Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller is one of the most influential playwrights in America. Death of a Salesman, one of his representative plays, got an immediate success after its first performance. Meanwhile it has aroused heated debates in the criticism circle both home and abroad. According to my survey on the domestic journals, in the span from the year 1984 to 2005, the reviews on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman amount to 50. Among 50 articles studying on Death of a Salesman, most of them are about the disillusionment of the American Dream and Arthur Miller's views on tragedy in Death of a Salesman. Among a few essays which are about the expressionistic techniques used in the play, they mainly focus on some of the expressionistic techniques such as stream of consciousness, dream, and some auxiliary stage devices, but there is no systematical analysis of the expressionistic techniques adopted in the play. Moreover, none of the articles under the survey comprehensively analyze how Arthur Miller combines the subjectivity of expressionism with the illusion of objectivity afforded by realism in Death of a Salesman. So the emphasis of this thesis is through analyzing the realistic and expressionistic features in structure, character, stage design and language to argue that Death of a Salesman is a play in which realism and expressionism are perfectly combined together.Firstly, this thesis focuses on how Miller combines realism and expressionism in structure in Death of a Salesman. On the one hand, the structure has realistic features: there is a well-knit plot; the play contains standard dramatic elements such as exposition, rising action, climax, and ending. Besides, "reversal" and "recognition", traditionally realistic devises as referred to by Aristotle, can be found in the play. On the other hand, the characteristics of Willy's thought decide that besides the external plot, there exists the internal plot which mainly deals with the memories of the past.