The Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller was the son of a Jewish immigrant. He lived in Harlem and later in Brooklyn after his father's death. He came to be noticed by the Theater Guild which was a highly respected foundation that was founded to present excellent plays, not necessarily commercial success.

His work covered a wide range of materials. Much of it grew out of his childhood memories of a tightly knit and somewhat eccentric family. He also dealt with political issues and problems of Anti-Semitism. His political concerns have been a constant concern in his works. Miller flirted with Marxism, but never committed to it. His commitment was never to ideology but to a vision of human solidarity which he saw as intimately related to his Jewish identity.

Miller has the realist’s concern to offer a densely populated social world. Its characters are manufacturers, writers, longshoremen, lawyers, surgeons, policemen, and writers; they constitute the society whose values they both exemplify and betray. According to Miller, virtue resides in the individual who lends his weight to the cause of the common man. Miller’s father was a businessman, committed to the values of business; his mother despised those for whom the business was a total world. In many of his plays the divergent values which he associated with his parents are dramatized through pairs of characters who represent the material and spiritual poles of human experience. Miller has always been concerned with questions of guilt and innocence and thus with moral life. His plays are part of a continuing realistic tradition that began in the US between the two world wars. He was influenced by Ibsen, the left-wing dramatists, and the protest drama of the 30s and 40s.

Miller’s social consciousness, his awareness of the ills of American civilization, and his belief that these ills were caused by moral weaknesses made him a social dramatist. This is why he began to probe the psychological causes of behavior. Miller believes in the dignity of man and the possibility that he may be victorious. His plays are about man’s relationship with society and his personal identity. His aim is a theater that teaches not by proposing solution, but by defining problems. 

In The Death Of A Salesman, Miller depicts a love story between a man and his sons in a crazy way between both them and America. The play's concerns were rooted in the American ideal of business success and its conclusions were a challenge to standard American business values. The play takes place in the 1930s economic depression times. The American Dream had faded but not died completely.  Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. During this time period, we witness the failure of a national myth of success. Not just Willy’s failure, but the failure of a nation.

Willy’s conversation is sprinkled with references to consumer products and to the advertisements which recommend them. Time in the play is fluid, time blends and interacts the past and its relationship to the present. During the course of the play, Willy confuses time more and more. This is a staging technique that reflects the disintegration of Willy’s mind. He loses his grip on reality and time. In allowing past and present to collapse towards each other, Miller traced the causalities and identified the possibility of change. He also aimed to represent the psychological state of a man whose inner and outer life are in collapse and to show as Willy’s mind spiral’s downward his disability to sustain temporal or spatial boundaries. As it depicts past and presents concurrently the play is considered a Memory Play.