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Example research essay topic: Death Of A Salesman Willy Loman - 2,658 words

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... of properties, that greatest of indignities, death. In a less extreme form we have in Death the same technique that makes the formulaic horror movie ultimately so reassuring. In such movies, all but one or two characters are obviously victims, idiots who insist on backing into dusty, cobwebbed rooms while a heavy-handed score positively shouts warning.

While these obvious victims are dropping like flies, the audience is encouraged to identify principally with the common-sensi cal hero who is marked from the beginning as a survivor. Happily, Miller rejects this emotional gimmick through the bulk of the play, drawing us into the foolish Willy Loman's psyche through a variety of experimental techniques and through the ardor of Willy's pursuit of what The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway called "the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. " 17 But Miller's brand of humanism finds no value in slaying either the protagonist's or the audience's ego as do the great Classic and Renaissance tragedies. Rather, Miller's humanism values giving man "his whole due as a personality"; 18 and so it values reinforcing the audience's "sense of personal dignity. " 19 Consequently, Miller chooses not to press Willy into a complete recognition of his littleness and, more significantly, chooses not to press the audience into an identification with a protagonist in his ultimate confrontation with his littleness. How different this modern-romantic attitude is from that attitude evinced in the great tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare. In her essay "Tragedy and Self Sufficiency, " Martha Nussbaum explains that the Athenian valued pity as evidence of a non-hubristic disposition, as acknowledging "true facts about one's own possibilities. " 20 When audiences feel this pity, they draw near to the sufferer and acknowledge that something akin to the hero's suffering could happen to them, that both hero and audience live in a world of tragic reversals "in which the difference between peter and pitied is a matter far more of luck than of deliberate action. " 21 From such a view fear arises: "If this happened to the hero, it could happen to anybody, " the peter reasons. "And if it could happen to anybody, it could happen to me. " Aristotle went so far as to argue that pity, by definition, demands that the peter witness in the pitied a pain "which one may himself expect to endure, or that someone connected with him will. " 22 The pity evoked in most modern tragedy fails to ruffle us in this way because we can reason that our greater wisdom protects us from the sort of tragedy which befalls a foolish person like Willy Loman. But hardly any such comfort existed for the Athenian who witnessed the fall of Oedipus.

Even if our hypothetical Athenian views Oedipus as rash, he sees that fault in a character who is admirable in all other important respects. The doomed king is courageous, honest, intelligent, strong, sympathetic to the plight of his citizens, skillful in combat, in virtually every respect a model man and king. Perhaps Oedipus's rashness is partially to blame for his tragedy, but who is perfect? If fate can trip up and trample under foot such a fine, strong individual, it certainly can trip up and trample an average one.

Shakespeare's great tragedies evoke in me a similar response. Even that murderous usurper, Macbeth, elicits from me a certain measure of Aristotle's brand of pity, for because of Macbeth's many noble qualities I am less tempted than I might be to pity Macbeth condescendingly. In his study of villain-heroes in Elizabethan drama, Clarence Valentine Boyer underscores the fact that Macbeth possesses a highly sensitive nature and a poetic imagination, which together make him capable of extraordinarily deep feeling and cause him to suffer more intensely than anyone else in the play. Not only this, but Macbeth demonstrates extraordinary courage, aspires to extraordinary accomplishments, and both loves deeply and is deeply loved. 23 Thus, despite his villainy in violently usurping the throne of a good king, we pity Macbeth in his agonizing internal struggle, pity a man who is highly suited to reign but who can reign only through crime, a tragic situation. 24 Finally, we are further spurred to Aristotelian pity by the play's supernatural aura, which, as Boyer puts it, produces "in us a feeling that there are strange mysterious forces in nature tending to evil, which sweep a man away with them to his destruction once he exposes himself to their power. " 25 Instead of cultivating and deepening our sense of Aristotelian pity for his protagonist, Miller, in contrast, alienates us from Willy and transfers the recognition to Biff, whose greatest humiliation -- the scene in which he waits in Oliver's office for six hours only to find that Oliver, when he arrives, does not even recognize him 26 -- appears offstage, preventing me from internalizing Biff's dime-a-dozen status as Biff does. What's more, having been abandoned by the original protagonist, at the conclusion of the play I am tempted to seize upon Biff as a surrogate hero.

