Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change

Setting the Scene: Death of a Salesman and After the Fall

Austin E. Quigley Setting the Scene Death of a Salesman and After the Fall In his essay “After the Fall and After,” Albert Wertheim makes a strong case for a decisive shift in Miller’s career during the eight-year hiatus between the opening of his revised version of A View from the Bridge and the opening of After the Fall (1964).The latter, he suggests, in spite of an unenthusiastic critical response, marks the beginning of “the second flowering of Arthur Miller’s playwriting career.”1 “Comparisons with Miller’s earlier dramatic works can serve to cloud the discussion,” he argues, and there is certainly some clarity to be gained by situating After the Fall largely in the context of the plays that succeed it.2 But he also notes,in passing,GeraldWeales’s remark that“The Inside of His Head, Miller’s original title for Death of a Salesman, might well be an alternate title for After the Fall. . . . Since [the play] aptly locates its episodes within the convolutions of Quentin’s brain, this is made manifest onstage through the use of free-form sculpted areas” in which the various scenes are situated.3 As Death of a Salesman was written fifteen years before After the Fall, the continuity in Miller’s writing career might be every bit as important as the discontinuities, and a more detailed comparison of the two plays confirms this to be the case. Even the evident contrasts between the two plays suggest not so much the differences between mutually exclusive alternatives, such as those provided when we contrast “open” with “closed,” but the kind that distinguish mutually implicating oppositions, like those of the two sides of a coin.4 It is in these respects that Death of a Salesman and After the Fall can shed some illumination not only on each other but also on the more general nature of Miller’s dramatic work. It is in terms of structure and setting that the complementary function of the two plays becomes most clearly apparent. Their episodic configurations provide related settings for characters wrestling with issues at the outer limits of human experi60 ence; they also provide related problems for audiences seeking to grasp precisely what is at stake. Structurally, both plays interweave scenes of the past and present, depicting events in a sequence at odds with their chronological progression . The most obvious consequences of this departure from a linear chronological structure become evident if we recall the characteristic structure of the well-made play, with its linear structural pattern of exposition , complication, crisis and resolution. In such a structure the crisis scene, coming late in the narrative, is one capable of redirecting the drama by enacting or reporting a decisive causal event for which someone is clearly responsible.In effect,chronology,linearity,causality and responsibility are aligned with each other along a single axis, and the work of the audience is correspondingly simple. But the equivalent scene in Death of a Salesman is the eventual dramatization, late in act 2, of the frequently signaled event in Boston that occurred when Biff, aged seventeen , discovered his father with a woman in a hotel room. But this is not a new event that turns the action in a new direction, nor is it a newly revealed event for any of the characters, as Willy and Biff already know of it and neither Linda nor Happy learns about it when it is finally dramatized on stage. Its causal status is thus rendered problematic by its structural deployment, and even more problematic if we ask ourselves about its thematic implications.Was Willy simply the victim of some bad timing and, without this chance encounter, would all otherwise have been well, or at least tolerable, for Willy, Biff and the rest of the family? Causality, in fact, is one of the most problematic features of Death of a Salesman.The key problem is not the shortage of causal factors but their sheer number and variety, so much so that the play, with its episodic structure, has at times been criticized for failing to make them cohere. At various points in the play,Willy’s radical discontentment is explicitly linked to a variety of causes: the rootlessness and alienation of an urban rather than rural way of life (stage set, 11; Ben, 85; Biff and Happy, 22–23, 61; Willy, 122); the growing population with consequently increased competition and reduced space (Willy, 17–18); the changing values...