Family Dreams in Death of a Salesman
1975; Duke University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2925484
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoNE CRITIC, perhaps facetiously, has called Death of a Salesman' a tragedy for extroverts.2 This differentiates Willy Loman from a dramatic tradition of introspective figures who, like Shakespeare's Hamlet or Milton's Samson, confront their situations in a profound social and metaphysical solitude. By contrast, a protagonist who cannot be alone, who cannot summon the intelligence and strength to scrutinize his condition and come to some understanding of it-whatever agony it may cost him-seems disqualified for the tragic stature literature can bestow. With reference to Aristotelian standards, Sheila Huftel has remarked that Loman fell only from imagined height.3 Indeed, to an extent his drama represents merely the collapse of a Philistine. Yet if one does not look upon Loman with a scowl of condemnation for his adherence to values he barely understands, for his anti-intellectualismi, his contradictions, his insensitivities and petty cruelties, he does not because the fall from a height only imagined is nevertheless a fall. Loman is not, as critics have too facilely stated, a modern Everyman but an anomaly, a bourgeois romantic, an odd synthesis of Joe and Chris Keller, or of Everyman and Faust. He moves one not with his mediocrity and failure but with the frustrated energies of his outreach beyond mediocrity and failure toward a relationship to society constantly denied him. Loman wants success, but the meaning of that need extends beyond the accumulation of wealth, security, goods, and status. As Arthur Miller said in an interview, The trouble with Willy Loman is that he has tremendously powerful ideas.' But he yearns toward them
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