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Analysis of "Death of a Salesman"

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Published: Jan 31, 2024

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Table of contents

Body paragraph 1: the illusion of the american dream, body paragraph 2: the demise of the traditional family, body paragraph 3: the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, body paragraph 4: the evolving definition of success, counterargument: critiques and alternatives, references:.

• Trandell, Jesica et al. "American Dream: Is the American Dream Dead or Alive?" Michael H. Conseur Company, 2020, https://www.ihcnp.com/american-dream/.
• "Family Dynamics - a Look at the American Family." Walden University, http://www.waldenu.edu/connect/newsroom/publications/articles/2012/08-family-dynamics-a-look-at-the-american-family.
• Kasser, Tim. "Materialistic Values and Goals." Psychology Today, 21 June 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-and-the-good-life/201206/materialistic-values-and-goals.
• Ramasubbu, Shantala. "Death of a Salesman: A Mindmap and General Notes." Ramasubbu, 2011, https://ramasubbutech.blogspot.com/2011/02/death-of-salesman-mindmap.html.
• SparkNotes Editors. "SparkNote on Death of a Salesman." SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2002, http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/salesman/.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 30, 2020 • ( 0 )

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its literary achievement, as such, but is, rather, the impact which it has had on spectators, both in America and abroad. The influence of this drama, first performed in 1949, continues to grow in World Theatre. For it articulates, in language which can be appreciated by popular audiences, certain new dimensions of the human dilemma.

—Esther Merle Jackson, “ Death of a Salesman : Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre”

It can be argued that the Great American Novel—that always elusive imaginative summation of the American experience—became the Great American Drama in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Miller’s masterpiece forms the defining myth of the American family and the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the play’s only rival in American literature in expressing the tragic side of the American myth of success and the ill-fated American dreamers. A landmark and cornerstone 20th-century drama, Death of a Salesman is crucial in the history of American theater in presenting on stage an archetypal family drama that is simultaneously intimate and representative, social and psychological, realistic and expressionistic. Critic Lois Gordon has called it “the major American drama of the 1940s” that “remains unequalled in its brilliant and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its richness of visual and verbal texture, and its wide range of emotional impact.” Miller’s play, perhaps more than any other, established American drama as the decisive arena for addressing the key questions of American identity and social and moral values, while pioneering methods of expression that liberated American theater. The drama about the life and death of salesman Willy Loman is both thoroughly local in capturing a particular time and place and universal, one of the most popular and adapted American plays worldwide. Willy Loman has become the contemporary Everyman, prompting widespread identification and sympathy. By centering his tragedy on a lower middle-class protagonist—insisting, as he argued in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”—Miller completed the democratization of drama that had begun in the 19th century while setting the terms for a key debate over dramatic genres that has persisted since Death of a Salesman opened in 1949.

Miller’s subjects, themes, and dramatic mission reflect his life experiences, informed by the Great Depression, which he regarded as a “moral catastrophe,” rivaled, in his view, only by the Civil War in its profound impact on American life. Miller was born in 1915, in New York City. His father, who had emigrated from Austria at the age of six, was a successful coat manufacturer, prosperous enough to afford a chauffeur and a large apartment over-looking Central Park. For Miller’s family, an embodiment of the American dream that hard work and drive are rewarded, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything. The business was lost, and the family was forced to move to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in a small frame house that served as the model for the Lomans’ residence. Miller’s father never fully recovered from his business failure, and his mother was often depressed and embittered by the family’s poverty, though both continued to live in hope of an economic recovery to come. For Miller the depression exposed the hollowness and fragility of the American dream of material success and the social injustice inherent in an economic system that created so many blameless casualties. The paradoxes of American success—its stimulation of both dreams and guilt when lost or unrealized, as well as the conflict it created between self-interest and social responsibility—would become dominant themes in Miller’s work. As a high school student Miller was more interested in sports than studies. “Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift , and Rover Boys, ” Miller recalled, “and only verged on literature with some of Dickens. . . . I passed through the public school system unscathed.” After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his job that Miller began reading, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world and his vocation: “A book that changed my life was The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up, I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

In 1934 Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan. There he found a campus engaged by the social issues of the day: “The place was full of speeches, meetings and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues. . . . It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.” At Michigan Miller wrote his first play, despite having seen only two plays years before, to compete for prize money he needed for tuition. Failing in his first attempt he would eventually twice win the Avery Hopwood Award. Winning “made me confident I could go ahead from there. It left me with the belief that the ability to write plays is born into one, and that it is a kind of sport of the mind.” Miller became convinced that “with the exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human could do.” He would embrace the role of the playwright as social conscience and reformer who could help change America, by, as he put it “grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” Two years after graduating in 1938, having moved back to Brooklyn and married his college sweetheart, Miller had completed six plays, all but one of them rejected by producers. The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play examining the ambiguities of success and the money ethic, managed a run of only four performances on Broadway in 1944. Miller went to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, tried his hand at radio scripts, and attempted one more play. “I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.” The play was All My Sons, about a successful manufacturer who sells defective aircraft parts and is made to face the consequences of his crime and his responsibilities. It is Miller’s version of a Henrik Ibsen problem play, linking a family drama to wider social issues. Named one of the top-10 plays of 1947, All My Sons won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award over Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The play’s success allowed Miller to buy property in rural Connecticut where he built a small studio and began work on Death of a Salesman .

This play, subtitled “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,” about the last 24 hours of an aging and failing traveling salesman misguided by the American dream, began, as the playwright recounts in his introduction to his Collected Plays , with an initial image

of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons —a method one might call linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be “brought forward” in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment. . . . I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.

