By this point in his career, Miller had already proven his chops with his hit play, All My Sons. It won Arthur Miller the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. When the play version appeared on Broadway, it was a total hit. His interest was renewed later on however, by an uncle who was a salesman. The idea for the play first manifested itself as a short story, which author Arthur Miller initially abandoned. The storyline features Willy Loman, an average guy who attempts to hide his averageness and failures behind increasingly delusional hallucinations as he strives to be a "success." The play is a scathing critique of the American Dream and of the competitive, materialistic American society of the late 1940s. On the other hand, ambition can keep us from recognizing our own limits, trapping us in the delusional grandeur of imagined achievements.įor Willy Loman, ambition is the ultimate foe-the Darth Vader to his Luke Skywalker, the Voldemort to his Harry Potter, the Cruella to his Pongo.ĭeath of a Salesman is a tragedy about the differences between the Loman family's dreams and the reality of their lives. On one hand, ambition can motivate us to get out of bed in the morning and follow our dreams. It's one of those things that can be either your best friend or your worst enemy. Miller points out with remarkable artistic perception the hold of illusions on individuals and its disastrous consequences, the dreams that are intertwined with illusions, the gulf that separates the actual practices from the professed ideals of society.Ambition. This phenomenon, ignorance of reality or non-recognition of facts, has been a potent source of European theatre since the time of the Greeks but what lends weight to Miller’s discovery is that it is not an exceptional experience to a few but is actually common throughout industrial civilization. The central energy of Salesman is derived from an explanation of technological culture, in which illusion takes the place of dreams, and fantasy substitutes reality. With the distance between illusion and reality, the sense of isolation, lack of understanding and the struggle for being. Both the popular and critical acclaim that the play has received so far confirms the author’s description of it. Miller, in his “Introduction” to the Collected Plays, says that Death of a Salesman is a play that poses the question … “whose answers define humanity?” (32). IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities, 3(1). Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: A Re-evaluation. Author: Gunasekaran Narayanan, Government Arts College, IndiaĬitation: Narayanan, G.
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