Satirical Realism In Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman

To motivate audience members to address these problems with society, Miller creates characters they can empathize with. Because Death of a Salesman is a play, most characters are actors with a physical presence and capacity for human emotion rather than merely printed names. The theatrical realist movement inspired plays about middle-class characters and encouraged natural acting. Miller took this movement further; to maximize the chance of the audience identifying with his characters, he created characters that were almost anonymous in their genericity. The most prominent evidence of this is the fact that the play never mentions what the titular salesman sells. Thus, any salesperson in the world can imagine that Willy Loman is marketing the same goods he or she does. …show more content…
Happy, like Willy, sells an unnamed product, and Biff claims that he has “had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs” (1875). Like most people, the main characters are neither well-to-do nor destitute, their dialogue is neither eloquent nor uneducated, and they face neither wild success nor devastating failure. As Biff tells Willy, “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” (1930). Almost any audience member could imagine himself or herself in the place of, and facing the same problems as, any member of the Loman family.
Another convention of theatrical realism that Miller employs is relatable themes, including the American Dream, masculine archetypes, and parental roles. The American Dream purports that anyone can achieve success, but several characters in Death of a Salesman have different definitions of success and how to achieve it. Willy defines success as “to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities … and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people” (1904), which he believes anyone with enough charisma can do. For Willy, this type of success