The play took shape by staging the past in the present, not through flashbacks of Willy’s life but by what the playwright called “mobile concurrency of past and present.” Miller recalled beginning

with only one firm piece of knowledge and this was that Loman was to destroy himself. How it would wander before it got to that point I did not know and resolved not to care. I was convinced only that if I could make him remember enough he would kill himself, and the structure of the play was determined by what was needed to draw up his memories like a mass of tangled roots without ends or beginning.

At once realistic in its documentation of American family life and expressionistic in its embodiment of consciousness on stage, Death of a Salesman opens with the 63-year-old Willy Loman’s return to his Brooklyn home, revealing to his worried wife, Linda, that he kept losing control of his car on a selling trip to Boston. Increasingly at the mercy of his memories Willy, in Miller’s analysis, “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Reflecting its protagonist, “The way of telling the tale . . . is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical.” The family’s present—Willy’s increasing mental instability, his failure to earn the commissions he needs to survive, and his disappointment that his sons, Biff and Happy, have failed to live up to expectations—intersects with scenes from the past in which both their dreams and the basis for their disillusionment are exposed. In the present Biff, the onetime star high school athlete with seeming unlimited prospects in his doting father’s estimation, is 34, having returned home from another failed job out west and harboring an unidentified resentment of his father. As Biff confesses, “everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” His brother, Happy, is a deceitful womanizer trapped in a dead-end job who confesses that despite having his own apartment, “a car, and plenty of women . . . still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” The present frustrations of father and sons collide with Willy’s memory when all was youthful promise and family harmony. In a scene in which Biff with the prospect of a college scholarship seems on the brink of attaining all Willy has expected of him, both boys hang on their father’s every word as he exults in his triumphs as a successful salesman:

America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ’cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.

Triumphantly, Willy passes on his secret of success: “Be liked and you will never want.” His advice exposes the fatal fl aw in his life view that defines success by exterior rather than interior values, by appearance and possessions rather than core morals. Even in his confident memory, however, evidence of the undermining of his self-confidence and aspirations occurs as Biff plays with a football he has stolen and father and son ignore the warning of the grind Bernard (who “is liked, but he’s not well liked”) that Biff risks graduating by not studying. Willy’s popularity and prowess as a salesman are undermined by Linda’s calculation of her husband’s declining commissions, prompting Willy to confess that “people don’t seem to take to me.” Invading Willy’s memory is the realization that he is far from the respected and resourceful salesman he has boasted being to his sons as he struggles to meet the payments on the modern appliances that equip the American dream of success. Moreover, to boost his sagging spirits on the road he has been unfaithful to his loving and supportive wife. To protect himself from these hurtful memories Willy is plunged back into the present for a card game with Bernard’s father, Charley. Again the past intrudes in the form of a memory of a rare visit by Willy’s older brother, Ben, who has become rich and whose secrets for success elude Willy. Back in the present Willy is hopeful at Biff’s plan to go see an old employer, Bill Oliver, for the money to start up a Loman Brothers sporting goods line. The act ends with Willy’s memory of Biff’s greatest moment—the high school football championship:

Like a young god. Hercules—something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges standing by? And the buyers I brought, and the cheers when he came out—Loman, Loman, Loman! God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!

The second act shatters all prospects, revealing the full truth that Willy has long evaded about himself and his family in a series of crushing blows. Expecting to trade on his 34 years of loyal service to his employer for a nontraveling, salaried position in New York, Willy is forced to beg for a smaller and smaller salary before he is fired outright, prompting one of the great lines of the play: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” Rejecting out of pride a job offer from Charley, Willy meets his son for dinner where Biff reveals that his get-rich scheme has collapsed. Bill Oliver did not remember who he was, kept him waiting for hours, and resentfully Biff has stolen his fountain pen from his desk. Biff now insists that Willy face the truth—that Biff was only a shipping clerk and that Oliver owes him nothing—but Willy refuses to listen, with his need to believe in his son and the future forcing Biff to manufacture a happier version of his meeting and its outcome. Biff’s anger and resentment over the old family lies about his prospects, however, cause Willy to relive the impetus of Biff’s loss of faith in him in one of the tour de force scenes in modern drama. Biff and Happy’s attempt to pick up two women at the restaurant interconnects with Willy’s memory of Biff’s arrival at Willy’s Boston hotel unannounced. There he discovers a partially dressed woman in his father’s room. Having failed his math class and jeopardized his scholarship, Biff has come to his father for help. Willy’s betrayal of Linda, however, exposes the hollowness of Willy’s moral authority and the disjunction between the dreams Willy sells and its reality:

Willy: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.

Biff: You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!

Willy: I gave you an order!

Biff: Don’t touch me, you—liar!

Willy: Apologize for that!

Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!

Willy’s guilt over the collapse of his son’s belief in him leads him to a final redemptive dream. Returning home, symbolically outside planting seeds, he discusses with Ben his scheme to kill himself for the insurance money as a legacy to his family and a final proof of his worth as a provider of his sons’ success. Before realizing this dream Willy must endure a final assault of truth from Biff who confesses to being nothing more than a thief and a bum, incapable of holding down a job—someone who is, like Willy, a “dime a dozen,” no better than any other hopeless striver: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Biff’s fury explodes into a tearful embrace of his father. After Biff departs upstairs the significance of his words and actions are both realized and lost by the chronic dreamer:

Willy, after a long pause, astonished, elevated Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!

Linda: He loves you, Willy!

Happy ,deeply moved Always did, Pop.

Willy: Oh. Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Plays

Doggedly holding onto the dream of his son’s prospects, sustained by his son’s love, Willy finally sets out in his car to carry out his plan, while the scene shifts to his funeral in which Linda tries to understand her husband’s death, and Charley provides the eulogy:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Linda delivers the final, heartbreaking lines over her husband’s grave: “Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free. . . .”

