Death of a Salesman Essay -- Arthur Miller Exposes Willy Loman

â€Å"Death of a Salesman† written by Arthur Miller in 1948 attempts to give the audience an unusual glimpse into the mind of a Willy Loman, a mercurial 60-year-old salesman, who through his endeavor to be â€Å"worth something†, finds himself struggling to endure the competitive capitalist world in which he is engulfed. Arthur Miller uses various theatrical techniques to gradually strip the protagonist down one layer at a time, each layer revealing another truth about his distorted past. By doing this, Miller succeeds in finally exposing a reasonable justification for Willy’s current state of mind. These techniques are essential to the play, as it is only through this development that Willy can realistically be driven to motives of suicide. The very first section of the first scene, already defines the basis of Willy’s character for the rest of the play. The stage directions on page 8 identify him as being an exhausted aging man, whose work seems to be wearing him down. â€Å"†¦lets his burden down†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Miller, 8). Although this makes Willy appear uninteresting, he soon contrasts this characteristic when he shows an optimistic determination towards his own failures. â€Å"I’ll start out in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning.† (Miller, 9) Another aspect of Willy that makes him more interesting to the audience is his already visible complexity of layers: â€Å"I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.† (Miller, 9) This of course leads the audience on to wondering what exactly is taking place in a man’s head to make him say such a thing, evoking a mild fascination in Willy’s character. Another character that is developed almost immed iately within the first two pages of the play is Linda. Again the stage directions on page 8 introdu... ...me period without using artificial â€Å"memorable speech†. This conveyance of realism to the audience is vital for Willy’s motives to seem plausible, and for Willy to be believed in as a character. On the other hand however, â€Å"Death of a Salesman† offers the audience another aspect of the play in which the inner mind of a character is symbolically represented in an expressionistic way on stage. Arthur Miller however succeeds in combining theses seemingly contradictory techniques, by conveying a sense of realism in the way the protagonist’s mind is portrayed, creates what sets it aside from anything alike it. Work Cited Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. U.K.: Penguin, 2013. Works Consulted Bloom, Harold. Arthur Miller. New York: Chelsea, 2008. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.