Death Of A Salesman Tragedy Analysis

Register to read the introduction… Its roots, however, lie deep in the past. It has been argued that Willy’s nomadic childhood has left him feeling ‘kind of temporary’ about himself. Never having known a secure home, he is obsessed with providing one for Linda and his sons, and increasingly aware of his own failings as a husband and father. A deep-seated need for affection and reassurance leads him to seek the companionship of other women when he is away on business. He is also known to inflate his achievements in order to gain approval from Linda, his sons, and older brother and father-substitute, Ben. This, in turn, leads to the self-deception that is his fatal flaw. The stories he tells, the lies and half-truths, become more reassuring to him than reality. Reality is so harsh and painful that he escapes into illusion. (Unfortunately, his example prompts his sons to do the …show more content…
The path to tragedy: a wheel of fortune…
If Death of a Salesman is to qualify as a tragedy, it needs to show how Willy’s fatal flaw impels him from happiness to misery and death. Miller’s treatment of this theme has much in common with the Jacobean concept of the Wheel of Fortune. Stated simply, this concept dictates that happiness (like all other forms of human success) is fleeting and in that happiness are the seeds of tragedy. When everything seems achieved the ‘hero’ is at the top of the wheel. However, a flaw in his own character means that the situation is doomed, the moment passes and a slide into misery and, ultimately, death is inevitable.

In Death of a Salesman, it is at the very moment when the Loman family seems most secure and united that the seeds of the tragedy are sown. Miller presents us with an almost idyllic portrait of Willy, Linda, and their two …show more content…
In the final version of the play, the stage setting ‘expresses’ Willy’s divided consciousness, as the reality of the house walls may be breached. Time and space may exist for the surrounding apartment houses and their inhabitants, but may be dissolved within the reality of the Loman household. As the drama progresses, this is made evident by the action, as reality dissolves for Willy at certain points in the play, and the dream-like or nightmarish evocations of the past take place on the forestage. Miller sees Willy as living “at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” He asserts that “in dramatic terms the form, therefore, is this process, instead of being a once-removed summation or indication of