The power and persistence of Death of a Salesman derives from its remarkably intimate view of the dynamic of a family driven by their collective dreams. Critical debate over whether Willy lacks the stature or self-knowledge to qualify as a tragic hero seems beside the point in performance. Few other modern dramas have so powerfully elicited pity and terror in their audiences. Whether Willy is a tragic hero or Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy in any Aristotelian sense, he and his story have become core American myths. Few critics worry over whether Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero, but Gatsby shares with Willy Loman the essential American capacity to dream and to be destroyed by what he dreams. The concluding lines of The Great Gatsby equally serve as a requiem for both men:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Death of a Salesman

By arthur miller, death of a salesman essay questions.

Does Willy Loman die a martyr? How do Linda's and his sons' interpretations of his death differ?

A strong answer will note that Willy has a noble conception of his suicide - he kills himself because he truly believes that the insurance money will allow his sons to achieve their destined greatness. But Miller does not give the audience the easy satisfaction of seeing Willy's plan come to fruition. It is highly doubtful that the Lomans would actually receive any insurance money at all. He has a record of suicide attempts, and it would be near impossible to convince the insurance company that his death was an accident.

The crux of an essay should be that Willy thinks he is martyring himself, but his martyrdom is in vain.

Death of a Salesman is one of the foundational texts describing the American dream. How does Miller's play differ from the more traditional Horatio Alger model? Is Miller overwhelmingly cynical on the topic?

Strong answers will contrast Miller's pessimistic and cynical take on the concept of the American dream with its glorified Horatio Alger representations. Traditionally, the American dream means that any person can work his way up from the bottom of the ladder to the top. Miller's work isn't so much a direct subversion of that dream as it is an exploration of the way in which the existence of the American dream can ruin a person's expectations.

Discuss the motif of women's stockings in Death of a Salesman? What are Willy and Biff's attitudes toward them? How do Linda and the woman with whom Willy is having an affair regard them?

To the women, stockings serve as a symbol of what Willy can provide and as a measure of his success. To Willy, they are a symbol of his guilt over the affair. To Biff, they are a symbol of Willy's fakeness and his betrayal of Linda. Each time the stockings appear, they serve each of these three purposes for every character present.

Describe the significance of names in this play. How do Happy and Biff's names contrast with or support their characters? Interpret the name "Loman."

Happy - a boy's name. As his name implies, Happy is someone who should be content - he has a job, an apartment, and a never-ending stream of women - but he remains deeply unhappy.

Ben - Willy's brother is named after the biblical figure Benjamin, which means "one who is blessed." The biblical Benjamin far outstripped his brothers in all areas, rousing their jealousy.

Loman - Willy is a low-man. No great hero, he is already so low on the ladder that he has hardly anywhere to fall.

What is the role of modernity in Death of a Salesman? Have cars and gas heaters fundamentally changed the American dream? How does Miller view these innovations?

The answer should note that Willy is a man left behind by progress. His is a profession that only functions in a small niche of time - he is reliant on the automobile and the highway system, but can't survive the advent of more sophisticated sales methods than the door-to-door. He is startled and confused by Howard's gadgets, and longs for an outdoors life that involves creating things with his hands.

Discuss the gender relationships in this play. Are there any positive models for a harmonious relationship? Does Miller find this concept plausible?

There are only two women of significance in the play, Linda and The Woman, who does not even merit a name. Happy nicely exposits the dichotomy between the two types of women in the world, as represented by his idealized mother and by The Woman and Miss Forsythe. The attitude towards women that Willy modeled for his sons was that women exist to be conquered - and once they've been had, they are no longer worthy of respect.

Analyze the role of seeds in Act II's final segment. What do they stand for?

Willy begins to obsess over seeds as he realizes that he has nothing to pass on to his sons. He hasn't created anything real, nothing physical that you can touch with your hand. But seeds are an investment in the future, something that is both tangible and grows with time, and that is what he wants to pass on to his sons.

Discuss examples of ways in which Willy Loman's suicide is foreshadowed in the first act of the play.

Be sure to note that the question isn't really whether Willy is going to die, but how. The discussion of Willy as suicidal is quite on the nose in the first act, but what is left ambiguous at that point is the how and the why. We are given both the rubber hose and the car as possible modes of suicide, and general despair and desperation as motivations, but the ultimate motivation of insurance money does not become an issue until the end of the play.

Compare Death of a Salesman to A Streetcar Named Desire. How do Willy Loman and Blanche Dubois each represent a fundamental element of the American drive towards progress and success?

Willy and Blanche are both victims of modernity. Willy cannot compete against the young men in the modern business world. And Blanche cannot adapt to the coarseness of life in the new South. Rather than adjusting, both characters descend deeper into their idea of the idealized past, until they lose hold on reality altogether.

Compare Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby. How do Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby suffer a similar fate?

Answer: Although they lived very different lives - Willy, objectively a failure, and Gatsby, objectively a success - Willy and Gatsby had similar downfalls. Both were caught up in the illusion of the American dream, fervently believing that they could and should reach for the stars. But after a lifetime of having relied on personality to get by, the men found themselves terribly alone, even in death.

Death of a Salesman Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Death of a Salesman is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Significant of the tittle in 600 words.

I think the title refers to both the death of Willy the salesmen and the death of his dreams. Willy's dreams of success turn to disillusionment when he cannot compete in the capitalist world. An extended metaphor might also involve Capitalism and...

death of a salesman

Charley visits because he is worried about Willy.He knows Willy is a proud man and he wants to help him, though Willy isn't really willing to take his help.

