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Death of a Salesman - Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero
Summary: Essay examines to what extend can we consider Willy Loman as a tragic hero.
In the first century B.C, Aristotle wrote "Poetics", in which he defined his theory on tragedies. According to Aristotle, a tragedy revolves around a great and/or noble man, such as a king or war hero, who has a tragic flaw that eventually leads him to his downfall or to his fall from glory, helped by external forces. Throughout the play the tragic hero has to have some opportunity to overcome his mistakes. Nevertheless, he dies, leaving the audience a feeling of waste, but the fall is not pure loss: there is some increase in awareness, some gain in self-knowledge or some discovery on the part of the tragic hero. Many critics have written that tragedy is incompatible with the modern world. However, playwrights such as Arthur Miller have been known to write what some consider to be "modern tragedies." "Death of a Salesman", for example, is...
This section contains 1,236 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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