Fantasy and Reality: Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman

Fantasy and Reality: Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman LEAH HADOMI The subtitle of Death of a Salesman, "Cenain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,'" as well as the title originally considered by the playwright, The Inside of His Head, already point to the play's thematic essence and major formal characteristic. Thematically, Miller's drama deals with the tension between the private inner world of the protagonist and external reality. Its principal structural characteristic consists of the integration of dramatic realism and expressionism.2 The conflicting inner selves that make up Willy Loman's many-sided persona represent his experience of the outer world refracted through the distoning medium of his fantasies. As the action of the play progresses, the connections between Willy's inner world and external reality - which are tenuous enough to begin with - gmw increasingly unstable and volatile until he is driven to kill himself, the ultimate act of self-deception in his struggle to impose his fantasies upon a reality that consistently thwans his ambitions and will. The shifts in Willy Loman's mind between his dreams and actuality, on the level of his personal existence, and between fantasy and realism on the level of dramatic presentation, are conveyed in structural terms by the patterns in which the play's formal elements unfold to establish the dramatic rhythm ofthe work. In the analysis of Miller's play that follows, I take my cue from the conceptions of dramatic rhythm as set out by Paul M. Levitt and Kathleen George.3 In my own consideration of the work, I shall examine the ways in which the rhythmic organization ofthe play is managed in respect ofthree structural elements in the play; characterization, symbolic clusters, and the plot. I Not only is Willy Loman the chiefcharacter of the play but it is primarily from his psychological perspective that the play's dramatic action derives its LEAH HADOMI meaning. The actual events enacted in his presence become the trigger for Willy's recollections and fantasies which constitute the play's imaginary sequences. The significance of each of the play's episodes, as well as the structure of the plot as a whole, depends on the rhythmic alternations between actuality and the protagonist's mental responses to them. His ideal self-image and the reality ofhis actual behavior and circumstances are the poles ofboth his inner existence and his dramatic interactions with the other characters of the play. The personalities of each of the dramatis personae are connected specifically with a particular feature of Willy's inner self, with a particular stance he has adopted toward his environment, or with one of the values in which he has educated his sons. Thus the conduct of the play's other characters is in great measure both the effect of his illusory perception of external reality and the cause of his deepening submersion in the world of his fantasies. When reality becomes too painful, Willy retreats into a dream world consisting of his roseate recollections of the past and of fantasies in which he fulfills the aspirations the attainment of which has eluded him in life. Although his memories are based on actual events, these are falsified in his mind by wishful thinking about how they ought to have turned out. Hence in Willy's mind, reality as it is immediately experienced by him merges in his consciousness with his recollection of distant events to form a seamless continuum ofpast and present time. The set in Arthur Miller's play furnishes, in the words of Edward Murray, "a flexible medium in which to enact the process of Willy Loman's way of mind.'" The block of apartment houses and the Loman home provide the static elements of the set. The element of change is furnished by the shifts of the location of action from one part of the stage to another. Its role in Miller's work evokes an instance of Kathleen George's dictum that the polyscenic stage functions according to the same principles as do the other manifestations of dramatic rhythm in pointing to the stable and changing features of the plot. However, the interplay between fantasy...