Analyzing The Characters Of Three Salesmen In American Drama In The Light Of Appraisal Theory

Three important American dramas,Eugene O’ Neill’s The Iceman Cometh,Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,and Tennessee Williams’ s A Streetcar Named Desire,which win world-wide reputation for three playwrights respectively,coincidently,are all performed almost in almost the same period in history.There’s an interesting and prominent point that the main characters of the three plays,Hickey,Willy and Stanley,are all salesmen.What are the characteristics of these three salesmen created in the same period? Are there any similarities and differences in their characters?The Appraisal Theory,brought up by Martin as a further development and extension of Discourse Semantics basing on the systematic functional grammar,deals with how language realizes the interpersonal meaning in social interaction.A lot of researches are done by applying the Appraisal Theory in interpreting literary works,which in return develop the theory and prove its vitality in discourse analysis.But it is a pity that few of them are related to plays.People’s characters lie in their social relations.Analyzing the characters’ social relationships with the help of the subsystems of the Appraisal Theory,namely Attitude,Engagement and Graduation,can,in theory,reflect how these playwrights characterize their protagonist’s image,thus how these playwrights employ linguistic choices achieve the aesthetic affect of drama.Therefore,analyzing the three salesmen’s characters in their dialogues by employing the subsystems of Martin’s Appraisal Theory is significant and necessary.This thesis attempts to explore the Characters of the three salesmen in The Iceman Cometh,A Streetcar Named Desire,and Death of a Salesman with both quantitative and qualitative research methods in the light of the Appraisal Theory.By analyzing these evaluative expressions and the distribution of appraisal resources in the extracted dialogues of these three plays,the characteristics of the three salesmen will be demonstrated,whereupon a comparative and contrastive analysis among these three salesmen’s characters will be done to find out what they have in common and how they are different though sharing the same identity.On one hand,the present research will help readers to have a clearer understanding of the salesmen’s characters in these three plays.On the other,through this study,it can prove that the newly developing theory,namely the Appraisal Theory has certain descriptive and explanatory adequacy in analyzing the discourse features in the literature works like drama.