Please submit your questions one at a time.

How have biff and happy responded to their father’s condition

Biff denies responsibility for his father's condition, but he is forced to acknowledge that he is linked to his father's guilt and irrational actions. I think happy is just stressed about it.

Study Guide for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman study guide contains a biography of Arthur Miller, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Death of a Salesman
• Death of a Salesman Summary
• Character List

Essays for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

• Shattered Dream - The Delusion of Willy Loman
• Perceptions of Self Worth and Prominence: Spaces and Settings in Death of a Salesman
• Sales and Dreams
• Musical Motifs
• Death of A Salesman: Shifting of the American Dream

Lesson Plan for Death of a Salesman

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Introduction to Death of a Salesman
• Relationship to Other Books
• Notes to the Teacher

Wikipedia Entries for Death of a Salesman

• Introduction

Death of a Salesman

Introduction to death of a salesman, summary of death of a salesman, characters in death of a salesman, themes in death of a salesman, writing style of death of a salesman, literary devices in death of a salesman, related posts:, post navigation.

A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Death of a Salesman is that rare thing: a modern play that is both a classic, and a tragedy. Many of the great plays of the twentieth century are comedies, social problem plays, or a combination of the two. Few are tragedies centred on one character who, in a sense, recalls the theatrical tradition that gave us Oedipus, King Lear, and Hamlet.

But how did Miller come to write a modern tragedy? What is Death of a Salesman about, and how should we analyse it? Before we come to these questions, it might be worth briefly recapping the plot of what is, in fact, a fairly simple story.

Death of a Salesman : summary

The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn’t make a sale, he doesn’t get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family’s table. He wants to get a desk job so he doesn’t have to travel around any more: at 62 years of age, he is tired and worn out.

He is married to Linda. Their son, Biff, is in his thirties and usually unemployed, drifting from one temporary job to another, much to Willy’s displeasure. Willy’s younger son, Happy, has a steady job along and his own home, and is therefore a success by Willy’s standards.

However, Happy, despite his name, isn’t happy with the life he has, and would quite like to give up his job and go and work on a ranch out West. Willy, meanwhile, is similarly dreaming, but in his case of the past, rather than the future: he thinks back to when Biff and Happy were small children and Willy was a success as a salesman.

The Lomans’ neighbour, Charley, offers Willy a job to help make ends meet, but Willy starts to reminisce about his recently deceased brother, Uncle Ben, who was an adventurer (and young Willy’s hero). Linda tells her sons to pay their father some respect, even though he isn’t himself a ‘great man’.

It emerges that Willy has been claiming to work as a salesman but has lately been borrowing money as he can’t actually find work. His plan is to take his own life so his family will receive life insurance money and he will be able, with his death, to do what he cannot do for them while alive: provide for them. Biff agrees reluctantly to go back to his former boss and ask for a job so he can contribute to the family housekeeping.

Meanwhile, Willy asks his boss, Howard, for his desk job and an advance on his next pay packet, but Howard sacks Willy. Willy then goes to Charley and asks for a loan. That night, at dinner, Willy and Biff argue (Biff failed to get his own former job back when his old boss didn’t even recognise him), and it turns out that Biff once walked in on his father with another woman.

Willy goes home, plants some seeds, and then – hearing his brother Ben calling for him to join him – he drives off and kills himself. At his funeral, only the family are present, despite Willy’s prediction that his funeral would be a big affair.

Death of a Salesman : analysis

Miller’s family had been relatively prosperous during the playwright’s childhood, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious. This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen in much of his work for the theatre.

Death of a Salesman represented a decisive change of direction for the young playwright. His previous success as a playwright, All My Sons , was a social drama heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen, but with his next play, Miller wished to attempt something new. The mixture of hard-hitting social realism and dreamlike sequences make Death of a Salesman an innovative and bold break with previous theatre, both by Miller and more widely.

In his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which Miller wrote to justify his artistic decision to make an ordinary American man the subject of a theatrical tragedy, Miller argued that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes.

As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

Death of a Salesman is an example of this ethos: Loman, who cheated on his wife and lied to his family about his lack of work and his reliance on friends who lent him money, makes his last gesture a tragic but selfless act, which will ensure his family have money to survive when he is gone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Miller is somehow endorsing the hero’s final and decisive act. The emphasis should always be on the word ‘tragedy’: Loman’s death is a tragedy brought about partly by his own actions, but also by the desperate straits that he is plunged into through the harsh and unforgiving world of sales, where once he is unable to earn money, he needs some other means of acquiring it so he can put food on the table for his family.

But contrary to what we might expect, there is something positive and even affirmative about tragedy, as Arthur Miller views the art form.

For Miller, in ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, theatrical tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life, but there is something affirmative about the events leading up to this final act, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man – a man willing to take a moral stand and evaluate himself justly – in the way that it has.

Does Willy Loman deserve to be pushed to take his own life just so his family can pay the bills? No, so there must be something within society that is at fault. Capitalism’s dog-eat-dog attitude is at least partly responsible, since it leads weary and worn-out men like Willy to dream of paying off their mortgage and having enough money, while simultaneously making the achievement of that task as difficult as possible. When a younger and better salesman comes along, men like Willy are almost always doomed.

But by placing this in front of the audience and dramatising it for them, Miller invites his audience to question the wrongs within modern American society. Thus people will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve it. The hero’s death is individually tragic but collectively offers society hope.

So it may be counter-intuitive to describe a tragedy like Death of a Salesman as ‘optimistic’, but in a sense, this is exactly what it is. Miller takes the classical idea of the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , and updates this for a modern audience, too: the hero’s tragic flaw is redefined as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society.

