Realistic Features Of The Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller is one of the most influential playwrights in America. Death of a Salesman, one of his representative plays, got an immediate success after its first performance in New York in1949. Meanwhile it had aroused heated debates in the criticism circle both home and abroad. According to my survey on the domestic journals, many reviews on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Among these reviews, most of them are about the disillusionment of the American Dream and Arthur Miller’s views on tragedy in Death of a Salesman as well as the expressionistic techniques used in the play. So the emphasis of this thesis is through analyzing the realistic features in literature, character, stage design and language to argue that Death of a Salesman is a play in which realism is perfectly used. Firstly, this thesis focuses on how Miller uses realism in the play. On the one hand, the realistic features are analysed from the perspective of critical realism and social realism. Death of Salesman exposes the "American dream’s defects", known as the "American Dream no longer,". The main character, Willy Loman loses himself in a warped vision of the American Dream. On the other hand, we can enjoy the realistic features in Death of a Salesman from the perspective of character, language and stage design. Miller gives a vivid image of Willy, Willy suffers from a big blow from the shattered American dream.Besides, there is another reason for his death that his two sons are fallen and helpless,which makes Willy hopeless. He works hard all his life and he dreams that his two sons would be sucessful in society. However, there is nothing in the end, which is a heavy blow to Willy. All of Willy’s sufferings are realistic features in society. Miller puts emphases on the analyses and he focuses on revealing the psychological activities.This thesis consists of five parts, with three chapters coming between the introduction and conclusion.Chapter one deals with the realistic features in character. The realistic meaning of Willy Loman, as a common preson in Amercia, is that he has an Amercian dream from the realistic presentation of career expreience and his family life.In the Chapter two, the thesis mainly focuses on the language from the realistic features. I analyse the language from the realistic features. The language styles includes mental dialogue, references, colloquial language, selective realistic language and metaphorical language and so on.Chapter three deals with the realistic features in stage design. Firsly, I apply the realistic ways of drama to analyse the realistic features in stage structure. On one hand, I show the realistic features from the conversion of the stage scene. On the other hand, we can appreciate the realistic features from the application of music in the play. The music plays an important part in the play, because it is closely linked with the human’s emotion in a logical way. Secondly, judging from the realistic recreation of scenes.Throughout the play, the hero has been placed on the edge of despair when the curtain opens, In Act Ⅱ, Willy commits suicide. It focuses on revealing his Psychological process before his death. According to the realism, it emphasizes on the authenticity of description details and especially the bottom of society as well as of the tragic fate the "little people". Therefore, the realistic writers stick to realistic description. The language of the Characters is used to create characters and it is a an important approach to describe the characters. It is obvious that realistic features o f language is shown in Death of a Salesman. We can enjoy the realistic features from the three ways of mental dialogue, references and colloquial language. The play creates the perfect effect in the various scene designs and realistic techniques. The scenes includes a suburban backyard, a Manhattan restaurant a hotel room in Boston and a cemetery. The effects of innovative drama scenery will affect the21st century American script writing and stage in art. The audience is surprised by the authenticity of the stage design. In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller describes a little man in Amercian society who devotes himself to the American dream in order to make a life for him and his family memebers. Arthur Miller describes the hero in an realistic way, which reproduces the character in a vivid and true way in the realistic society.