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3651250100Mr. Desmond IB English 21 April 2019**To be completed in the Notebook by Monday, April 8**For each of the four source materials, write a well-developed one-paragraph reflection.In each reflection, cite and respond to a specific reference to the text. You may either contextualize, challenge, or concur with your chosen reference. However you decide to respond, take the time to express yourself clearly.IMPORTANT: PLEASE DEVOTE A SEPARATE PAGE IN YOUR NOTEBOOK FOR EACH REFLECTION. Properly label each with the title and author of the piece to which you are responding. 'SALESMAN' HAS A BIRTHDAY?- IN ARTHUR MILLER'S OWN WORDS? February 5, 1950 The 'Salesman' Has A Birthday by Arthur Miller (Author of Death of a Salesman, which celebrates its first anniversary on Friday) Experience tells me that I will probably know better next year what I feel right now about the first anniversary of Death of a Salesman – it usually takes that long to understand anything. I suppose I ought to try to open some insights into the play. Frankly, however, it comes very fuzzily to mind at this date. I have not sat through it since dress rehearsal and haven’t read it since the proofs went to the publisher. In fact, it may well be that from the moment I read it to my wife and two friends one evening in the country a year ago last fall, the play cut itself off from me in a way that is incomprehensible. I remember that night clearly, best of all. The feeling of disaster when, glancing up at the audience of three, I saw nothing but glazed looks in their eyes. And at the end, when they said nothing, the script suddenly seemed a record of madness I had passed through, something I ought not admit to at all, let alone read aloud or have produced on stage. Tears and Laughter I don’t remember exactly what they said, exactly, excepting that it had taken them deeply. But I can see my wife’s eyes as I read a – to me – hilarious scene, which I prefer not to identify. She was weeping. I confess that I laughed more during the writing of this play than I have ever done, when alone, in my life. I laughed because moment after moment came when I felt I had rapped it right on the head – the non sequitur, the aberrant but meaningful idea racing through Willy’s head, the turns of story that kept surprising me every morning. And most of all the form, for which I have been searching since the beginning of my writing life. Writing in that was like moving through a corridor in a dream, knowing instinctively that one would find every wriggle of it and, best of all, where the exit lay. There is something like a dream’s quality in my memory of the writing and the day or two that followed its completion. I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch anymore. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us. On that afternoon, more than any time before or since, the marvel of the actor was all new to me. How utterly they believed what they were saying to each other! To watch these fine actors creating their roles is to see revealed the innocence, the na?ve imagination of man liberated from the prisons of the past. They were like children wanting to show that they could turn themselves into anybody, thus opening their lives to limitless possibilities. Kazan’s Technique And Elia Kazan, with his marvelous wiles, tripping the latches of the secret little doors that lead into the always different personalities of each actor. That is his secret; not merely to know what must be done, but to know the way to implement the doing for actors trained in diametrically opposite schools, or not trained at all. He does not “direct,” he creates a center point, and then goes to each actor and creates the desire to move toward it. And they all meet, but for different reasons, and seem to have arrived there by themselves. Was there ever a production of so serious a play that was carried through with so much exhilarating laughter? I doubt it. We were always on the way; and I suppose we always knew it. There are things learned – I think, by many people – from this production. Things which, if applied, can bring much vitality to our theatre. There is no limit to the expansion of the audience’s imagination so long as the play’s internal logic is kept inviolate. It is not true that conventionalism is demanded. They will move with you anywhere, they will believe right into the moon so long as you believe who tell them this tale. We are at the beginning of many explosions of form. They are waiting for wonders. A serious theme is entertaining to the extent that it is not trifled with, not cleverly angled, but met in head-on collision. They will not consent to suffer while the creators stand by with tongue in cheek. They have a way of knowing. Nobody can blame them. And there have been certain disappointments, one above all. I am sorry the self-realization of the older son, Biff, is not a weightier counterbalance to Willy’s disaster in the audience mind. And certain things more clearly known, or so it seems now. We want to give of ourselves, and yet all we train for is to take, as though nothing less will keep the world at a safe distance. Every day we contradict our will to create, which is to give. The end of man is not security, but without security we are without the elementary condition of humaneness. In The Future A time will come when they will look back at us astonished that we saw something holy in the competition for the means of existence. But already we are beginning to ask of the great man, not what has he got, but what has he done for the world. We ought to be struggling for a world in which it will be possible to lay blame. Only then will the great tragedies be written, for where no order is believed in, no order can be breached and thus all disasters of man will strive vainly for moral meaning. And what have such thoughts to do with this sort of reminiscence? Only that to me the tragedy of Willy Loman is that he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it. It is the tragedy of a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. From those forests of canned goods high up near the sky, he heard the thundering command to succeed as it ricocheted down the newspaper-lined canyons of his city, heard not a human voice, but a wind of a voice to which no human can reply in kind, except to stare into the mirror at a failure. So what is there to feel on this anniversary? Hope, for I know now that the people want to listen. A little fear that they want to listen so badly. And an old insistence – sometimes difficult to summon, but there none the less – that we will find a way beyond fear of each other, beyond bellicosity, a way into our humanity. ? 