Drama analysis: key themes and interpretive approaches

As Northrop Frye states, tragic heroes are “the inevitable conductors of the power about them...instruments as well as victims.” Tragic heroes experience great pain and suffering themselves, through which the audience members can contemplate their own faults. More than that, tragic heroes can bring about the destruction of others including those they love. Examples from classical literature like Oedipus and Hamlet provide obvious examples of how tragic heroes cause the death or destruction of their loved ones. Willy Loman, the classic though common tragic hero, also becomes a conduit of despair in Death of a Salesman.
Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman epitomizes the tragedy of the common man. In Miller’s essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” he writes that classic tragic flaws are “not peculiar to grand or elevated characters,” (1). A common man like Willy Loman can be every bit as much of a tragic hero as Oedipus or Hamlet because the common man is “as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were,” (Miller, “Tragedy” 1). In addition to possessing a tragic flaw such as hubris, blindness, or willful ignorance, the tragic hero is also characterized by the destruction he leaves in his wake.
Loman’s actions, or lack thereof, contribute to the tragic vision of the play as a whole. Lacking charm or social skills, Willy Loman fails to achieve the American Dream. Willy has been beaten down by frustration, and has allowed bitterness and anger to get the better of him. Worse than that, Willy Loman passes down his pessimism, poor attitude, and underachievement to his children. It is one thing for Willy himself to fail, and quite another for him to be unable to inculcate better values in his children. The Loman children, Biff and Happy, lie to others and to themselves, just like their father.
Towards the end of the play, the delusions in the family have completely gripped and torn apart the household as a result of the poor example Willy set for his sons. “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” Biff exaggerates, to which Happy responds, “We always told the truth!” (Miller Death 97). Both brothers use hyperbole to show how out of touch they each are with reality, and with the truth. Willy Loman has passed down his dysfunctional cognitive biases to his sons, creating a web of suffering.
The tragic vision of the play is also evident in the ways each male member of the Loman family believes the world is against them, while not doing much to change. At the beginning of the play, Willy Loman says of his son, “Biff is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker,” (Miller Death 8). The sons believe that the family should have remained in the agricultural sector. Loman’s reflection shows how he cultivates the fundamental attribution error, one of his tragic flaws. Success is not due to “personal attractiveness,” but to being a “hard worker,” and yet Willy Loman points out how the system seems rigged against ordinary men like them. As Miller discusses in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” it is primarily threats to his dignity that the common man becomes a tragic hero.
Willy Loman is a tragic hero and a common man, and his commonness makes him even more relatable to audiences than if he were Hamlet or Oedipus. One of Loman’s traits is living with his head in the clouds and being unrealistic, which ends up destroying his family. Happy states, “Dad is never so happy as when he’s looking forward to something!” (Miller Death 76). Running from the truth, lying, and blaming events and people external to themselves and their family causes the entire Loman family to sink into despair. Indeed, Willy Loman is the type of tragic figure that Miller and Frye warn audiences about, the person who magnifies their own flaws to bring down all others around them.




Works Cited

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Retrieved online: http://www.pelister.org/literature/ArthurMiller/Miller_Salesman.pdf
Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Retrieved online: https://www.nplainfield.org/cms/lib5/NJ01000402/Centricity/Domain/444/tragedymillerandaristotle.pdf