There is something noble in his flaw, even though it will lead to his own destruction. So really, the flaw is not within the individual or hero as much as in society itself.

A key context for Death of a Salesman , like many great works of American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, is the American Dream: that notion that the United States is a land of opportunity where anyone can make a success of their life and wind up stinking rich. Miller’s weaving of dream sequences in amongst the sordid and unsatisfactory reality of the Lomans’ lives deftly contrasts the American dream with the American reality.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman”

This is a very insightful and convincing appreciation. What it misses is any idea that Miller’s being Jewish may have had a hand in helping him to see why the American dream and its popularity-cult needed to be criticized. The word “cult” in “populairty-cult” says it all, because “The Death of a Saleman” is at its core a play about idolatry, the Ol,d Testament theme against which its prophets railed the most.

Willy is portrayed as an idol-worshipper, whereas his friend, Charely, and Charley’s son, Bernard, are both seen as devotees of the “true” God, in whose religion the human being is always endowed with dignity and always seen as an end in himself, never as a means to some other end. The play, in fact, asks a very Jewish question. If the true God and the false god both require sacrifice, how can you ever know which is which? And its tragedy supplies us with Miller’s answer: those who worship idols discover in the end that THEY are the sacrifice!

Miller, like Philip Roth later on, was a Jewish-American inheritor of the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition, a tradition in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremia en Ezekiel continually used their verbal art to expose Israel’s stinking moral corruption, foreseeing nothing but doom if it continued in irs idolatrous ways. Change ancient Israel to America, change the average Israelite of that time to Willy Loman now: both wind up destroying themsevles for the very same reason: with all the good will in they world, they have no self-knowledge and spend their whole lives worshipping a false god, deluded in the belief that they are worshipping the true one.

Their mistake in both cases only becomes apparent when it is time to offer the sacrifice, but by then, of course, it is always too late!

Perfect analysis, particularly when viewed in regards to recent events, involving American involvement with Israel dogma

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Death of a Salesman

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Introduction

Before Reading

Reading Context

During Reading

Reading Questions & Paired Texts

After Reading

Discussion/Analysis Prompt

Essay Questions

Exam Questions

Exam Answer Key

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the bulleted outlines below. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Willy Loman strives for the American Dream but fails to achieve it.

• Why is Willy unable to achieve the American Dream? ( topic sentence )
• In what ways does the American Dream become Distorted for Willy?
• In your concluding sentences, evaluate Willy’s attempt to become a successful salesman when his skill set may have precluded it.

2. Willy is abandoned by his father, and Willy betrays his son Biff.

• In what ways does the legacy of fathers subvert the success of the Loman men? ( topic sentence )
• In what additional ways is Willy abandoned and Biff betrayed?
• In your concluding sentences, consider the effect of A Father’s Abandonment and Betrayal on the Loman family as a whole.

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Death of a Salesman

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A-Level English With Miss Huttlestone

AQA Tragedy Section C Model Answer

The following was a class effort, with small groups each contributing paragraphs on a specific focus:

‘Within tragedies, men are presented as destructive forces’ to what extent do you agree?

Whilst it can certainly be said that men act destructively, to state that they are in absolute control of such ‘forces’ would be limiting.

The destructive force of the male character can be clearly seen through the characterisation of the knight in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ The ‘Knight at arms’ is ignorant of the obvious warnings of danger that the faery’s child presents. She is at first described as possessing the qualities of having a ‘light’ ‘foot’ and ‘her eyes were wild’. This immediately portrays her ephemeral and fleeting nature and foreshadows the knight’s tragic downfall due to his obsession and ignorance towards her nature. Furthermore, he attempts to control her through assuming her outlook on the situation as ‘She looked at me as she did love’ suggests he is tragically blind because of his refusal to become disillusioned with love and her supernatural status. It reflects a key point of Romanticism which is the unattainable dreamlike state of negative capability that becomes unreachable due to a need for reason, similarly to how the knight’s need for answers leads him to a state of cyclic suffering in which he is ‘alone and palely loitering’ here Keats may be trying to warn us of the destruction caused by striving for reason above feeling.

Immediately, within ‘Death of a salesman’, it can be seen that the tragic hero Willy Loman lives a life consumed by destructive patterns of behaviour due to his relentless desperation to achieve the American Dream and the derogatory lengths he’ll go to despite its drastic effects on others. Interestingly, the audience are forced to acknowledge one of Willy’s most destructive behaviours extremely early on in the production where flashbacks of ‘The women’, a lady whom Willy has an affair with, appear mid conversation between Willy and his Wife: (He suddenly grabs her and kisses her roughly). This brief encounter to Willy’s affairs is structurally interesting as Arthur Miller instantly demonstrates how Willy is selfishly destroying the trust and love between his family as a result of his greed for success and status. Miller wastes no time fooling the audience into a blissful interpretation of the tragic hero as an honest, hard-working man, but instead delves straight into his flaws. These moments of betrayal are at the root cause for the family’s later problems such as Biff’s downfall after witnessing the affair. During the moment Biff discovers the affair he exclaims “You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!” This can be viewed as a terrifying moment of realisation for Biff that his father is not the idealised dream like hero he has envisaged, but a cheating liar.” Linda, Willy’s wife, can be considered to be the individual who should suffer from Willy’s actions the most due to her whole life being devoted to Willy. We are never shown Linda with a life outside of the family because during this era women were mainly house wives with no responsibilities aside from this. Therefore, Willy’s behaviour would be most destructive towards Linda because she is completely unable to uphold a life apart from Willy and the two boys.

