Friday, February 11, 2011

Death of a Salesman: Reality vs.Illusion

This play is filled with lots of emotions and themes of illusion that runs parallel with the idea of achieving success in reality. The author, Arthur Miller has presented the story in a creative way of describing the character's pain through changing the time frame back and forth. As a reader, I had a hard time understanding the dialogues in different phases of time while keeping my focus on the main idea of the play. However, I appreciate how Miller was able to present Willy's pain through the dreams he had. The dreams helped me a lot to understand Willey's psychology and why he acted so furiously in certain scenes. His interaction with his older son, Biff was one of the most accountable acts with lots of heated conversations. Even though Willey's wife- Linda, and his two sons- Biff and Happy are all unable to separate reality from illusion to some degree, but Willy goes through the "daydream" the most. In some ways it was confusing to think whether Willy was optimistic or was always in illusion as he believed that both he and his sons will accomplish a lot. I thought that Biff's character provided a contrast to that character of Willy's, because he always knew the reality vs. Willy, who cared a more about his dreams. Biff tried to explode Willy's illusion by stating that "Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!" However, it did not stop Willy from the illusion of success that he has been longing for and instead of achieving through hard work, he finds an easy to provide success to Biff by committing suicide. From my perspective, illusion poses a similar meaning to suicide, because both of them are way to escape the reality. In both cases, a person is not ready to tackle the hardship and accept things as they are in reality, rather they choose to escape. It is sad that sometimes people like Willy has to give their own lives to escape the reality which seems harsher than death

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