Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is considered an artistic stunning success and became has become one of the most performed and adapted plays in American theatrical history. The play was marvelously acclaimed for both critic and audience, it also won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, consolidating Arthur Miller’s career as a writer. The simple and tragic story of Willy Loman, as Miller points out “Salesman is absurdly simple. It’s about a salesman and it’s his last day on earth” emphasizes the social question of the effect the capitalistic American Dream myth has on an ordinary family, as he tries but fails to achieve the American Dream of material success and prosperity. Willy Loman has the quality of an
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This is because of its structure. The very form of the play—the irregular process of mind through which Willy Loman suffers during the last day of his life—is itself a result of the sales-man's commitment to an unrealistic image of himself. As a consequence of pursuing for so many years the counterfeit dignity embodied in his idea of success, Willy now finds the truth about himself overwhelming in its accumulated force. As Miller stated, he 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," For this reason the structure of the play is a "mobile concurrency" of past and present, fantasy and biography. In constructing this play, Miller was absorbed by the concept that "nothing in life happens 'next' but that everything exists together and at the same time within us." There is no past to be "brought forward" in a human being, the playwright says, but he is his past at every moment and his present is "merely that which his past is capable of noticing and smelling and reacting to." Because his salesman-hero is in a peculiar psychological state, which exactly exemplifies this relationship between past and present, Miller sought "a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's way of mind." When he combined expressionism with realism to create this form, he made an innovation in dramatic techniques. In his own belief, Salesman "broke the bonds of a long tradition of realism." Even as it did so, however, the play's approach was kept "consistently and rigorously subjective" so that it would not depart from its basically realistic style. As Roudane commented on the structure of the play: "the form of Death of a Salesman was an attempt, as much as anything else, to convey the bending of time."(363). Thus, we begin with what is most notable about the structure of the play: the treatment of time.
This is because of its structure. The very form of the play—the irregular process of mind through which Willy Loman suffers during the last day of his life—is itself a result of the sales-man's commitment to an unrealistic image of himself. As a consequence of pursuing for so many years the counterfeit dignity embodied in his idea of success, Willy now finds the truth about himself overwhelming in its accumulated force. As Miller stated, he 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," For this reason the structure of the play is a "mobile concurrency" of past and present, fantasy and biography. In constructing this play, Miller was absorbed by the concept that "nothing in life happens 'next' but that everything exists together and at the same time within us." There is no past to be "brought forward" in a human being, the playwright says, but he is his past at every moment and his present is "merely that which his past is capable of noticing and smelling and reacting to." Because his salesman-hero is in a peculiar psychological state, which exactly exemplifies this relationship between past and present, Miller sought "a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's way of mind." When he combined expressionism with realism to create this form, he made an innovation in dramatic techniques. In his own belief, Salesman "broke the bonds of a long tradition of realism." Even as it did so, however, the play's approach was kept "consistently and rigorously subjective" so that it would not depart from its basically realistic style. As Roudane commented on the structure of the play: "the form of Death of a Salesman was an attempt, as much as anything else, to convey the bending of time."(363). Thus, we begin with what is most notable about the structure of the play: the treatment of time.