He possesses a nobility of spirit, a courage in the face of cold reality, that makes him genuinely admirable. But Biff's nobility is not the nobility we feel in an Oedipus gouging out his eyes, in a Macbeth recoiling from his spiritual poverty, or in a Lear weeping himself to death. It is the relatively static nobility of a Tiresias, an Edgar, persons who strike us as basically good from the first, as the salt of the earth. We have experienced no fall and redemption, no death, burial, and resurrection.

We have received redemption on the cheap, our facile dignity, typical of the pre-fallen tragic hero, neatly intact. But Death of a Salesman flatters its audience by another, more subtle means, a means that has been overlooked. Earlier I referred to the Hastings refrigerator that Willy bought because it had the biggest ads, and credited Miller with critiquing the personal philosophy that lay behind such a foolish method of choosing a major appliance. Ironically, though, Miller himself has created a very big ad for the dysfunctional Willy Loman and its effect is not altogether unlike the effect of the Hastings refrigerator ad on Willy Loman. For Miller manages to create an audience for a man who does nothing to earn an audience beyond monumentally fouling up his life, manages to make us pay attention to a man we might otherwise have ignored, impresses us with the life of a relatively unimpressive man -- in short, gives Willy Loman "the biggest ads of any of them. " In effect, Death brings to the failed salesman's funeral not the handful of kith and kin that his life warranted, but thousands upon thousands of mourners, outdoing even the funeral of the eighty-four year-old salesman Willy so admired.

Certainly, the fumbling tenacity with which Willy follows his misguided philosophy ennobles him to a degree, but are we actually ready to insist that this characteristic alone elevates him to a level consistent with his fame? So here is where we stand: Within the fiction of Death we meet Willy Loman, a low man on the totem pole chafing against his obscurity, a man discarded by the sales company for whom he has worked for thirty-five years not because he is loathed but because he is useless. Willy Loman, a man whose highest aspiration in life is to be well liked, is not even well disliked. He achieves only the status of nuisance. In sum, Willy Loman belongs to that group referred to by Flannery O'Connor's Mrs. McIntyre as "all the extra people in the world. " 27 And even when Loman recognizes his status as an extra person, and takes that most drastic of measures to remedy the situation, he fails.

He fails to impress his son and, we can assume, fails even to make his suicide appear an accident and so garner the $ 20, 000 that supposedly will launch his alter ego, Biff, into a successful business career. But viewed from the outside, as a character in a play, Willy Loman is not an extra. He is the leading man, the protagonist, the tragic hero, a character who looms large in the audience's imagination. Consequently, his position as dramatic center tends to misshape our identification with him, a phenomenon overlooked by Miller in his bracing but at times facile attack on the Aristotelian notion that tragic heroes are necessarily persons of rank and importance. When I insist that a lowly character's position as dramatic center tends to misshape my identification with that character, some readers will skip over my explicit contention and quarrel with what they perceive as my unstated assumptions, that a work should encourage an audience to identify with its protagonist, or that an audience should strive to achieve such an identification. If, as some advise, I cultivate a rigorous aesthetic distance throughout an engagement, the analytical part of my brain assiduously churning away in Brechtian fashion, the empathetic part remaining dutifully inert, I hardly identify at all.

I say "hardly" because even in a work committed to minimizing identification, such as Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, it must prod its audience into some degree of identification before it can alienate them, must draw them in before it can distance them. If one has felt, even briefly, any empathy for the good woman of Setzuan, then one has identified with her. Or, if I follow an older conventional wisdom and surrender my awareness of the work as a formed object, as a fiction, I become absorbed into the life of the protagonist. But there exists a third alternative to which I suspect most serious auditors aspire. Under this alternative, the reader or viewer, together with Coleridge's ideal poet, brings his or her whole soul into activity, 28 energetically joining the author in the creative process, shuttling between intuition and logic, feeling and thought, empathy and critique, identification and analysis. But whether critics are advocating a primarily logical, intuitive, or critically imaginative approach to literary engagement, nothing in us, so the unstated assumption goes, need prevent our imaginations from translating the protagonist of dramatic theater (as opposed to epic or absurdist theater) off of page or stage and into the mind -- or recreating him, at least -- and then identifying with him.

