Death Of A Salesman
...idea that tragedy doesn’t need to be concerned with characters of great magnitude; instead, he proposed that the protagonist could be an ordinary person, an “every-day-man”. As explained in Millers’ essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” he sets out the pattern for his own idea of a tragedy and the tragic hero. It becomes evident that in Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is not the “common man” that Miller was determined to create. It will be argued here that, while Death of a Salesman is a tragedy, it is not a tragedy of a common man, but rather, a tragedy of a character apart from the rest of humanity.
Willy Lomans’ fear is that he wants to be viewed as a good, decent human being. He wants to believe that he's a well-liked, decent person, who doesn’t make mistakes, but the truth is that he does make mistakes, many that haunt him. Willy does not consider this normal and severely regrets his failures such as raising his children poorly, as he sees it. “The quality in such plays that does shake us, but derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in the world” (Miller, "Tragedy and the Common man"). Willy’s underlying fear of being displaced is the real tragedy. He wants to do things right, but the fact is he has many incidences that haunt him. Consistently throughout the play, Willy drifts in and out of a dream. He is constantly haunted by memories of his dead brother Ben who struck it rich. He also has flashbacks of incidents that haunt him in other areas. For example, the sequence in which Biff catches Willy with a woman other than Linda. This haunts Willy because he sees it as part of why Biff does not love him. “Tragedy then is the consequence of a man's total obligation to evaluate himself justly” (Miller, “Tragedy and the Common man”). This is Willy's flaw. The...
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