In ‘Death of a Salesman’ males other than Willy are painted as destructive forces, and most specifically through the characterisation of Happy. Happy is a clone of Willy, he takes his father’s delusional advice and example in every aspect of his life which causes him to destroy a lot of his prospects; “my own apartment, a car, and plenty of women and still goddamit I’m lonely”. His inability to accept truth and reality is tragic because it enhances the claustrophobia of this period and the Great Depression. He chooses to live within lies and stay ignorant to the truth which cements the tragic closing of the play as it is with this mindset that he is unable to prevent his father’s end. One truly tragic trope of Happy’s character is his relentless pursuing of something so futile. Not only does Happy’s “crummy characteristic” destroy his own life but also those around him “That girl Charlotte I was with tonight is engaged to be married in five weeks. (he tries his new hat)” the juxtaposition of the destruction of an engagement and the seemingly casual stage direction “tries on his new hat” exemplifies how little empathy he has towards other people’s relationships and how he instantly goes from feeling remorse to almost feeling proud of his destructive personality. While Happy doesn’t necessarily play a role in Willy’s insanity and eventual death some may argue that the shadow caste from Willy’s older brother Ben may have impacted Willy. The stage entrances from the both of them completely contradict each other “dressed quietly…exhaustion is apparent” compared to “utterly certain of his destiny” illustrates that Willy aspires to this type of success and just like Happy relentlessly pursues it even if he knows it is unattainable or not real. Miller constantly makes references to where Willy’s talents lie “good with my hands” illustrates how Willy is ignoring his talents and embracing the futility of the path he has chosen. When the audience is made aware of some of Willy’s influences such as Ben it becomes clearer to us what type of person Willy wishes to be. These idols can be seen as the culprits for Willy’s tragic downfall. Ben especially because he makes Willy believe that success is easy and that he hasn’t had to sacrifice anything (e.g. family, love, friends) to attain it. Ben lacks detail as a character and is very detached from the stage, suggesting that perhaps Willy’s presentation of Ben is either false.

Furthermore, In “Isabella, or; The Pot of Basil”, the effects of the male influence and male destructive forces are already made known to the readers, by Keats when he opened the first stanza with “poor simple Isabel!”. At first readers experience Lorenzo’s period of inactivity, when he doesn’t muster enough courage to confess to Isabella about how he feels. However, this period of inactivity causes Isabella to suffer greatly from loneliness due to her “sick longing” that remains unfulfilled until she had to confess her love to “Lorenzo!”. Though, this period of “To-morrow”, may have been due to the clear distinctions of classes Lorenzo felt between himself and Isabella. During Keats time, we see how he himself struggles against society’s expectations and social norms that upper class such as Isabella does not mix with someone who’s positioned in lower class, such as Lorenzo. Nevertheless, the male destructive force continues with Isabella’s “money bags” brothers. The “money bags brothers” in ‘Isabella; or, and the Pot of Basil’ are the epitome of destructive men. The male antagonists are strict followers of the class system, by which society lives, so when their younger sister begins a relationship with Lorenzo, a man of lower class, they feel they must right a wrong. To right this wrong the brothers form a “stratagem” and plan to murder Lorenzo. As destructive forces the brothers instantly believe that the best and only solution to the problem is to make Lorenzo their “murdered man”. At no point do the brothers take into consideration Isabella and the devastation they will cause her. The capitalist brothers go against much of what the Romantics such as Keats believed in with their firm belief in the class system and exploitation of that system, making profit without concern for any damaged caused along the way. The brothers can therefore be described as a destructive force because they profit from every devastating event they cause, “each richer by being a murderer.” Keats almost solely depicts the brothers as destructive forces apart from their guilt when they realise the impact their act has had on Isabella but even as they flee and escape their guilt they still leave behind Isabella, more alone than ever, and cause more destructive as they run away. Not only are the brothers presented as destructive forces in this poem but they are tragically destructive in the complete devastation caused by them alone.

Similarly within ‘Lamia’, male protagonists are also represented as destructive forces, with Lycius’ damaging need for validation and Apollonius’ ‘demon eyes’. Lycius’ destruction comes when he seeks to inform ‘all his kin’ of Lamia’s ‘beauty’ at the wedding. This could be endorsed from the setting of Corinth, as contextually it was a place of great trade and competition. Many readers interpret this act as him emulating the setting, as he sees Lamia as a possession to show off. However, it can also be said that Lamia self-wills her own destruction and is destructive herself, as firstly she ‘loved the tyranny’ and can therefore not leave Lycius and his destructive nature. Lastly, she is the one responsible for the nymph ‘self-folding like a flower’, as she exposes her to Hermes and the outside world, just to get to Lycius. This in itself is destructive because she sacrifices the nymph for her own personal gain. Therefore, the females in Keats’ poetry can also be seen as destructive forces, as well as the males.

On the other hand, it could be argued that men seek to repair the destruction caused by society as seen in ‘Death of a Salesman’ through Willy Loman. From the start, Willy Loman is highly indoctrinated by the illusion of the American Dream symbolised by the ‘red Chevy’, this reflects the materialism of the classist society in which they live however in a moment of anelepsis, willy contradicts his view of the Chevy by saying “That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car” Here willy displays a moment of recognition however due to societal expectations he continues on a path of tragic downfall. At the end of his narrative, Willy Loman is still concerned of how to ensure he leaves his family with money, shown through his speech “A man has got to add up to something” “It’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar preposition.” Here it suggests that Willy is not the cause of the destruction, the society, which has driven him to this decision is, and Willy Loman continues to strive to fix the damage to support his family financially.

Whilst it can be said that male protagonists act destructively, contributing to their tragic fall, ultimately it seems larger forces are at work, such as society itself, that compels such figures to possess a myopic vision of their world.

