Delusional Protagonist Essay

In both novels novels A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, there is one major character in each novel that shares an almost unique characteristic with the other one; delusion. Both of the characters, Blache Dubios, and Willy Loman, respectively, live deluded lives in some shape or form, be it a delusion of self-perception, friends and family, or something else. One facet of delusion with both characters is how they rely on the people around them to maintain their delusions. They all use their surrounding characters actions and the way they interact with them as objects of which to reinforce and build their own delusions off of. Simply put, their delusion can only stay intact with the participation of the other characters in “playing along,” with the delusion.

Blache Dubios, the delusional major character in A Streetcar Named Desire, is a bit of an airhead. She is a very “floaty,” person, whose head is usually up in the clouds and rarely ever in the real world. Due to this, she acts on her own impulses, which results in a shady past. After leaving her hometown, she moved to a hotel and began living with many men, and eventually she got kicked out of the hotel due to her messing around with a student of hers, as she taught at school during her tenure in the hotel. After all this trouble, as a last ditch-attempt to regain a somewhat stable life, she moves in her with sister Stella and Stella’s husband Stanley, to a small house in urban New Orleans. And this is where her delusions begin.

Due to a combination of her being an airhead, and her want to start over and dismember her past from herself, Blanche begins self-delusion. She creates a fantasy life, in which she is still a young, beautiful, innocent woman who has ju...

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...me speech about becoming successful as he did from when before he was fired. It wasn’t his self-worth delusion that was the main one, it was the one about his legacy that he would pass on toward his children, mainly and maybe only Biff. When this delusion of how well that his teachings were going is thrashed and loses the support of another character, when at the end of novel Biff declares that Willy’s path that he kept trying to set for Biff was just not working so Biff was going to set out on his path, that is when Willy collapses. It was after this admission of Biff’s that Willy went and killed himself.

Blanche Dubios and Willy Loman were both delusional characters whose delusions, and therefore their own “sanity”, relied on the enabling and support of the delusions by the other characters, and once that support was lost, so too were the delusional characters.