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Title: Death of A Salesman by Arthur Miller ISBN: 0-14-048134-6 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 06 October, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 (139 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Death of a Salesman
Comment: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman was and is the best play of the time which is about a man named Willy Loman who was a very successful person who ruled New England as a respected salesman and is fired only to have nothing to leave his wife and two sons, Biff and Happy, Willy comes to a decision to kill himself so the insurance company will pay his family twenty thousand dollars so they can get out of the congested city they live in.
Arthur Miller was writing about the greatest dream of the American person, to be successful and to be well liked and Willy is pushing Biff to be a better salesman and become more like his father, and Arthur Miller is writing about that this is not the American way, this is the way the business man and that is not the right way to look at life, you should take it as it is, and will not be pressured by the world to be well liked and respected throughout the world.
Some of the main lessons I have learned though this script is that you have two ears and only one mouth so you can listen two times as much than you can speak. As in the case of Willy and Biff, the tend to talk too much and not let the other person even get a word in, and they don't listen and they were not liked well because of that, Even other people can do that, in the case of Biff and Bill Oliver, Bill did not even look at Biff when he went to see him, so as some sort of revenge, Biff went into his office and stole his fountain pen.
I would recommend this play because it shows exactly what the people of America think today and this shows that they are completely wrong and should look to the way of working harder then you can be liked.
Rating: 4
Summary: Death of a Salesman - A social criticism? (by Timo Voß)
Comment: In my view the drama "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller is a very popular book. It is a tragedy where the reader can see the development of the tragic flaw from the first page till the end: The main character is Willy Loman. He is a normal father working as a salesman in a firm for many years. But something goes wrong with his mind and he lives in illusions. Hereby the point is to find out what went wrong in his life. Arthur Miller shows up all the different situations that led Willy to his decision at the end of the book. He looses his job for example, he does not come along with the behaviour of Biff and he cannot pay for his family anymore. So at the end he preferred the death more than being alive ("You end up worth more dead than alive"). Willy Loman is a dreamer. Looking back to the past is lovely for him, and there are all the flash-backs in the play which underline his dissipations into the past. The flash-backs are a good way to show the people after and after what might have gone wrong in the long past, because the real set is shortly before Willy`s death. So the reader just gets to know from the flash-backs what really happened in the past, and Willy`s own ones are not conformable with the real truth every time. The hotel scene in Boston is one big evidence. Very early the reader gets to know that his oldest son Biff broke up school shortly before his finishing. He did not want to go to summer school, but why? Later on the reader gets the answer because of the hotel scene where Biff caught his father with a strange woman and he was disappointed. There are hints like this one in every scene. Many criticisers, like Eleanor Clark, wrote about Miller`s play that it was definitely the capitalist system which made Willy loosing his mind. I share this opinion because the time Arthur Miller wrote the play is the shift in the society in the later thirties. On the one hand it might be a strong critic by the author about this new system, on the other hand he just could show how some normal people could break off because of this system. A big proof therefore is the brutal firing of Willy out of his firm where he worked more than forty years, and the remembers at his brother Ben who could go out into the world trying to make his way a long time before the capitalist system came. In the end I can say that I enjoyed the play; even the fact that many questions are unanswered (particular at the requiem) does not disturb me that much. The reader therefore gets the chance to make up his own decisions and thinks about it a lot. I think that is well done by Arthur Miller as well.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beyond the term "Classic"
Comment: This play blew me away when I read it some ten years ago. And the same thing happend when I saw it on Broadway as a revival many years ago. One can only imagine the impact it had on audiences when it first came out. Truly, there has been nothing as harrowing, riveting, and emotional in the theatre since. The "idea" of the play is powerful enough, but couple this with the "American dream" theme and you've got explosive material. The intensity of this piece of theatre is hard to match. A few other great works come to mind ("Sophie's Choice by Styron or McCrae's "Bark of the Dogwood"--though those are books or movies) but even so, something about "Death" is beyond that. Why this isn't required reading in school is something I'll never understand. Arthur Miller is a national treasure and if he had written this play only, his reputation would have been confirmed forever.
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