Summarize how Arthur Miller uses expressionist dramaturgy in Death of a Salesman - Essay Example

The play was mainly about a man Willy, a salesman, who realizes that, his life in which he has done his best to be well-liked is actually a failure. The play starts when biff, Willy’s eldest son comes home but has a fight with his father because he wants him to do a good job like him but biff refuses to do so. Then they have a big argument which ends up in nothing. Dejected, Willy starts talking to imaginary people in the middle of the night and becomes so loud that his family wakes up. Biff realizes that his father is stressed due to the financial problems faced by them.

Willy wants to meet his boss Howard to become a local salesman rather than being a travelling one. On the other hand Biff decides to borrow a loan from his former employer Oliver to start a business. The financially upset family sleeps dreaming of a better tomorrow. Next day as obvious everything goes wrong Willy instead of becoming permanent gets fired and starts talking to himself as he is on his way to the restaurant to meet his sons. His sons are also faced with failure and are thinking of a way to tell their father what has happened without offending him.

Willy reaches the restaurant and demands good news from his sons but they tell him that the loan was rejected. Biff says that he was the biggest fool to ever try for that. Shocked Willy starts talking to himself again reliving the dreamy past when his sons caught him with a woman in Boston. The two sons leave their father in the restaurant and go away with two girls. When they returned back home their mother was infuriated that why did they leave him in the restaurant? Another argument rises which ends up by Biff admitting that he is a failure and cannot live up to his father’s dreams.

Willy thinks that this all is due to him and the best he can do is to suicide by which Biff will get the insurance money and he will be able to start a business. After a few minutes there is a loud crash and Willy has died. In the end Linda, Willy’s wife, is still sobbing in the imagination that Willy was a good salesman. The play has a lot of ideas shown in it. First of all the main theme in the play were relationships. The play shows the importance of relationships in an individual’s life.

As we can see that there are strong and weak relationships within and outside the loman family. Willy shares a very strong relationship with his wife Linda and they support each other in all circumstances. An evidence of this is when Biff and happy come home without their father, Linda becomes angry and argues with them on not bringing their father with themselves. On other occasions the relationship between Willy with his sons, his boss and his neighbors is shown. This is how Arthur Miller used his play to show his theme that relationships play an important part in everyone’s life.

Another idea shown in this play is that the real world is far more different than our imagination. If anyone dreams to be something then it is not necessary that he will be that. This idea is shown in many scenes in the play. Firstly Willy thought that he was a good salesman who he was not and when the reality came to him in the face of his job being lost he became very upset. Another evidence of this idea was when biff said that he will borrow some money from Oliver but he couldn’t. The theme was also shown in the last scene when Linda was in the delusion that Willy was a good salesman but no one came on his funeral.

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