DOAS & Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy & "Tragedy and the Common Man"

I really appreciate the way that Arthur Miller talks about hamartias in characters of a story in his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man”:

The flaw, or crack in he character, is really nothing – and need be nothing – but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are “flawless”.

Although in an Aristotelian tragedy, plot would be considered the most important aspect of the play, I believe that what makes this play so tragic is the struggle between Willy’s GREAT hamartia of being unable to see the reality of himself and his family and all of the other characters, especially Biff, who try to either appease Willy or make him understand what is true. I think Willy’s stubbornness and pride blinds him and makes him act as strangely as he does. Just as Miller says, Willy sees things like the stockings and Biff’s presence as challenges against his “rightful status” and therefore shows “active retaliation” through his fits of unexpected anger. The stockings serve as a reminder of Willy’s act of adultery and how he was found out by Biff who called him a “phony little fake”. Biff himself is also a reminder of this to Willy but there is more to Biff that angers Willy. Willy starts to conclude that Willy’s act of adultery caused Biff’s success and popularity in high school to decline and blames himself for Biff’s shortcomings. He is unable to see that Biff is a “nothing” and that his values of being well liked by people aren’t things that are valued by the world anymore. Yet, he is unwilling and unable to show this weakness in front of Biff and he claims that Biff is full of “spite”, continuously bringing up whose “fault” it is. Willy’s dignity prevents him from giving up his “phony dream” and to realize that firstly, his son isn’t amazing, and that, secondly, the world doesn’t value how people present themselves to be anymore, like how they talk or look like. Willy couldn’t even realize this back in the 1920s when he was talking to Linda about how people “seem to laugh at [him]” when he traveled as a salesman. He blamed it on “[joking] too much” and being “fat”, but it was just that the world was changing to come to accept people more like Bernard. People with intelligence are actually appreciated and valued because of their knowledge. It is even sadder that Willy can’t seem to recognize this after seeing how Bernard has grown.

Act 2 (part 2) & Requiem

From the line:

Stanley, calling to Happy indignantly: Mr. Loman! Mr. Loman!

The symbolism of the stockings is finally explained through the Willy’s memory of the event that he believes led to Biff’s downfall. His act of adultery with “the woman” not only drives him mad with guilt for the rest of his life but also shatters his son’s image of his father. Biff admired his father and “[knew] that the way [he] could talk” to others would bring them to like him. He believed in his father’s definition of success being how much you were loved and valued by others. However, his world was destroyed when he found out about his father’s affair with another woman who Willy gave Linda’s stockings to. Biff then proceeds to call his father a “phony” and a “fake”. Miller uses this flashback as a turning point in Willy’s behavior in which we are filled with pity for Willy and Biff. Also we are finally able to understand Willy’s strange hatred for Linda’s mending of her stockings. These stockings serve as a reminder of Willy’s adultery and unfaithfulness to Linda and his family.

One thing that I noticed is that when things get difficult, Biff tends to run away. In Willy’s flashback of when Biff found out about “the woman”, after Biff calls his father a “fake”, he “turns quickly and weeping fully goes out with this suitcase” leaving his father shocked and dumbfounded in the hallway. When Biff was angry at the fact that Oliver pretended not to know who he was, he ran away with Oliver’s fountain pen. And when Biff is frustrated at Willy for not understanding that he didn’t get the deal and couldn’t “even bear to look at his face”, he “hurries out” of the restaurant. Perhaps Miller includes this constant running away to indicate Biff’s lack of confidence and the dysfunctional relationship between father and son.

Biff’s relationship with his father shows the failure of the promise of the MISLEADING American Dream. For Willy, the message of the American Dream was that if many loved you, success would come your way. However, by continuously looking to impress others, Biff realized that he was “so full of hot air” that he couldn’t listen or cooperate with anyone, causing communication problems between him and anyone else, especially Willy who believed that the American Dream was the way to live from the very core of his heart.

