Death of a Salesman and All My Sons as Optimistic Tragedies
This essay deals with Arthur Miller, and his uniqueness as a tragic playwright. The research question that this paper attempted to answer was, why were Miller's plays different from many other tragedies. Two of Arthur Miller's tragedies were used in this essay, Death of a Salesman and All My Sons. The thesis of this essay is, Arthur Miller deviates from the standard perception of tragedy in his plays, Death of a Salesman and All My Sons because unlike other tragedies, they are optimistic in that the main character causes the tragedy for what they perceive to be the greater good.
The body of this essay starts out with a discussion of tragedy, and the commonly viewed perception of it, one of pessimism. It goes into detail of several different definitions of tragedy, made by literary critics. The "tragic flaw" is discussed and proven to be a major part of a tragedy, especially Miller's. Death of a Salesman is used to prove this statement. The idea that Miller's plays are optimistic is discussed in great detail. Both plays are used to prove this concept, as well as essays written by literary critics with opinions on this topic. One of the major points in this essay is Miller's use of love. Love is a dominant emotion throughout the tragedies. The important thing about the love is that it is one of the main reasons that the characters do what they do to cause the tragedy.
The conclusion of this essay enforces the idea that Arthur Miller's plays are unique from other tragedies. It reinstates the thesis and the reason that it is true. The conclusion also summarizes the most important points of the essay and ends the paper tying everything together.
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7. Carson, Neil. "A View from the Bridge and the Expansion of Vision." Bloom, Harold, ed. Arthur Miller: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. (1987) p 94.
8. Hayman, Ronald. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar Publiching Co. (1956); p 43.
9. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: The Viking Press (1958); p 133.
10. Hayman, Ronald. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar Publiching Co. (1956); p 55.
11. Miller, Arthur. "Introduction to Collected Plays." Weales, Gerald, ed. Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin Books (1996); p163.
12. Miller, Arthur. Six Great Modern Plays: All My Sons. New York: Dell Publishing Co. (1956); p 420.
13. Gross, Barry. "All My Sons and the Larger Context." Martine, James J., ed. Critical Essays on Arthur Miller. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. (1979); p 12.
Arthur Miller’s success first began with his Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947. This award winning play “Struck a note that was to become familiar in Miller’s work: the need for moral responsibility in families and society”. (Anderson 1212) Later, his production Death of a Salesman left him the group of America’s top playwrights....
Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy, lives in Sighet during World War II with his mother, father, and two sisters, and he is very religious and wanted to study Judaism. However, there were warnings by some people that Jewish people were being deported and killed. Although no one believes these warnings, Elie and his family are taken to a ghetto where they have no food. After being in the ghetto Elie and his father are separated from Elie’s mother and sister because of selection and were placed in cattle cars where they had no room. They are taken to Auschwitz where they suffer from hunger, beatings, and humiliation from the guards which causes Elie’s father to become weak. By now Elie loses his faith in God because of all he has been through. Lastly, Elie’s father dies just before the Jews are liberated and Elie sees his reflection in the mirror but does not recognize himself because he looks like a skeleton.
Life as a human is dictated by an inborn hunger or purpose, and people, in general, will act on this hunger for their own personal gain in their individual ways. This hunger, be it for wealth, land, love, power, revenge, or pride, can, and will be the undoing or failing of all mankind as Miller so clearly points out in his play 'The Crucible';. This essay will explore the motives of characters within the play and even the motives of Arthur Miller himself and therefore show how conflict stems from certain recognisable human failings including those mentioned above, fear, and hysteria.
When the Holocaust happened there were many Jews killed due to gas chambers and fires that hid their remains. The book Night is about Elie wiesel (a survivor of the Holocaust) and what had happened to him in auschwitz. Elie wiesel is an actual survivor of the holocaust who wrote this book to show the horrors of auschwitz. He was very changed after he came out of the concentration camp known as Auschwitz(the biggest concentration camp during the holocaust). In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, was affected by the events in the book because he didn't care if he died, he wasn't mournful over death, and he was psychologically affected.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes. Kate Kinsella, et. Al, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2002. 1233-1334. Print.
Elie is an ever-changing character: his struggle for his faith and conflicting himself about it, his struggle between his faith and the other inmates, and his struggle between God and his relation to Job; even though the underlying conflicts are between Elie and God solely. Elie had once believed that God was the almighty and contained all of the higher power. But, as the concentration camps changed multiple people mentally and physically, the camps had changed Elie too. No matter how strong Elie had once believed in God, that strong belief had dimmed down to a dull minimum, a slim-to-nothing belief left behind. They say change is for the better, but that always isn’t the case.
