A Turn-taking Study On Characters Of Three Salesmen In Modern American Drama

The three most important American modern dramas, Eugene O’ Neill’s TheIceman Cometh, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee Williams’s AStreetcar Named Desire, are all performed in the years1946-1949. One important andinteresting point is that the main characters of these three plays, Hickey, Stanley andWilly, are all salesmen. What are the personalities of these three salesmen created inthe same time period? What are the similarities and differences in their characters?This thesis attempts to analyze dialogues of these plays to find the threesalesmen’s different characters and similarities among them by applying theturn-taking framework used in drama stylistic analysis proposed by Li Huadong andYu Dongming. During the analysis of extracts, this thesis calculates and analyzes thenumber of turns, average turn-length, the times of turn-type and turn-control strategies.Analysis of dialogues is done by combining analysis method with descriptiveapproach, from the following five perspectives: the initiation and control of topics,turn-length, turn-type, interruption and monologue, and turn-control strategies. Resultshows that the three salesmen in American modern dramas obviously have differentcharacters. O’Neill portrayed an outgoing, active, talkative, facile and possessiveHickey. Stanley is inarticulate and stupid in thoughs, and violence is his solution toeverything that is not going as he expected. He is eager to dominate others and he is aself-centered-person. Willy is wimpy, overcautious and complicated before his boss.However, there are also some similarities among them. In the plays of O’Neill, Miller,and Williams, a man who is eager to promote his concept is showed on these threesalesmen. What’s more, during the data analysis, this thesis finds that theturn-allocation is quite asymmetrical in conversations including multiple characters.Almost each character has the chance to control the topics, claim and hold turns,which mostly depends on the character of a participant. So analysis onmultiple-character conversations will reveal the characterizations much better.This thesis is the first attempt to make a contrastive analysis among these threesalesmen’s characterizations by applying a turn-taking framework. The presentresearch can help readers to have a clearer understanding of the salesmen’s characters,dialogues, and the implication in these three plays.