Death of a Salesman

By -
Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller

Willy Loman is a traveling salesman, but he's getting older and more tired, and he's getting less stable--he keeps reliving memories instead of facing reality.  He's disappointed in his two sons, Biff and Happy, who were popular and successful in high school but have drifted ever since.  Willy expected them (and himself, too) to become successful businessmen, but that never materialized and he takes refuge in memories and lies about his life.  His wife loves him and is worried that he will commit suicide, but he tends to trample her.  During the play, we find out why Biff, the oldest son, went off the rails and just how far Willy will go to avoid reality.

I gather that the play is supposed to be about the failure of the American dream; at least, as Willy Loman sees it.  He wants to make deals and be loved, and for his sons to get rich.  He wants to believe that his sons are special--all-American athletes, popular, able to wheel and deal with the best and strike it rich without trouble.  The boys, more realistic, try to tell him that they are just ordinary men with ordinary lives.  That's not good enough for Willy, who can't face his own failures as a father (and husband), and whose dreamy expectations eventually kill him.


My Spin title was "The Crucible," and it came in a collection of five plays, so I read this one from my CC list as well.  It's yet another famous American piece that I'd never read before.  I had kind of a hard time with it, really.  Depressing mid-20th-century plays by Miller are not quite my thing, I guess. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 26, 2014 at 7:29 AM

    I quite liked The Crucible (but haven't reread it). Death of a Salesman I could live without. Like you, I can see what the themes are, but I don't particularly appreciate them on an emotional level.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more