Le Passeur De Temps

Death of a Salesman, as the masterpiece of Arthur Miller, has long been the target of critical studies, but few of them have had a systematical exploration of time in this play. Since then, by careful analyses, this paper endeavors to give a full account of time as structure and theme in Death of a Salesman.A general introduction would be given to the status of Death of a Salesman in the literary world, the scholarship it has received at home and abroad, and the main content and the significance of this paper.Chapter One would explore the overall relationship between time and drama. An inherent difference lay between realism and expressionism is the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, in Nietzsche's words, the difference between the art of sculpture and the art of music. As a visual-auditory art which boasts the characteristics of the art of time and the art of space, drama, for a long time, has been deprived of its time element. Especially under the rigid confinement of the three unities, time has lost its anima, fluidity and musicality. To restore its due part, a precondition is a change in people's conception of time per se.Chapter Two analyzes the time concept of the play, the device the play uses to express it, the overall time structure and the theatrical designs of the play. Death of a Salesman breaks the linear time line, defies the dichotomic division of past and present, instead it creates a non-past/non-present simultaneity. With the use of stream of consciousness, the play dissolves the objective time into the subjective time. The two times, like two melodic lines in a polyphony, parallel, cross and embed with each other that cumulate in Willy's death march.Chapter Three explores time in Death of a Salesman from a thematic perspective. First is the mythical time that tells a fall from paradise, then the social time symbolized by the towering clock which exerts a pervasive and invisible control over people's life, and finally the psychological time which gives rise to Willy's schizophrenic experience and reflects an inherent split of the self.In conclusion, thematically, time is an enemy for Willy which constitute the paradox of human existence, while structurally, it is a fiber of the play which is an indispensable organic part of the play and itself a way of expressing.