1950 The New York Times, February 5, 1950by Arthur MillerUsed with permissionDeath of a SalesmanDate: 1949Author: Arthur MillerFrom: Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion.After the success of All My Sons, Miller felt empowered to create something more risky and began to cast about for something on which to build his next play. After meeting his uncle Manny Newman at a matinee performance of All My Sons and asking how he was doing, Miller got the first glimmer of a new idea. Instead of replying, Manny had gone straight into saying how well his sons were doing, as if he felt that he had to build them up in competition against their successful playwright cousin. The fact that Manny did not even pause before taking their conversation in an unexpected direction gave Miller the idea to write a play without transitions, where the dialogue would flow from one scene to the next without any apparent breaks. Instead of using a chronological order in which single events followed on from one another, he wanted to create a form that displayed the past and the present as if they were both occurring at the same time. In this way, he would be able to transmit to the audience exactly what was going on inside the mind of his protagonist; indeed, an early title for the play was The Inside of His Head. It would be retitled: Death of a Salesman.…Although Willy Loman's situation is often described as timeless, Death of a Salesman can be read as an illustration of the historical economic interests and forces operating on U.S. society from the turn of the century to when the play was written. This was a period of major changes in the economic structure of the United States. Willy witnessed the pioneers' sense of hope and possibility at the beginning of the new millennium, a time when his father and brother both left home to embrace such possibilities to the full. While his father vanished from sight, his brother came out ahead. Willy lived through the wild prosperity of the 1920s and was inspired by meeting successful salesman Dave Singleman to go into sales. This was a period when he felt he could become successful in the big city, until the 1929 Wall Street crash marked the start of the Great Depression. The Depression lasted throughout the 1930s, and Willy evidently found his products increasingly hard to sell in a period when nobody had money to buy anything but necessities.With the economy being jump-started for the 1940s by the increased market demands and industrial advances of World War II, Willy saw a renewed sense of vigor in the U.S. economy that probably created much of the hope that he places in the prospects of his sons. However, it is becoming a young man's world, and Willy, in his sixties, is swiftly becoming outmoded, his sales style also being out of date. It is hardly surprising that he ends up being fired as he illustrates to his own boss his incapacity to make a sale when he fails to persuade him to give him a desk job. The play was written and is set in 1948 at the time when forces of capitalism and materialism came to the fore and technology made its greatest inroad into the lives of everyday people. Death of a Salesman depicts the impact of these forces on the lives of an ordinary family—the Lomans. It is little wonder that so many of those watching the original production felt that they were witnessing their own story or that of a family member.The Lomans are depicted as social failures in their inability to make money and live happily and comfortably, but the deeper question asked by the play is whether this failure is because of their own inadequacies or caused by society's unrealistic standards of success? In Miller's opinion, the blame of failure should not be attached to insignificant cogs in the social machine like the Lomans but should be partially attributed to the larger social forces that operate on people's lives. Economics play an important part in the creation of such forces. By the time the play was written, Miller saw business matters at odds with conventional morality, with humanity threatened by the onset of technology and the growing pressures of ownership; all these issues are reflected in the dilemmas of the Loman family and the other characters to whom they are economically linked.Miller's strong sense of moral and social commitment runs throughout the play. The aim of Death of a Salesman is twofold: First, Miller wanted to write a social drama that confronted the problems of an ordinary man in a conscienceless social system; second, he wanted that same play to be a modern tragedy that adapted older tragic theories to allow for a common man as tragic protagonist. Willy's apparent ordinariness should not blind us to his tragic stature; Miller insists that a common family man's situation can be as tragic as the dilemmas of royalty because he ties his definition of heroism to a notion of personal dignity that transcends social stature. Willy is heroic because he strives to be free and to make his mark in society, despite the odds against him. Though he is destroyed in the process, he is motivated by love, and his destruction allows for learning to take place. Through Willy's sacrifice, Biff is able to accept his father's love while recognizing the emptiness of the dream that Willy espoused. Willy had accepted at face value overpublicized ideas of material success and therein lays his tragedy, for he will kill himself in his pursuit of such a dream. His downfall and final defeat illustrate not only the failure of a man but also the failure of a way of life.Abbotson, Susan C. W. "Death of a Salesman." Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 11 Feb. 2015 < at FiftyAs far as I know, nobody has figured out time. Not chronological time, of course—that’s merely what the calendar tells—but real time, the kind that baffles the human mind when it confronts, as mine does now, the apparent number of months, weeks, and years that have elapsed since 1948, when I sat down to write a play about a salesman. I say “apparent” because I cannot find a means of absorbing the idea of half a century rolling away beneath my feet. Half a century is a very long time, yet I must already have been grown up way back then, indeed I must have been a few years past thirty, if my calculations are correct, and this fact I find indigestible.A few words about the theatrical era that Death of a Salesman emerged from. The only theatre available to a playwright in the late forties was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialized theatre in the world, with the off-Broadway evolution still a decade away. That theatre had one single audience, not two or three, as is the case today, catering to very different levels of age, culture, education, and intellectual sophistication. Its critics were more than likely to be ex-sports reporters or general journalists rather than scholars or specialists university-trained in criticism. So a play worked or it didn’t, made them laugh or cry or left them bored. (It really isn’t all that different today except that the reasoning is perhaps more elevated.) That unified audience was the same for musicals, farces, O’Neill tragedies, or some imported British, French, or Middle European lament. Whatever its many limitations, it was an audience that loved theatre, and many of its members thought theatergoing not quite a luxury but an absolute necessity for a civilized life.For playwriting, what I believe was important about that unified audience was that a writer with ambitions reaching beyond realistic, made-for-entertainment plays could not expect the support of a coterie of like-minded folk who would overlook his artistic lapses so long as his philosophical agenda tended to justify their own. That unified audience had come in from the rain to be entertained, and even instructed, if need be, provided the instruction was entertaining. But the writer had to keep in mind that his proofs, so to speak, had to be accessible both to the lawyers in the audience and to the plumbers, to the doctors and the housewives, to the college students and the kids at the Saturday matinee. One result of this mix was the ideal, if not the frequent fulfillment, of a kind of play that would be complete rather than fragmentary, an emotional rather than an intellectual experience, a play basically of heart with its ulterior moral gesture integrated with action rather than rhetoric. In fact, it was a Shakespearean ideal, a theatre for anyone with an understanding of English and perhaps some common sense. Some of the initial readers of the Death of a Salesman script were not at all sure that the audience of 1949 was going to follow its manipulations of time, for one thing. Josh Logan, a leading stage and film director of numerous hits, Mr. Roberts and South Pacific among them, had greeted All My Sons two years earlier with great warmth, and invested a thousand dollars in Salesman, but when he read the script he apologetically withdrew five hundred. No audience, he felt, would follow the story, and no one would ever be sure whether Willy was imagining or really living through one or another scene in the play. Some thirty years later I would hear the same kind of reaction from the theatre people in the Beijing People's Art Theatre, where I had been invited to stage the play, which, in the view of many there, was not a play at all but a poem. It was only when they saw it played that its real dramatic nature came through. In the 1949 Broadway audience there was more to worry about that their following the story. In one of his letters, O'Neill had referred to that theatre as a "showshop," a crude place where a very uncultivated, materialistic public cut off from its own spirituality gathered for a laugh or a tear. Clifford Odets, with his first successes surely the most hotly acclaimed playwright in Broadway history, would also end in bitter alienation from the whole system of Broadway production. The problem, in a word, was seriousness. There wasn't very much of it in the audience, and it was resented when it threatened to appear on the stage.So it seemed. But All My Sons had all but convinced me that if one totally integrated a play's conceptual life with its emotional one so that there was no perceptible dividing line between the two, such a play could reach such an audience. In short, the play had to move forward not by following a narrow, discreet line, but as a phalanx, all of its elements moving together simultaneously. There was no model I could adapt for this play, no past history for the kind of work I felt it could become. What I had before me was the way the mind - at least my mind - actually worked. One asks a policeman for directions; as one listens, the hairs sticking out of his nose become important, reminding one of a father, brother, son with the same feature, and one's conflicts with him or one's friendship come to mind, and this all over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one wants to go. Initially based, as I explained in Timebends, my autobiography, on an uncle of mine, Willy rapidly took over my imagination and became something that had never existed before, a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars.His language and that of the Loman family were liberative from any enslavement to "the way people speak." There are some people who simply don't speak the way people speak. The Lomans, like their models in life, are not content with who and what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated perhaps, closer to power. "I've been remiss," Biff says to Linda about his neglect of his father, and there would be many who seized on this usage as proof of the playwright's tin ear or some inauthenticity in the play. But it is in Biff's mouth precisely because it is indeed an echo, a slightly misunderstood signal from above, from the more serious and cultivated part of society, a signal indicating that he is now to be taken with utmost seriousness, even remorseful of his past neglect. "Be liked and you will never want" is also not quite from Brooklyn, but Willy needs aphoristic authority at this point, and again, there is an echo of a - for want of a better word - Victorian authority to back him up. These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more elegant past, a time "finer" than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit - on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.As