Willy Loman & Oedipus

Emotions are what tie cultivate and char exemplifyer and audience together. Miller argues that all tragic figures (Oedipus and Willy included) are trying to find, keep, or recover their "'rightful' position" (Miller 1726). What makes Oedipus and Willy even much tragic is their self-deception with respect to their "rightful position" in the world. Tragedy recognizems more than anything else to be the stage of humanity's failure to see that life itself is a tragedy, that one's "rightful position" (as powerful and heartfelt king or as successful salesman and family man) is a evanescent illusion that moldiness sooner or later place crashing d accept around one's ears. In other words, Oedipus was always a mock king, because he killed his father and wed his mother and sic in motion the wheels which would eventually grind him to dust. The foundation was stinky from the start. The same holds for Willy: he never really possessed the American Dream, as much as he might build deluded himself otherwise at the height of his professional success and unornamented success as husband and father. Willy discovers that the American Dream is a dog-eat-dog materialistic nightmare that leaves him ruined. With respect to his family, Willy was never a success, imposture on his wife and hated and pitied by his sons. Biff sees the great part of Willy's tragedy: "The man didn't know who he was" (Miller 1546).

twain Willy and Oedipus are ignorant of essential concomitants about themselves and their lives, and their ignorance of

Miller, Arthur. Death of A Salesman. Literature. Ed. X.J. Kennedy. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 1476-1547.

The short story which best exhibits the quality of being a "just representation of general nature," as Samuel Johnson puts it, is James Joyce's "Araby." Every reader will the likes ofly identify with Joyce's tale of young love disillusioned to the degree that that reader has been burned by his or her own romantic yearnings, young or old. The story which is least model of common experience is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," because few readers are insane murderers like Poe's narrator.

If Othello is a self-deluded fool whose self-doubts make him easy pickings for the consummate evil machinations of Iago, Oedipus is a man whose flaw is his great pride. From the ascendant of the play he reveals that he believes himself to be responsible for the urban center and all its citizens suffering under the beshrew. He sends Creon to Delphi "To learn . . . /What act or pledge of mine may save the urban center" (Sophocles 1108). This good, heroic, compassionate king, however, is the same man who murdered not entirely his father but four other men because they ran him move out the road (Sophocles 1127). Oedipus learns the truth of his past and come outs more concerned with the fact that he is the target of his own search for the source of the curse than with the fact of the murders themselves. He has killed five men, and yet the act would seem to have meant nothing to him had one of them not been his father. On Oedipus' behalf, it must be said that such a sudden awaken to such dreadful truths (including his marriage to his mother) would leave anyone slightly mad. The pain, iniquity and shame he feels leads him to blind and exile himself.

Othello could have this instant questioned his wife about Iago's claims; he could have brought Iago, Desdemona and Cassio together to lay out Iago with his claims and allow Desdemona and Cassio to confront him; he could have queried Iago mercilessly an
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