Antigone And Willy Loman Conflict Essay

Conflict is integral to tragedy, emerging from the plot’s interplay of opposing forces. However many critics argue about the nature of this conflict. Raphael argues that the outward conflict of tragedy is between the “two forms of sublime, a conflict between inevitable power, which we may call necessity, and the reaction to necessity of self-conscious effort.” On the other hand, Hegel surmised that tragedy was the conflict between justified powers and the individual, which leads to the “exfoliation of the social and individual consciousness”. However, in this discourse on tragedy, there has not been enough analysis on the conflict between mimesis and the critical inclinations of the audience. This essay assesses this conflict in Sophocles’ Antigone and Miller’s Death of a

At Willy’s firing, as a last vestige of hope, he eulogises Dave. Yet Willy’s speech slips into the threshold between his illusion and reality– the simple language is demotic yet multifaceted in its self-referentiality. His language adopts cumulative listings of activities and geographical places, unable to fathom the inherent disparity in Dave’s demise: “remembered and loved and helped by so many different people” yet had no home, unable to distinguish his lifestyle in New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston”. Chiastically framing this doubling are nightmarish repetitions “when he died—and by the way he died the death of a salesman … when he died”, where the garish and fragmented nature of this eulogy symbolizes the true death of the American dream. Yet Willy is unaware. Rather this is his predicament; in his stasis Willy remains in the liminal space between his realistic, demotic language and his figurative, self-referential rhetoric, still oriented around fantastical