A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF MILLER’S WILLY LOWMAN – A DREAMER, MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING
Keywords:
American Dream, Success Myth, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Capitalist society, Personality, Well LikedAbstract
Death of a Salesman is based on a salesman’s obsession with success myth in the context of great economic depression. Arthur Miller’s American dreamer Willy Lowman is an illustration of much practiced philosophy of being well liked. People in a modern business oriented society tend to run after profit without realizing their own capability. Success, in a fast growing modern society as in America, does not depend on any miracle. Success and failure go side by side. Willy Lowman, in the play Death of a Salesman exemplifies America’s success myth. That his failure is the wrong assumption of this myth- is well discussed in the field of American Literature of the 20th Century. Many modern and post modern critics tried to examine the problems of capitalist society for Willy’s tragedy. This paper will try to investigate an exclusive character study of Miller’s protagonist to determine other important causes related to his failure and to analyze the one who is more sinned against than sinning. In this paper, American dream of success and Miller’s treatment of it is discussed. After that, a psychoanalytic criticism is done to analyze the character of Willy Lowman.
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References
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