| Arthur Miller is an outstanding American playwright of the twentieth century.He is good at showing social problems by describing the plight of the obscure characters,so he is called the “moral voice of American stage”.While the survival dilemmas of characters in his early plays are mainly related to society,the survival predicament of the protagonist Victor in The Price,a masterpiece in the middle phase of his writing career,comes more from his bad faith: he believes his responsibility to his father,and denies the possibility of his free choice to escape his responsibility comes after it.Therefore,the study of Victor’s bad faith is helpful to reveal Miller’s existentialist thoughts buried in this play.This thesis uses Sartre’s theory of bad faith to explore Victor’s mental process and discuss the origin of Victor’s bad faith,Victor’s condition of maintaining bad faith,and the price that Victor pays for his bad faith.This thesis puts forward that Victor’s existence has a dual property,that is,the facticity of his policeman identity and the transcendence of becoming a scientist.The difficulty of the coordination between his facticity and transcendence makes Victor give up his transcendence and choose to be a policeman for 28 years.To maintain the balance of his inner world,Victor believes misinterpreted facts to persuade himself that he has no choice,and he sincerely wants to get the fixed definition of “a filial son” from the world.In bad faith,Victor loses reflective consciousness,becomes a passive “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world”,and suffers from the anguish of becoming alienated from others.Based on the theory of bad faith,this thesis reveals the inner complexity,contradiction,and conflict of Miller’s protagonist when he is in the face of freedom and responsibility,which is helpful for readers to understand Miller’s writing thoughts.At the same time,through the analysis of Victor’s survival predicament,this thesis points out that Victor’s price of being comes from his escaping of his freedom and responsibility,which is helpful for readers to further understand Miller’s existentialist thoughts. |
