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Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, 1949, is traditionally viewed as a modern tragedy. Ample evidence in the text, however, suggests that Miller leans also toward the convention of the Theatre of the Absurd. Miller uses several techniques, including an absurdist handling of set, time and space, thought, action, and language to contribute to the larger absurdist "poetic image" of the death of a salesman. And the thematic interpretation of that image in terms of character and audience suggests the perpetuation of illusion, a common absurdist theme.Because Miller effectively combines the absurdist with the realistic elements of the drama, an absurdist reading of the play does not negate its readings as tragedy and social realism, but rather enhances those readings, providing an important additional perspective from which to view the play. An absurdist reading also establishes a definite tie between this important twentieth century playwright and the influential absurdist convention in theatre. / Department of English

Aeschylus wrote that we learn through suffering. Whether one agrees with this statement or not, one has to recognise that it has given rise to a great deal of discussion about tragedy. What kind of suffering we can associate with tragedy will be considered in the chapters which follow. The more immediate concern is the business of learning. Man can learn a good deal about the problems that confront him, but he cannot learn all there is to know about anything. His knowledge is relative. He may postulate the absolute, but it is beyond the grasp of the human mind to perceive the absolute in its absoluteness. The relativist can avoid an epistemological quagmire by simply accepting that a relativistic attitude is only of relative value; he has the intellectual humility to recognise that whatever he thinks or says is likely to reveal only part of the truth. Arthur Miller has suggested that the best serious literature is concerned with the absolute, in that he criticises one of his contemporary playwrights for writing a work which "fails to extend itself so as to open up ultimate causes". Chap. 1, p. 1.

This study emphasizes the private and public struggles of the common man as portrayed in two representative plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Price, and two by Thornton Wilder, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. These plays demonstrate man's struggle because of failures in responsibility toward self and family and because of his inability to fully appreciate life. Miller concentrates on the pathetic part of Man's nature, caused by a breakdown in human communication. Wilder, however, focuses on the resilient part which allows man to overcome natural disasters and moral transgressions. The timelessness of man's conflict explains the motivations of symbolic character types in these plays and reveals a marked applicability to all average citizens in American society.

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.