After his flashback, Willy detaches himself from all materialistic things. He gives Stanley money saying that he “[doesn’t] need it anymore”. He looks for seeds to plant and goes back home to start planting them. Willy is confused by his dreams and aspirations and the reality of the state of his family, although I am unsure as to whether this is due to something psychological or not. But the important thing is that Willy is only able to fully believe a couple of things by the end of the play. Willy believes that Biff is spiteful for his adulterous act and that Biff blames Willy for his lack of success. However, Biff loves his father and just wants his father to see him for who he really is. He does not want to hear his father’s expectations of him that are years old and outdated. Biff simply wants his father to see him for the “nothing” that he is. Biff is able to realize and is set free from the phony American Dream that his father Willy holds on to unknowingly as if it were his sole possession. The other thing that Willy believes is that his death will bring his popularity back and impress Biff. Willy in his speech to Ben states that he will have people “from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire” and that through this Biff will realize that his father is “known”.

Linda’s final phrase in the play “we’re free” as well as the fleeting music of the flute represents the catharsis of the family from Willy’s imposing dream. Although they are all mourning Willy, any glory or respectability that Willy’s death might have had was stripped by the lack of people at his funeral and his family’s and neighbor’s lamenting over Willy’s sad life as an unconfident salesman who “[rode] on a smile and shoeshine”.

Act 2 (part 1)

From the beginning of Act 2 until the line:

Happy: No, that's not my father. He's just a guy. Come on, we'll catch Biff, and, honey, we're going to paint this town! Stanley, where's the check! Hey, Stanley!

At the end of Act 1, the audience was left with hope with Biff and Happy looking forward to a new deal and with Willy looking forward to a new job in New York. This optimism lasts for only a short while into Act 2 as Willy and Linda talk about how they are almost out of debt for the first time in twenty-five years. Willy also brings up the first mention of the garden as he questions whether “beets would grow there”. Willy’s curiosity of whether the beets can grow there and his failure to do so symbolize Willy’s dreams for his children and for himself. Just like these seeds that have been able to grow despite the “so many times” that Willy has tried, Willy has never been able to support his family with “fruit”, in his case money or food. Not only that, but the failed seeds are also a symbol for Willy’s “failure” to nurture and care for Biff as he wanted to. When we see the scenes between Young Biff and a past version of Willy, there is a noticeable difference in that they don’t argue and Biff actually listens to his father. Biff was supposed to be the successful one after high school. He was offered scholarships to universities, was the star player on the football team, and was very popular in school. In many ways I see similarities between the character of Biff and the character of Jim O’Conner from Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Both were very successful in high school but burned out as soon as they realized the harshness of the real world. Going back to the usage of the seed as a symbol, Willy’s diversion about the growing of beets in the garden serves as a foreshadowing of the unveiling of how Biff came to be where he is now due to the actions of Willy.

The happiness and hope that is seen in the beginning of the act does not last very long especially as Willy gets rejected and fired from his job by his boss. Miller uses this scene to position the audience to feel pity for Willy. Up until this point, the only reason that I had to feel pity for Willy was when he confessed to Linda that he was not selling as much as he did before because people didn’t like him due to his rotund physical appearance. However, Miller uses the speech between Willy and his boss Howard to show disrespect that Willy endures through to keep his job. Howard continuously cuts Willy off with a “Sh! For God’s sake!” and other such rude, exclamatory phrases and keeps calling him the degrading term “kid” until he (Howard) realizes that Willy should be in Boston. Despite Willy’s pleading for a job in New York with little pay, Howard refuses to give Willy a different job. In his desperateness, Willy brings up the fact that he helped Howard’s father name him and the honor that is placed in that position. Yet this concept of honor has long been disregarded in the business world. Honor and the concept of being “well liked” are both things that are unnecessary to be a good and successful salesman. However, Willy is unable to understand that “business is business” and during his entire life, he reveals, that he has always believed that “selling was the greatest job that any man could want” because he falsely examined the life of Dave Singleman, a man who was still a salesman at age 84. He believes that it is a job that allows one “to be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people”. Willy fails to see that Singleman only seemed “well liked” because his job required him to be in contact with many people and that Singleman’s funeral that was attended by “hundreds of salesman and buyers” did not mean that he was loved but that once again he knew many people in his life.

