Arthur Miller: The Salesman's Two Cases

ARTHUR MILLER: THE SALESMAN'S TWO CASES A CAREFUL STUDY OF Death of a Salesman in terms of Arthur Miller's own defense of it in various articles, prefaces, and interviews leads to the conclusion that the author himself does not understand his own accomplishment-and his confusion is shared by his critics. The fact of the matter is that not only is Miller's salesman suffering from schizophrenia, but the play itself is afflicted with that disease. Most plays, like most people, have multiple facets to their personalities, but these usually function more or less harmoniously within a single integrated being. The two personalities of Miller's play do, of course, inter-relate, but they are basically different genres-a dazzlingly experimental social drama is the dominant personality, but it detracts our attention from the more important and more conventionally-made drama of a moral struggle toward insight and honest personal commitment . Shortly after the premier of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller defended his play in the New York Times from certain critical attacks by asserting that "the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as the kings were.... The tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his sense of personal dignity."l He elaborated his arguments in the introduction to A View from the Bridge, where he said that all good drama is essentially social drama, depicting man in a struggle to wrest from his society some recognition of his worth not as a customer, draftee, machine tender, ideologist, or whatever, but as a human being. Modern society refuses to grant him that recognition, and any determined effort to secure it is doomed to end tragically. "The reason Death of a Salesman ... left such a strong impression was that it set forth unremittingly the picture of a man who was not even especially 'good' but whose situation made clear that at bottom we are alone, valueless, without even the elements of a human person, when once we fail to fit the patterns of [social] efficiency." The fullest discussion of 1 Quotations from critics and from Arthur Miller's remarks (except those from the Preface to his Collected Plays) are all taken from Two Modern Ameri· can Tragedies, ed. by J. D. Hurrell (N. Y.: Scribner'S, 19151). 117 118 MODERN DRAMA September the genesis, form, and meaning of all of Miller's plays to date is in his introduction to the Collected Plays,2 where Miller takes his critics to task for misreading Death of a Salesman as an anti-capitalistic play or as a document of futility and pessimism. Perhaps Miller's most significant comment is that "Willy Loman has broken a law [of modern culture just as Oedipus had of -Greek culture] without whose protection life is unsupportable if not incomprehensible to him and to many others; it is the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live.... My attempt in the play was to counter this [law] with an opposing system which, so to speak, is in a race for Willy's faith, and it is the system of love which is the opposite of the law of success. It is embodied in Biff Loman, but by the time Willy can perceive his love it can serve only as an ironic comment upon the life he sacrificed for power and for success and its tokens." Obviously, Miller focuses his attention on Willy Loman-Biff functions in a sub-plot designed to serve merely as an "ironic comment" on the main plot. But intention does not here square with achievement . Miller and his critics are in error in seeing the central character of the play in Willy Loman. The protagonist of a drama must be the one who struggles most for understanding, who faces the most crucial question, who achieves the most transforming insight, and whose motives, decisions, and actions most influence the total situation . By these criteria the main figure of Death of a Salesman is not...