As we observe Willy Loman playing out his tragedy or, to take other examples, as we follow Radio Raskolnikov's fall and redemption, or Stephen Deals's search for a calling that will exalt him to the sun, or Jude Failed's struggle against loneliness and obscurity, or Blanche DuBois's search for love and dignity, at some level we are aware of these figures as the centers of their respective worlds, as the focal points of audiences hanging on their every available thought and action. Thus, even when I disappear into a character as small and lowly as Willy Loman, I participate in the romance of the stage. I am caught up in the audience's paradox. Although I feel Willy's obscurity, his insignificance, his failures, these qualities have been transfigured by his role as protagonist. You see, although lowly Willy Loman is oblivious to his status as dramatic center, I cannot be, am not oblivious to it even in those moments when, slack-jawed, like a boy become his action hero, my identification with him occurs effortlessly. As Willy Loman, I lead a double life and, in so doing, create a second Willy Loman.

I am a second-rate travelling salesman struggling to maintain my dignity. I also am a self among other selves identifying with Willy Loman. The collective imagination of the audience has joined itself to the life playing itself out on the stage. But like a quanta of light fired into the theatre of the subatomic, that collective identification has altered the thing observed. And here, I speak not of the alterations that inevitably occur when a story moves from author to auditor. Rather, I mean that transformation which only an audience -- or better still, an audience among audiences stretched across time -- can generate.

My mind, the whole of it, right and left, conscious and unconscious, is stuck with the paradox of these opposing realities, two realities inextricably mingled. Certainly, we may posit a Willy Loman who exists in some hypothetical realm as a thoroughly un renowned failure, stripped of the egotist's supreme fantasy of a rapt audience unto eternity. But that Willy Loman remains stubbornly hypothetical, permanently unknowable, for if we the audience come to know him, he is no longer obscure. Our Willy Loman, for all his failures, for all his obscurity within the world of the fiction, remains to patrons of American theatre a household name.

It would be easy enough to argue that this tension enriches the drama, that Miller, through the magic of the stage, has redeemed life from its stubborn shabbiness. Within the scope of American literature, the work is canonical. But the work misses entry into the canon of the ages, seems out of place beside such tragedies as Oedipus, Lear, Hamlet. This is hardly to damn the work. But under the pressures of that pseudo-democratic spirit which takes the phrase "all men are created equal" as a refutation of the traditional concept of nobility, Miller's drama participates in that seamier work of Lasch's capitalism, providing not only life and liberty but narcissistic escape for all, even for the common man. For protagonist and audience alike, the movement is away from the ground of reality, a movement that can be compared illuminatingly to the notion of evil propounded by St.

Basil, and further developed by Augustine, Boethius and Thomas Aquinas -- as a movement toward darkness, toward negation. 29 As noted, the modern root of the glorification of such a rebellious impulse can be traced to romanticism. I do not mean to imply that the movement that began in Germany and moved into the literature of our language principally through Wordsworth and Coleridge is without merit. But like any set of ideas and attitudes, it was and is vulnerable to corruption through excess. Thus, while Goethe gives us glorious Faust and while Whitman gives us an all-embracing cosmic self, modern Americans writers give us Of Mice and Men's Lennie and Streetcar's Blanche DuBois -- give us, to put it crudely, idiots and lunatics. If Goethe and Whitman privilege boldness and creativity over humility, realism, and consistency, the heirs of O'Neill and Fitzgerald romanticize narcissism, solipsism, and psychosis even while dramatizing their tragic consequences.

That second generation romantic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a long tradition of moral philosophers, insists that love is the secret to living morally, or as Shelley puts it, "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. " He then goes beyond this to declare that literature, far from serving to demoralize, exercises this crucial empathetic faculty. 30 Now, whereas we may agree with Shelley that literature can exercise our powers of empathy, we still can ask how well a particular work actually succeeds in doing this. As for Death of a Salesman, how well does its well-attended Willy Loman enlarge our powers of empathy for anyone of flesh and blood? What I have been arguing suggests that our identification with this protagonist does not benefit us as much as it initially might seem. There is a human type, however individuated its members, the beaten and obscure casualty of the rat race, shattered by failure, whom we may encounter again and again in the world beyond page and stage. But we have not been given such a figure in Death of Salesman. Instead, we have been given a synthetic figure sprung from the audience's paradox, an obscure loser paradoxically famous.

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Research essay sample on Death Of A Salesman Willy Loman

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