Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a play best summed up in its title, it is just that, the death of a salesman. This death is not necessarily the physical end to a human life, but the crumbling end to the dreams of Willie Loman, the play’s main character.
The three main parts to Willie’s world are his job, his family, and his image as seen by the rest of the world. Although these parts are interwoven and interrelated, they are best divided and given separate analysis.
The first part of Willie’s world is his job. Willie is a salesman for a large company in New York. Willie’s self-image and much of his self-worth are based in his job. In his own mind he is still as he used to be, well known and well respected among the clientele in the New England area. Things have changed though and the people Willie once knew in the business are no longer there and he no longer has the connections he once had. His inability to cope with and adapt to this changing business has caused, among other things, a loss in pay. Willie has lost his competitive edge, and with it his feeling of self worth and identity.
The second part of Willie’s world is his family, more specifically his son, Biff. Biff is the firstborn and favorite son of Willie. Willie has high expectations of, and transfers his dreams, as so many fathers do, onto Biff. Biff can not live up to the expectations of his father and has dreams of his own which cause Willie to see him as a loafer, a shiftless bum with no desire to succeed. Although Willie’s dreams are not realized in Biff, his son’s respect is still important. This respect is lost when Biff catches his father in an affair with a young lady. Even though this is not talked about (Biff never told anyone, not even his mother) it still creates tension and causes Biff to lose the respect he once held for Willie.
Willie’s main philosophy in life is “Be liked and you will never want” and this is the cause of the problems in the third part of Willie’s life, his image. Image is everything to Willie. In his past he was a well liked, well known, respected man who turned his image into his success, but his image has changed.
A Structuralist Reading of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
A Structuralist Reading of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
The fundamental structural dynamic underlying the whole manifested universe, much less literature, is duality; therefore, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is easily analyzed from the structuralist perspective.
Each of us is a complex mixture of polar opposites, the most primary of which being the division between right brain and left brain, or, more commonly, “heart and mind.” Austen’s technique in this novel is that of eliminating altogether the corpus callosum, thus juxtaposing the two halves into a “binary opposition,” a split between the heart that throbs and exults and the mind which ascertains and evaluates. Marianne is, of course, the heart of the novel, Elinor the mind. Moreover, the remaining characters, too, fall within one of these two categories. I have arranged the most important figures of the novel in this way:
SENSE SENSIBILITY
Elinor Marianne
Edward Mrs. Dashwood
Lucy