This essay focuses on the theme of the American Dream in relation to narcissism in Miller’s Death of a salesman. The purpose is to demonstrate that a close reading of the main protagonist, Willy Loman, suggests that his notion of success in relation to the American Dream can be regarded as narcissistic.  This essay will examine this by first observing how Willy´s notion of success is represented in the play, then look at how his understanding of it can be viewed from a narcissistic standpoint.  The results I have found in my analysis show that there is a connection between Willy’s understanding of success and his narcissistic behavior. He displays traits such as grandiosity, arrogance, need of specialness and denial of emotions. His relationship with other characters reveals his lack of empathy, manipulation and exploitation of others as well as his need of superiority and fear of inferiority.  The conclusion is that Willy and his notion of success could be considered as narcissistic.

As is evident from the title of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), the protagonist of the play, the salesman Willy Loman, will die. This essay will investigate what role Ben, Willy’s deceased brother, plays in Willy’s suicide. The thesis is that Willy needs Ben’s support in order to commit suicide and therefore needs to bring Ben’s values, at the possible expense of his wife Linda’s, into his superego. Ben is, to Willy, a true example of the American Dream, as he was a very successful businessman. Willy’s ego (or rational mind) seems to realize that his superego (or conscience) needs to replace the humane values of Linda with the economic values of Ben, in order to justify his motivation of an “economically beneficial” suicide. When Willy arrives at his final conclusion of how his favorite son Biff would financially benefit from his “accidental” suicide and thereby being able to attain Willy’s version of the American Dream, the evidence brought forth may suggest that Willy, at that point, allows Ben full access into his mind.        Willy’s mind will be investigated via Freud’s triple model of the psyche; the id, the ego and the superego.

This essay will analyze the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, from a psychoanalytical perspective. The purpose is to establish the reason for his suicide. The thesis is that Willy Loman seems to have developed a narcissistic and borderline personality disorder and as a consequence his mentality was affected and that led him to commit suicide. Willy Loman is a self-centered man who has an obsession with success both as a salesman but also as a husband and a father, in such a way that his mental health is questioned. This suggests that his final decision to commit suicide has been affected by some type of mental disorder that derives from his neuroses. Therefore, Willy Loman’s behavior will be investigated by using Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of neuroses and mental disorders.

As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

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As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document Copyright 1996, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Bennett, CE 1999, The interrelated development of social values and the concept of the tragic hero with reference to the works of Arthur Miller, MA dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-10102007-115952 / > / Dissertation (MA (English))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / English / unrestricted

This study is an archetypal literary analysis of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman and Homer’s The Odyssey. The analysis aims to demonstrate how Arthur Miller’s protagonist, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman demonstrates several stages of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the individuation process, similar to Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey. This is done by identifying set archetypes and stages of Jung’s individuation process, the persona, the shadow, the anima, and the self. After that, the stages are applied to both Miller’s play and Homer’s epic poem. The analysis shows that both protagonists demonstrate and complete Jung’s individuation process. Willy Loman completes a symbolic journey, whereas Odysseus completes a physical one.

The diploma thesis examines a drama translation and its changes for staging purposes. The thesis strives for interdisciplinarity, for it enriches the theoretical-analytical approaches of translation studies with practical dramaturgy insights of the creators of the stagings. The thesis analyses Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) as translated by Luba and Rudolf Pellar (1962). Their literary translation is subjected to a translation analysis under Peter Newmark's model of analysing a translation (1988). Subsequently, the thesis examines the types and the extent of the changes in the scripts for stagings used in the Czech National Theatre in 1993-1996, and in the current staging in the Municipal Theatres of Prague (premiere in 2019) while employing their comparison with the Pellars' published translation. Key words: translation studies, translation of drama, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller, Luba and Rudolf Pellar, staging, dramaturgy

This thesis evaluates tragic characters from three representative tragedies, Macbeth, Antigone, and Death of a Salesman, in terms of Lawrence Kohlberg's six stage theory of moral development. A tragic character's moral judgment is described as being founded on universal values and principles which determine stage placement. The tragic situation is precipitated by conflict experienced by a character between his present stage form of evaluation and the more preferred, differentiated and integrated form of the next higher stage. Since Kohlberg's theory is cognitive-developmental with the moral principle of justice emerging autonomously at the stage six level, its application aids in supporting a view of tragedy based on a moral order having justice as its highest principle and on a continuity independent of historical and cultural influence.