Analysis of the death of a seller

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Sales Man is one of the outstanding works that won a Pulitzer Prize. The play depicts the life of a middle-class American family in search of the great American dream. Here I would like to analyze the work from various schools of literary thought.

Existentialism

The protagonist Willy Lowman can be compared to Albert Camus’ myth of Sisyphus, where the gods torture Sisyphus by rolling a boulder up a hill only to discover that it rolls back down. Willy Lowman is forced to do a menial job for a sales company. The tragic hero of the work is a person who pursues the great American dream but does not achieve it and succumbs to suicide. Looking at him from Sartre’s existential point of view, we find him bearer of existential angst. Harassed by the power of negative thinking, Billy relapses into existential solipsism. Billy’s character reveals a general narcissism.

marxist perspective

Looking at the work from a Marxist perspective, we find that the work is literate with oppressive symptoms of a leviathan, showing the dangers of a capitalist society. Proletarians are workaholics. We find ourselves with a society that is inhumane and dehumanizing. Society fragments and proceeds to improve itself with the abandonment of others.

Psychoanalysis

I would like to introduce the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage. The mirror stage in psychoanalysis is a stage in which the child enters the realm of language and becomes a self, a subject. The mirror scenario is a scenario in which Billy’s psyche comes into conflict with the aspirations and goals set by him. The mirror becomes an absurd theater of life. From a Jungian perspective, Billy Lowman is an archetypal fool. He is living in an insane illusory world. I would also like to make a comparison of Billy Lowman with Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s follies at one point were denigrated as the conquest of a madman by utopia. Don Quixote in psychoanalysis can be considered a narcissistic hero who creates the myth of existential anarchic life. Billy Lowman is a tragic, stoic hero who becomes the king of neurotic behavior.

Feminism

Billy’s wife, Linda Lowman, is an essence of the sacred feminine. She can be likened to a mother goddess trying to balance herself with the realities of life and struggling to cope with Billy’s dementia. She is an archetype of a classic middle-class American woman trying to cope with the realities of life.

Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

Postmodern perspectives look at how the binary divide in language is created. Certain structures are privileged signifiers and others are marginalized. In Death of a Salesman we find that capitalism and the bourgeoisie are privileged signifiers while Billy Lowman and the proletarians are marginalized. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie become structures that can be read as interpretive deconstruction texts.