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Example research essay topic: Death Of A Salesman Tragic Hero - 2,734 words

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Abstract: The sober treatment of a lowly, unheroic protagonist in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman flatters the audience. The more obvious way that it flatters us is by alienating us from the protagonist in his downfall so that we watch his destruction from a secure vantage. Less obviously, the form of the play, typical of modern American tragedy, romanticizes the protagonist through what I call the audience's paradox, that tension created when a serious work of literature employs an obscure and lowly character as protagonist and so makes him the center of our attention, makes him famous. Many nineteenth and twentieth century writers seek to convey the experience of a lowly character chafing against his obscurity. But how can an author convey such an experience when the very attention of a readership confers upon the character social significance and dignity, even fame?

Exactly how obscure can Jude be when he has a four-hundred page novel written about him, and written by Thomas Hardy, no less? This is a problem I call the audience's paradox, a special form of the observer's paradox. In essence, the audience's paradox is the tension created when a lowly character, chafing against his obscurity, serves as the protagonist of a work of literature and so becomes the center of the audience's attention, becomes famous. The paradox is endemic only to post-Enlightenment tragic literature. Whereas pride stands as a pivotal human imperfection in both the Ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions, the metaphysics of a debased form of romanticism valorize's pride, both hubris and narcissism, while denigrating humility. In America the roots of this tendency can be seen at least as early as Walt Whitman.

The title of his "Song of Myself" signals a poem unblushing in its swelling praise of the poem's speaker, and even if we insist that the speaker is not Whitman the man but a cosmic Whitman joined to all humanity by a boundless love, the contempt for humility evinced by the poem is hard to ignore. Narcissism, in another form, also rears its head in the dark romanticism of Edgar Allen Poe. In both his poetry and his short stories we repeatedly encounter personas who seek narcissistic fulfillment in child brides, a romantic tendency critiqued with savage clarity in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. And on the other side of the Atlantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley already had created a poetry of unparalleled humorlessness, the need for comic deflation crowded out by the poet's swelling humanism. But in the next century modern American tragedy would do even more to valorize pride at the expense of humility.

Indeed, such literature reinforces the audience's own pride by way of flattery -- both by implying in various ways that the audience is superior to the flawed protagonists and, paradoxically, by causing the audience to identify with an artificially elevated protagonist. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman starkly illustrates this process, and his stated poetic illuminates for us why this is the case, though we need to distinguish his stated poetic from the poetic actually evidenced in his tragedies. If in creating his greatest drama, Miller actually had followed the advice he offers in "Tragedy and the Common Man, " we long ago would have consigned Death of a Salesman to the second echelon of American theatre. Fortunately, the sterile poetic we find in "Tragedy" merely infects the drama; it does not govern it. In that oft-reprinted 1949 essay, Miller tells us "the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure... his sense of personal dignity. " So far, Miller's poetic seems in harmony with the history of tragedy.

And it continues to seem so when he adds, "From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his 'rightful' position in his society. " 1 Do the quotation marks around rightful constitute censure of the hero's attitude, or are they an effort to pass on to the reader the attitude of the tragic hero free of Miller's opinion? The ambiguity that Miller adroitly creates here strikes to the heart of tragedy. Did Oedipus, through his hubris, deserve, even hasten his downfall? Or was he simply a noble man unjustly crushed by amoral fate? Which is the more precise characterization of Oedipus: "he commits a tragic error, " or "he possesses a tragic flaw"? How should we translate Aristotle's term hamartia?

Or more to the point, how should we read Sophocles? If we see in Oedipus's tragic flaw an ingrained sin rather than merely an error or a misstep, are we reading into Sophocles' ancient Greek Weltanschauung a Renaissance and Christian view of the world? I find the debate invigorating, and yet to insist on an either / or is to miss an ambiguity inherent to tragedy. Oedipus sums up the ambiguity well when the chorus-leader asks him what god incited him to blind himself; Oedipus replies: He decreed that I should suffer what I suffer; But the hand that struck, alas! was my own, The ambiguity is deepened rather than rejected by Shakespeare, who needed to reach no further than his own religious tradition for the paradox of man as both free and predestined, simultaneously guilty of choosing sin and doomed to sin by original sin. This paradox resonates through his major tragedies, works in which omen and error, vanity and plain bad luck combine to annihilate the protagonists.