Willy has come to believe that the way to success is to be loved by many people but he does not realize that by always looking to please people all the time, it will be impossible to actually have a meaningful life with loved ones (thus the problem that Biff, who was taught these values by Willy, is having). When he visits Charley’s office and talks to a grown up Bernard, Willy tries to see what exactly it was that went wrong in Biff’s life that prevented him from becoming as successful as Bernard. When Willy realizes that it was his actions on a certain day that was the catalyst for Biff’s failure he immediately becomes defensive and tells Bernard to stop “blaming it on [him]”. Willy’s pride ends up being his ultimate downfall.

Act 1

The first act of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, introduces us to the issues that the play deals with as well as the personalities of the characters and their relationship with one another. The production notes that Miller gives at the beginning of the script is very similar to the way that Tennessee Williams’ wrote production notes at the beginning of The Glass Menagerie, perhaps showing a popular style used by playwrights writing memory plays. Miller tells us a variety of things through these opening notes such as meticulous details for the set and characteristics of the characters in the play even before we see them on stage. Most of the play takes place in a “small, fragile-seeming” two-story house that is surrounded by tall apartment buildings. Miller tells us that an “air of dream clings to the place” perhaps implying that the house was once a symbol of the free and removed from the city lifestyle that the Loman family (the main characters in the play) longed for. However, now with the apartment buildings surround the house, the house seems like a trap, lending itself to be a symbol for the imprisonment of certain characters, in particular the father Willy Loman. The use of the set and its boundaries to show the difference between events in the past and the present was also mentioned in the notes, foreshadowing the possibility of scenes that intertwine both the past and the present. To be honest, I couldn’t understand how the stage actually looked and how it would be used in the play until I drew it:

As mentioned before, Miller uses the stage directions to characterize Willy and Linda Loman. We are told that Willy is the salesman, meaning that he is the character that will die (an implication taken from the title). The directions that Miller gives in this paragraph to describe Willy’s first entrance on the stage are interesting in that they are very vague, allowing the actor to bring the character of Willy alive through whatever mannerisms he deems fitting for the character. However despite this apparent freedom that Miller allows, Miller’s vision for the character and what the audience should be seeing overall is very precise. For example, Willy comes in the house “dressed quietly” with two large suitcases and when he reaches the kitchen, he “thankfully sets his burden down”. Through this entire non spoken segment Willy’s actions are supposed to express his exhaustion. As we can see, there is no specific direction about Willy’s actions other than the fact that he comes into the house and that he puts down the suitcases in the kitchen. But Miller’s description of Willy and the actor’s portrayal of Willy is used straight from the beginning of the play to instill in the audience a sympathy for the hard life that this man, “past sixty years of age”, has.

As for the character of Linda, I believe that Miller explains her personality more in the beginning in order to justify her actions and speech in this play. Linda doesn’t have as many lines as anyone in the Loman family, not only that but she seems to be completely tolerant of Willy’s schizophrenic behavior and lack of respect for her. Personally, I thought that Miller established Linda as the mediator of the family. She is the one who calms down her sons when they are irritated by their father’s mumbling and the one who listens to Willy’s rambling with unfailing patience and calmness. It is simply her love for Willy and nothing else that allows her to tolerate Willy’s commanding and disrespectful attitude towards her.

With the introduction of the other characters, such the Loman sons, Happy and Biff, Willy’s brother Ben, and his neighbor, through dialogue, I believe that Miller positions us to feel pity for Willy. He is man whose brain vacillates from being in the past and the present. We see this through the way he interacts with people of the past while talking to people of the present. As mentioned earlier, the audience can differentiate between the two through the stage directions involving the set boundaries. Also the symbolism of the flute is realized much more towards the end of the act. Willy wants the best for both of his sons and in the past he believed that if they just put their mind to it, they would easily beat anyone else out there and be successful. Yet Willy defines success as the amount of money one has and how “well liked” one is while both Happy and Biff define success differently. Biff longs just be content and to come to a point where he can happily say that he isn’t wasting his life while Happy wants to “outbox, outrun, and outlift” anyone with a better social status than him.