Tragic Hero in Death of a Salesman

ENGLISH ESSAY

“Willy: Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it and there's nobody to
live in it”.
--- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
Produced in the year 1949, Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman is considered to be a
classic in modern theatre of America. The story revolves around a common salesman who
dreams of well-liked by others and also being rich. The tragic story is about Willy Loman with a
mixed up present and past that is portrayed through expressionistic scenes. Rahman (2016) said
that the character of Willy Loman negates the Aristotelian theories of tragedy, but one cannot
just say that the character is not a tragic one. According to Allan Lewis, there is a “need for
redefining tragedy in the contemporary theatre” because the character of Willy Loman from
Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman is the epitome of a modern “hero” of a modern tragedy.
Thus it can be said that the character, Willy Loman is not a classical tragic hero of the ancient
times and Aristotelian concepts but a pathetic modern hero of a modern tragic family drama
placed in the American bourgeois society of the 1940s.
According to Aristotelian concepts tragedy is “an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic
ornament; the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of
narrative; through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions” (chapter VI,
Poetics). Thus, a tragedy, according to Aristotle should evoke pity and terror in the minds of the
audiences through a tragic “hero”, a man who undergoes a change of fortune not because of
some vice or weakness but because of some error in judgement (Zhao, 2016). Arthur Miller, in
Death of a Salesman argues the elements of embodying and representing the role and act of the
protagonist in tragedies being apt to be played by a middle-class or a working-class individual in
the same manner in which a noble man would play. Willy Loman in the play Death of a
Salesman by Arthur Miller, cannot be called a “hero” of a tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense as he
never proves his quality of being a “hero”; neither does he ever show his quality of becoming a
good father nor she shows the ability to accept his own shortcomings and work on it and
therefore he is unsuccessful in living up to the dignity and standards of a “tragic hero” (Miller,
Cobb, Dunnock, Grosbard & North, 1966).
However, Arthur Miller redefined the classical concepts of tragedy and the tragic hero
through his play Death of a Salesman and the outcome of this redefined tragedy and the tragic