Miller, sensitive to the fate / freedom tension in the great tragedies, is committed to walking the fine line between a facile individualism and a facile fatalism. But then he steps off that line, arguing instead for a definition of tragedy akin to its debased, journalistic meaning, as when a news anchor speaks of a woman tragically killed by a drunk driver. This shift is easy to miss. "The wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, " Miller writes, "and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. " 3 Here, I first took Miller to mean that the tragic hero, for all his pride, ruthlessly searches out the truth about himself, even if it means facing some monstrous ugliness in himself -- patricide (Oedipus), incest (Oedipus), vanity (Oedipus, Lear, Macbeth), murderous ambition (Macbeth). But Miller's subsequent elaboration precludes such an interpretation. He goes on to write that the hero's flaw "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. " Having neutralized the flaw, Miller goes on to exalt it as that quality separating the hero from the common man: "Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are 'flawless. ' Most of us are in that category. " When Miller has finished defining it, that category, although supposedly flawless, seems a pretty pathetic place to be.

The other category, the category of the flawed but active hero, clearly seems preferable. There the tragic hero battles a world bent on degrading him, and in so doing forces the torpid masses to examine "everything we have accepted out of fear or insensitivity or ignorance. " 4 Willy Loan as Prometheus. The world as jealous god. Or, as Miller explains, "The tragic hero's destruction in the attempt to evaluate himself justly posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. " 5 Thus, Willy Loan's attempt to reject Biff's view of the both of them as "a dime a dozen" is not vanity or egotism, but rather the salesman's noble effort to secure his dignity, his nobility. In other words, it is noble to believe that one is noble. To believe that one is better than others is to be better than others.

Vanity is the greatest virtue, humility the greatest sin. To be humble means, etymologically, to be close to the ground, a condition that Anthony Bloom describes as "silent and accepting... transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, " 6 or what Mikhail Bakhtin could have been speaking of when he described "the reproductive lower stratum" 7 found in the comedy of grotesque realism. But in Willy Loan's mind being humble, being close to the earth, means being a human doormat for a universe bent on wiping its feet on him, bent on robbing him of his rightful status. Thankfully, Miller's most famous drama offers us a vision of human pride more complex than a strict adherence to his stated poetic would have allowed.

If Death prompts us to admire Willy's tenacity, however misdirected, it also forces us to see how his dubious notion of personal dignity, his narrow dedication to being well liked, has made him grotesque. Such a reading has from the first been well attested to by critics, but a brief analysis of the precise nature of Willy's conception of personal dignity will explain the play's fundamental weakness more probing than does the conventional wisdom on this matter, which holds that Willy's foolishness robs him of that air of personal dignity fundamental to the great tragic heroes of our tradition. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, describes "a way of life that is dying -- the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. " 8 It is in such a world that Willy struggles for both success and love, goals that under the rubric of Willy's personal philosophy are at times synonymous, at times mutually inimical. Willy's confusion, though by no means unique to our age, is a characteristically modern one. Jrgen Habermas might have been describing Willy Loan and his situation when he spoke on the subject of modernity. Habermas writes that the modernist understands that seemingly settled modes of life often turn out to be mere unstable conventions without rational foundation.

Consequently, modern man dares not base his self image on the particular roles and norms he presently fills and fulfills. Instead, he seeks to establish it upon "the abstract ability to present himself credibly in any situation as someone who can satisfy the requirements of consistency even in the face of incompatible role expectations and in the passage through a sequence of contradictory periods of life. " In short, ego identity supplants role identity. 9 This is Willy Loan in a nutshell. Confused about what direction he should take, early in his adult life he retreated behind the hope that if he could cultivate an impressive manner, he would never want for admiration or material success, regardless of the direction he took. But the play forcefully dramatizes the distasteful and ultimately unsuccessful result of such a narcissistic tack. When the family discusses Biff's idea to ask his old boss for a loan, Willy repeatedly interrupts his wife and then viciously castigates her for interjecting enthusiastic support for Willy's position, even though she does so at perfectly appropriate moments. Are we to admire Willy's behavior here, view it as another example of "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"? 10 Or consider an earlier scene when Willy, unable to keep his mind on his driving, has returned home prematurely from a sales trip.