Nine critical approaches are utilized when analyzing a piece of literature in order to appeal to a variety of critics. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible can be interpreted from numerous approaches, but one lens that is unmistakable throughout is the psychological criticism. From a psychological standpoint, one gains access to the mindset of both the author and the characters within. In addition to this, the reader also acquires a greater understanding of the motivations, behaviors, and mental state that each character possesses. Through psychological criticism, one can obtain information on a character’s motivation, the likelihood of their actions, and which behaviors are consciously made.
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, took the time to inform the world about his experiences as a prisoner of Auschwitz during the Holocaust in order for it to never happen again. Wiesel uses a language so unbearably painful yet so powerful to depict his on memories of the Holocaust in order to convey the horrors he managed to survive through. When the memoir begins, Elie Wiesel, a jewish teenager living in the town of Sighet, Transylvania is forced out of his home. Despite warnings from Moshe the Beadle about German prosecutions of Jews, Wiesel’s family and the other townspeople fail to flee the country before the German’s invade. As a result, the entire Jewish population is sent to concentration camps. There, in the Auschwitz death camp, Wiesel is separated from his mother and younger sister but remains with his father. As he struggles to survive against starvation, physical, emotional and spiritual abuse he also looses faith in God. As weeks and months pass, Wiesel battles a conflict between fighting to live for his father or letting him die, giving himself the best chance of survival. Over the course of the memoir, Wiesel’s father dies and he is left with a guilty conscience but a relieved heart because now he can just fend for himself and only himself. A few months later, the Allied soldiers free the lucky prisoners that are left. Although Wiesel survives the concentration camps, he leaves behind his own innocence and is forever haunted by the death and violence he had witnessed. Wiesel and the rest of the prisoners lived in fear every minute of every hour of every day and had to live in a place where there was not one single place that there was no danger of death. After reading Night and Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the Nobe...
Amid the time of World War II, the Jewish people were brutally assaulted and diminished. Elie Wiesel the author of Night uses him and his father’s own personal encounters through concentration camps to further demonstrate Jew’s mistreatment. The memoir is about a boy and his father’s journey of survival through concentration camps during the war; Jews are being persecuted and starved in camps hoping for someone to save them. In Night, Wiesel uses dehumanization to show that Jews are treated so badly that their humanity is taken away from them.
...he brutal tactic of dehuminization to terrify and break the will of so much of the European Jewish population during World War II. Wiesel has shown us how the prisoners had their identity taken away. A person's identity symbolizes many things within oneself. The prisoners were treated as if they were wild animals. They nearly got any food. The Nazis left many people to starve to death. The prisoners also did not get any justice. They had no rights and no freedom to do anything at all. The Jews feared for their life everyday they had stayed there. In the camp it was a never ending torture. People were separated from their families in a split second and would never be able to see one another ever again. Elie had suffered so much and went all the way to a point that it was okay for his own dad to die. The Holocaust will go down as one of the most brutal genocides ever.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. His parents ran a shop and cared for him and his three siblings, Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. Early on, the Jewish community of Sighet payed little heed to the stories of what had happened to foreign Jews that were expelled. By the time Germans had entered Sighet, it was too late for the people to escape their fates. At first, they were made to give up all of their valuable possessions and move into makeshift ghettos. Next came deportation of the entire community to the Auschwitz internment camp. The way that the people were piled into cattle wagons was only a precurser of appalling events that were to come. The horror really dawned on Elie when he realized that the large smokestacks that he saw were from crematoriums that were set up to burn the bodies of the thousands upon thousands of Jews that were killed in the gas chamber. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. The prisoners were given only black coffee in the morning, and soup and a crust of bread in the evening. The most terrifying aspect of the entire experience was the “selection”, the picking out of those that were to sick, old, or weak to be useful. These unfortunate souls were thrown into the fires. The one constant in Elie’s life was his father, who along with his son and all other prisoners, were later forced to evacuate to trains that would bring them to the Buchenwald internment camp deep in Germany, under the pressure of the Allied forces on the area. The final horrific scene in this book was how the interned, in mass, were forced to run full speed for hours on end, the people that lagged being shot on sight. The story culminated in the death of Elie’s father, and the eventual freedom of the Survivors of these death camps.
When the holocaust concluded, the long night finished. However, the terrors and haunting memories of the Holocaust will forever linger. After the prisoners were beaten endlessly, worked like slaves, witnessed acts of inhumanity and gave up body parts for their lives, Elie changed. The young man lost his faith, innocence, and Elies main focus became the survival of himself and father. Through Wiesel’s horrific experiences, he lost many things but gained the will and ability to persevere. All in all, Night is a book that will never be forgotten. Wiesel wrote the memoir to guarantee remembrance of the discrimination and inhumanity during the holocaust to ensure a similar event will never transpire again.
Murray, Edward. “The Thematic Structure in Death of a Salesman.” Readings on Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman. San Diego: Greenhaven Press Inc., 1999.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, and Dana Gioia. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999. 1636-1707.
113-117. Arthur Miller. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982. ---. Eight Plays.