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AQA A Level Lit B Death of a Salesman Resources Bundle

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

18 September 2024

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This bundle contains contains 20+ lessons to teach ‘Death of a Salesman’ (AQA Lit B - Tragedy):

• Intro lessons (note: this does not contain context or tragedy features)
• Discursive and analytical lessons to explore the WHOLE play (broken into sections noted as scenes)
• Lessons on writing an essay and revision (including a sample essay)
• Key quotation sheets
• Some annotations for key quotations

Can be adapted and changed to suit the level of need in your classroom!

Please note, the format changes from PowerPoint to Word documents, but the content and activities are the same. Word documents include annotations (enjoy!)

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Historical Context

Introduction to historical context.

Set in 1940s America, Death of a Salesman examines the rapid economic and social changes of the time.

1940s America

• Death of a Salesman is set in late 1940s New York City, at a moment of rapid change in the USA.
• The country was beginning to emerge from the suffering of the Great Depression and World War 2, on the verge of a sustained period of prosperity and growth in the 1950s and 1960s.

The American Dream

• Miller captures the moment when the American Dream, with its offer of wealth, happiness and success for all who are prepared to work for it, seems to have been reborn.
• The play’s references to a range of modern goods and brands (refrigerators, Chevrolet etc.) show an America fast becoming a consumerist society dominated by new marketing techniques, with Willy and Linda reassuring themselves that their Hastings refrigerator must be a sound buy as it had “the biggest ads of any of them”.

Willy Loman

• Miller also explores what is being lost in the rush to modernity. - His hero, Willy Loman, is a victim of a new, more ruthless version of capitalism which is beginning to emerge.
• His role as travelling salesman is becoming less relevant in an age of mass-marketing strategies using new technologies such as television.

Urbanisation

• Likewise, as power and wealth becomes concentrated in vast cities such as New York, Americans are beginning to become more distant from the countryside, both physically and spiritually.
• The sound of the flute which opens the play, “telling of grass and trees and the horizon” , is Miller’s poignant reminder of an America that is in danger of being lost or forgotten as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in its rapidly expanding cities.

1 Introduction

1.1 Introductions

1.1.1 Author

1.1.2 Historical Context

1.1.3 Setting

1.1.4 Social Issues

2.1 Key Events

2.1.1 Staging

2.1.2 Key Events 1&2

2.1.3 Key Events 3&4

2.1.4 Key Events 5&6

2.1.5 Key Events 7&8

2.1.6 Key Events 9&10

2.1.7 Key Events 11&12

2.2 Key Themes & Links

2.2.1 Foreshadowing & Inevitability

2.2.3 Settings

2.2.4 Family

2.2.5 Reality v Fantasy

3.1 Key Events

3.1.1 Key Events 1&2

3.1.2 Key Events 3&4

3.1.3 Key Events 5&6

3.1.4 Key Events 7&8

3.1.5 Key Events 9&10

3.2 Key Themes & Links

3.2.1 Pride

3.2.2 Metaphor

3.2.3 Self-Realisation

4 Extended Passage Analysis

4.1 Act One

4.1.1 Staging

4.1.2 The Woman

4.2 Act Two

4.2.1 In Howard’s Office

4.2.2 The Final Confrontation

4.2.3 The Requiem

5 Character Profiles

5.1 Willy & Linda Loman

5.1.1 Willy Loman

5.1.2 Linda Loman

5.2 Biff & Happy Loman

5.2.1 Biff Loman

5.2.2 Biff's Relationship with Willy

5.2.3 Happy Loman

5.3 Other Characters

5.3.1 Uncle Ben

5.3.2 Charley

5.3.3 Bernard

6 Key Themes

6.1 Concepts

6.1.1 The American Dream

6.1.2 Fathers & Sons

6.1.3 Nature & the City

6.1.4 Success

6.1.5 Men & Women

7 Writing Techniques

7.1 Structure

7.1.1 Act One

7.1.2 Act Two

7.2 Realism

7.2.1 Introduction

7.2.2 Staging

7.2.3 Language

7.3 Expressionism

7.3.1 Introduction

7.3.2 Staging

7.3.3 Music

7.4 Symbolism

7.4.1 The Garden / Seeds

7.4.2 Diamonds

7.4.3 Alaska & Africa

7.5.1 Introduction

7.5.3 Silk Stockings

7.5.4 Money

7.5.5 Mythological Figures

8 Historical Context

8.1 Historical Context

8.1.1 Miller’s Family & The Great Depression

8.1.2 America’s Recovery

9 Literary Context

9.1 Tragedy

9.1.1 Introduction

9.2 Applying Tragic Concepts

9.2.1 The Tragic Hero

9.2.2 The Tragic Flaw

9.2.3 Recognition

9.2.4 Emotional Release

9.2.5 Chaos & Disorder

9.2.6 Revenge

9.2.7 Inevitability

10 Critical Debates

10.1 Introduction

10.1.1 Introduction

10.2 The Marxist Reading

10.2.1 Marxist Analysis

10.2.2 The Marxist Reading

10.3 The Feminist Reading

10.3.1 Feminist Analysis

10.3.2 The Feminist Reading

10.4 The Eco-Critical Reading

10.4.1 Eco-Critical Analysis

10.4.2 The Eco-Critical Reading

10.4.3 Post-pastoral

10.5 Other Debates

10.5.1 The Play as Tragedy

10.5.2 The Critics

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Arthur Miller Explains Death of a Salesman

In a newly discovered letter to a college student, written shortly after the premiere of his most famous work, the playwright describes his theory of tragedy.

