The Goodness and Immorality of John Proctor in Miller's The Crucible

There are many sides to John Proctor and they occur at different stages of the play, John is a complex character and is very well respected even though he has done wrong things. Arthur Miller was in the same situation as John Proctor in 1956-57 because he refused to give names of people he saw at communist meetings. There was the same trial system. If you confessed you would stay alive assuming you had turned from the communist meetings, however if you denied that you were seen at communist meeting you would have been hanged because there would be no evidence to show you weren’t there. You get the impression that the character of John Proctor was based on the real life character of Miller.

When John Proctor is first introduced in the play there is a paragraph describing him, and reading this you learn a lot about his character, what others think about him, what he thinks of himself, and how he acts towards people.

‘He was the kind of man – powerful of body, even tempered and not easily led.’ This quote is very straightforward and you understand that he is fair-minded. After this quote you think he sounds like a good man and a rule-follower; however you then get to the line ‘ he’s a sinner, a sinner not only against the moral fashion of the time but against his own vision of decent conduct’.

This is the point where you start to think; what could he have done to become a sinner? Was it a sin in the eyes of god, his friends and family, the law? The description tells us that Proctor was respected so much he was also feared. This is proved when John Proctor enters from the door and Mary Warren ‘leaps in fright’.

Mary Warren is the servant girl of John Proctor but after a couple of lines you realise that she is not a very good...

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...isapprove of, however he is a good father and does care for people. I think that Salem would say he was a bad man. Elizabeth on the other hand would say he was a good man because although he has done bad things in his life, he feels guilty about doing these things and knows he did wrong, which some would say is more important than the crime itself. I think that John Proctor would think himself as a bad man because he is put across as very modest so he would think about the crimes he committed rather than the good things he has done. Doing a bad thing does not make him a bad man. I think that John has lots of good points and lots of bad points but he did the right thing in the end and he knew that what he did was wrong as soon as he did it, he loved his wife and she loved him, he was a good father and he lived a good life, so I think that John Proctor is a good man!