Willy's present circumstances. Although Miller denied
any familiarity with Freudian psychology, he has successfully developed the
motivating idea of this play for which his original title was: "The Inside
of His Head."
"In
the vagueness of Willy's identity and his occupation, in the mysterious success
of Uncle Ben, in the inexplicable virtue of the good neighbors, in the incomprehensible
magnetism of Willy's proletarian tendencies, we have not only the studied
ambiguity of Miller's method but also the quality of the radical political
climate. In more ways than the dramatist may know, his plays speak for the
spirit of the time."