Here, when he's not shouting at his family, he's conversing enthusiastically with the ghosts of his past. His next-door-neighbor Charley comes over to see what the racket is all about and lulls Willy into a card game to calm him down: WILLY: Did you see the ceiling I put up in the living-room? CHARLEY: Yeah, that's a piece of work. To put up a ceiling is a mystery to me. How do you do it? CHARLEY: How could I put up a ceiling?

WILLY: Then what the hell are you bothering me for? WILLY: A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You " re disgusting. 11 Here, as when he repeatedly cuts off his well-meaning wife during his conversations with Biff, Willy is fighting for what he conceives to be his rightful status, fighting, as Happy phrases it at the funeral, "to be number-one man. " 12 But in his treatment of his wife and Charley we see the ugly, inhuman behavior to which this personal philosophy leads. This little man is the king of his castle, and he tears down his wife to prove it. He senses that Charley is the better man -- the better businessman and the better father -- so he ruthlessly belittles him. For Willy to be happy, "attention must be paid" as Linda puts it in making a different but not unrelated point.

He and his son Biff must not merely be liked, but be "well-liked" -- admired by a throng of cheering fans, so to speak -- and not because they earned it, but because "I am Willy Loan, and you are Biff Loan!" . 13 This philosophy seems warm and humane beside Charley's belief that "the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell"; 14 but the problem with it is that in the economy of attentiveness, demand for attention inevitably outstrips supply. If being well-liked means having a throng of adoring fans, a la Biff when he was captain of the football team, then precious few people will be able to achieve this. For every number-one man, there are many who must settle for sitting in the stands and cheering. When few do settle for the job of cheering for Willy Loan, life for this failed drummer becomes a game of king of the hill in which rather than climbing mountains he climbs sand piles and beats down every one else, if not in fact, then in his imagination.

And so Willy, having failed to succeed through an impressive manner, pretends that he is well liked, that he is the king of his castle, that his carpentry skills place him on a higher plateau than Charley, that his sexual conquest of The Woman makes him more of a man. Biff tries and fails to make his father face reality, but only Biff realizes that the phallic pen of egotism, which he clutches at in Oliver's office, is worthless. Only he comes to understand that the pursuit of egotism is as absurd, as irrational, as the theft of the pen itself. Willy Loan's personal philosophy -- like the Hastings refrigerator that had "the biggest ads of any of them!" -- just doesn't work. If Arthur Miller the critic misses this point, Arthur Miller the dramatist does not.

And yet the form of Miller's drama suggests that something of Miller the critic did indeed infect Miller the dramatist. Although Death forcefully censures the very narcissism Miller applauds in "Tragedy and the Common Man, " the play nevertheless flatters its audiences. It manages this in two ways. The more obvious way becomes most apparent in the play's climax. During the course of the play I come to sympathize with Willy Loan, despite his lack of wisdom. But, to paraphrase Sylvan Barnet, Morton Berman, and William But's argument, because Willy Loan appears even more foolish than usual in his "exaltation, " it is more difficult for us to identify with him in his death than with a royal figure such as Lear. 15 When Willy exclaims, "Can you imagine [Biff's] magnificence with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket?" and "When the mail comes he " ll be ahead of Bernard again!" , 16 we are effectively protected from participating in his death.

His glaring foolishness at the play's climax kills my identification with him precisely when identification is most essential. There is a similar foolishness in Lear, but it comes early. At the moment of his death we are in sympathy with this wiser, better Lear and so can participate in his ultimate humiliation, death. Miller employs the tragic form to gain some measure of sympathy for his common man, but then he politely shields us from that deepest...


Free research essays on topics related to: arthur miller, tragic hero, death of a salesman, willy loan, tragic flaw

Research essay sample on Death Of A Salesman Tragic Hero

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