it turned out, this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition. Having seen it in five or six countries, and directed it in China and Sweden, neither of whose languages I know, it was both mystifying and gratifying to note that people everywhere react pretty much the same in the same places of the play. When I arrived in China to begin rehearsals the people in the American embassy, with two exceptions, were sure the Chinese were too culturally remote from the play to ever understand it. The American ambassador and the political officer though otherwise, the first because he had been born and raised in China, and the second, I supposed, because it was his job to understand how the Chinese thought about life. And what they were thinking turned out to be more or less what they were thinking in New York or London or Paris, namely that being human - a father, mother, son – is something most of us fail at most of the time, and a little mercy is eminently in order, given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when, in fact, they are all trembling in a fast wind, blowing mindlessly around the earth.--Arthur Miller, 1999 .Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A CelebrationBy Joyce Carol OatesOriginally published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998, and reprinted in Where I've Been, And Where I'm GoingCopyright ? by Joyce Carol Oates“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. and then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” —Death of a SalesmanWas it our comforting belief that Willy Loman was “only” a salesman? That Death of a Salesman was about—well, an American salesman? And not about all of us?When I first read this play at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I may have thought that Willy Loman was sufficiently “other”—”old.” He hardly resembled the men in my family, my father or grandfathers, for he was “in sales” and not a factory worker or small-time farmer, he wasn’t a manual laborer but a man of words, speech—what his son Biff bluntly calls “hot air.” His occupation, for all its adversities, was “white collar,” and his class not the one into which I’d been born; I could not recognize anyone I knew intimately in him, and certainly I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us. Or, rather, we are Willy Loman, particularly those of us who are writers, poets, dreamers; the yearning soul “way out there in the blue.” Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child’s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity—”God Almighty, [I’ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!”Except of course, it can.* * *It would have been in the early 1950s that I first read Death of a Salesman, a few years after its Broadway premiere and enormous critical and popular success. I would have read it in an anthology of Best Plays of the Year. As a young teenager I’d begun avidly devouring drama; apart from Shakespeare, no plays were taught in the schools I attended in upstate New York (in the small city of Lockport and the Village of Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo), and so I read plays with no sense of chronology, in no historic context, no doubt often without much comprehension. Reading late at night when the rest of the household was asleep was an intense activity for me, imbued with mystery, and reading drama was far more enigmatic than reading prose fiction. It seemed to me a challenge that so little was explained in the stage directions; there was no helpful narrative voice; you were obliged to visualize, to “see” the stage in your imagination, the play’s characters always in present tense, vividly alive. In drama, people presented themselves primarily in speech, as they do in life. Yet there was an eerie, dreamlike melding of past and present in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s “present-action” dialogue and his conversations with the ghosts of his past like his revered brother Ben; there was a melting of the barriers between inner and outer worlds that gave to the play its disturbing, poetic quality. (Years later I would learn that Arthur Miller had originally conceived of the play as a monodrama with the title The Inside of His Head).In the intervening years, Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our domestic Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace, his mad scene on the heath a frantic seed-planting episode by flashlight in the midst of which the once-proud, now disintegrating man confesses, “I’ve got nobody to talk to.” His salesmanship, his family relations, his very life—all have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric; yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to; nobody to listen. Perhaps the most memorable single remark in the play is the quiet observation that Willy Loman is “liked . . . but not well-liked.” In America, this is not enough.* * *Nearly fifty years after its composition, Death of a Salesman strikes us as the most achingly contemporary of our classic American plays. It has proved to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the thirty-four-year-old playwright to temper his gifts for social realism with the Expressionistic techniques of experimental drama like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and The Hairy Ape, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, work by Chekhov, the later Ibsen, Strindberg, and Pirandello, for by these methods Willy Loman is raised from the parameters of regionalism and ethnic specificity to the level of the more purely, symbolically “American.” Even the claustrophobia of his private familial and sexual obsessions has a universal quality, in the plaintive-poetic language Miller has chosen for him. As we near the twenty-first century, it seems evident that America has become an ever more frantic, self-mesmerized world of salesmanship, image without substance, empty advertising rhetoric, and that peculiar product of our consumer culture “public relations”—a synonym for hypocrisy, deceit, fraud. Where Willy Loman is a salesman, his son Biff is a thief. Yet these are fellow Americans to whom “attention must be paid.” Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success—which is to say, the dark side of us. ................
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