I n April 1948 , the 32-year-old playwright Arthur Miller set out to build a 10-by-12-foot studio—two windows, clapboard walls, a desk fashioned from an old door—on land he’d bought in rural Connecticut. Once it was done, he sat down and began to write. By the next morning, he had completed the first act of what would become his most famous work; he’d known only its opening lines , he said, and that it would end in the calamity presaged by its title, Death of a Salesman . The play was finished in six weeks, and it debuted 75 years ago, on February 10, 1949. Death of a Salesman was the first play to sweep all three major drama awards —the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and the Tony.

Eight months into the play’s Broadway run, Miller answered a letter from Barbara Beattie, a junior at the University of Richmond who had reached out as part of an assignment for a journalism class. Beattie’s daughter discovered Miller’s letter while helping her mother, now 94, move out of her home. Miller was diligent about his correspondence, according to Julia Bolus, the director of the Arthur Miller Trust and the playwright’s former assistant, but a reply of this length was exceptional. Beattie received an A in the class.

Oct 5, 1949

Dear Miss Beattie;

If there is a formal genesis of Death of a Salesman it certainly is in the Elizabethan drama, particularly Shakespeare. From the point of view of form I have long felt that the spaciousness of his plays had been forfeited for a physical concentration which contradicts life itself. I have learned from him, if you will, that words themselves are the best scene setting; that it is not necessary to devise elaborate plot machinery in order to “set” a scene which itself can explain itself—in short, to proceed to the meat of a scene at once and to make it happen where and when it logically would happen, and not where a stationary setting forces it to happen.

From the March 1979 issue: Arthur Miller on his travels in China

As well, my form is one which permits time for what in effect are soliloquies. As I see it, the force of the Elizabethan form lay in its ability to follow the mental processes of its protagonists wherever they might lead. The same may be said of mine. This cannot be said of the “realistic” form, called Ibsen’s , which itself imposes upon the story and the characters instead of following them, making way for them. In such plays incredible ingenuity, and much time, is wasted in the mere effort to justify the simple meeting of two characters. One may fairly say that in our day this form has come to be a word game in which the confrontation of characters is made to seem “natural” or “real”. Of course it is actually a severe form of stylization whose utter unreality and unnaturalness is shrouded by sets with windows that work, rugs on the floors, and so forth. Thus the means employed actually stand as an obstruction between the vision of the playwright and the emotional receptivity of the audience. For we do not dream or inwardly think in such terms but otherwise. We dream in scenes, don’t we. But the preparation for these scenes is direct, immediate, and contained in the scenes themselves. There is no maid who enters and talks to a butler who between them inform us that our father is about to return home after a year’s absence. We suddenly see our father, and in what he does and says lies all relevant information about his situation. Plays written in this fashion therefore proceed with true naturalness, from relevancy to relevancy, without sparring about.

Concerning the idea of Elizabethan tragedy and my own, I could speak for many hours. Central to Shakespeare’s tragedy is the idea of the Fall, which implies social stature of a royal level. I too see the Fall as a critical aspect of tragedy, but our world has changed, and it is no longer possible to think of the Fall as that of a socially elevated person exclusively. But social status, to my mind, was and is only a superficial expression of a deeper Fall, so to speak, namely, the destruction of a man’s idea of what he is by forces opposing him. Any class is thereby given entrance to the precincts of the tragic, and so it is in a democratic society. Under Elizabethan feudalism this notion was unthinkable if only because none but the royal had the alternatives of seemingly absolute choice, the liberties of the masses being hedged about by all sorts of rigid proscriptions. Today we are all “free” to aspire to any height, we have the hero’s necessary alternatives. My moral object, therefore, is to attempt to direct the efforts of men toward the clear appreciation of reality, exposing the illusory in order that man may realize his creative potentialities. In another context, Shakespeare was attempting the same thing, as in the history plays where the catastrophe derives from the impossible ambitions of the monarch or those of the subjects against the monarch. A certain ideal order is therefore implied as having been violated in his work, and in mine. His ideal was feudal; it supposed that life would be good when men behaved in accordance with their social position and neither lapsed into a lower level, (Prince Hal), nor created havoc by attempting to crash into one above them, (The King in Hamlet   ). My ideal order is less easy to formulate if only because it does not yet exist, while he was writing within a society whose theory was sufficient for him. I see man’s happiness frustrated until the time arrives when he is judged, given social honor and respect, not by what he has accumulated but by what he has given to his society. This ideal is posited not for itself, but because I know that the frustration of the creative act is the cause of our hatred for each other, and hatred is the cause of our fears. We reward our dealers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our teachers, our scientists, our workers who make and do and build and create. And so the urge that is in all of us to give and to make is turned in upon itself, and we accept the upside-down idea that to take and to accumulate is the great good. And whether we succeed in that or not, we are sooner or later left with the awareness of our emptiness, our inner poverty, and our isolation from mankind. When a man reaches that knowledge and has the sensitivity to feel the loss of his true self deeply, he is a tragic figure; but not unless he tries to find himself despite the world can he raise up in us the actual feeling that something fine and great and precious has been discovered too late. The history of man is his blundering attempt to form a society in which it pays to be good. The tragic figure now, and always, is the man who insists, past even death, that the stultifying combinations of evil give way before the outpouring of humanity and love that is bursting from his heart. This is why tragedy endures, and this is why it has really never changed excepting in its superficial aspects of rank etc.

I hope some of this has been clear. I write at such length because there are not many who have taken the trouble to examine the matter at all.

Sincerely yours, Arthur Miller

This article appears in the April 2024 print edition with the headline “Sincerely Yours, Arthur Miller.” Letter used by permission of the Arthur Miller Trust, in the care of the Wylie Agency LLC. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

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