Death of a Salesman Critical insights Essay

In a 2003 interview with his biographer, messiahopher Bigsby, virtu in ally the inherent structure of his meets, fine arthur M sicker explained, Its all astir(predicate) the lyric poem (Bigsby, moth m mischanceer). milling machines declaration ab out(a)(a) the centrality of wording in the creation of drama came at the curiosity of his almost seventy-year c beer. He had completed his final piece of cake, Finishing the Picture, and a slender more than a year after, he became ill and subsequently died in February 2005. gum olibanum millers statement can be seen as a final avowal about how language operates in outstanding dialog, a concern that had obsessed him since the blend in of his carg unitaryr when he wrote his start play, No Villain, at the University of Michigan in 1935.Despite millers proclamation, non enough critical attention has been paid to the sophisticated utilize of language that pervades his dialogue. Throughout his c areer, milling machine often wa s subject to checks in which critics mostly excoriated him for what they judged as a failed riding habit of language in his plays. For example, in the Nation review of the original production of remainder of a Sales objet dart in 1949, Joseph timber Krutch criticized the play for its stroke to go beyond literal meaning and its undistinguished dialogue. Unlike Tennessee Williams, milling machine does not get hold of a unique sensibility, new insight, fresh imagination or a gift for language (283-84). In 1964, Ric gravely Gilman judged that after(prenominal)(prenominal) the Fall lacks structural focus and contains vague rhetoric. He concluded that milling machines verbal inadequacy has never been more flagrantly exhibited (6). John Simons sweet York review of the 1994 Broadway production of Broken supply opined that milling machines ultimate failure is his language Tone-deafness in a playwright is only a shade less bad than in a composer. In a June 2009 review of Christophe r Bigsbys authorise biography of moth miller, Terry Teachout judged that miller to a fault often made the mistake of using florid, pseudo- poetical language (72).These reviews decorate how, as a language stylist, Arthur milling machine was underappreciated, too often overshadowed by his modern-day Tennessee Williams, whose major(ip) forcefulness as a playwright for m whatever critics lies in the lyricism of his plays. As Arthur K. Oberg pointed out, In the established image, millers art is mascu grade and craggy Williams, poetic and delicate (303). Because Miller has so often been pigeonholed as a neighborly playwright, most of the criticism of his tempt focuses on the cultural relevance of his plays and ignores detailed discussions of his language peculiarly of its poetic elements. Most critics are content to regard his dialogue as colloquial, judging that Miller best used what Leonard Moss described as the earthy mans language (52) to reflect the social concerns of hi s char moveers. The assumption is often made that the manufacturers, salesmen, Puritan farmers, dockworkers, housewives, policemen, doctors, lawyers, executives, and bankers who compose the bulk of Millers characters speak a realistic prose dialoguea style that is implicitly antithetical to poetic language.This prevailing opinion of Miller as a dramatist who merely uses the common mans language has been reinforced generally by a lack of in-depth critical analyses of how poetic language works in his canon. In his November 1998 review of the Chicago run of the fiftieth anniversary production of oddment of a Salesman, Ben Brantley observe that, as youthful Miller scholarship has suggested again and again, the plays images and rhythms have the patterns of metrical composition (E3). In reality, though, relatively few critics have thoroughly examined this aspect not only of Salesman but also of Millers total dramatic canon.1 Thomas M. Tammaro judges that critical attention to Mill ers drama has been lured from schoolbookual matterbook readingual psychoanalysis to such non-textual concerns as biography and Miller as a social dramatist (10).2 Moreover, classroom discussions of Millers masterpieces end of a Salesman and The Crucible (1953) mostly focus on these biographical and social concerns in addition to characterization and thematic issues but rarely discuss language and dialogue. Five years after his passing, it is time to recognize that Arthur Miller created a unique dramatic idiom that undoubtedly marks him as significant language stylist within twentieth- and twenty- offshoot- centuryAmerican and world drama. More readers and critics should see his dialogue not exclusively as prose but also as meter, what Gordon W. Couchman has called Millers rare gift for the poetic in the colloquial (206).Although Miller seems to work mostly in a form of colloquial prose, in that location are many moments in his plays when the dialogue cl azoic elevates to po etry. Miller often takes what appear to be the colloquialisms, clichs, and idioms of the common mans language and reveals them as poetic language, especially by shifting words from their referent to connotative meanings. Moreover, he significantly employs the synecdochical devices of parable, symbol, and imagery to give poetic significance to prose dialect. In addition, in many texts Miller embeds series of metaphorsmany are protractedthat possess particular connotations within the societies of the exclusive plays. Most important, these metonymical devices significantly support the tragic contests and social themes that are the focus of every Miller play. By deftly mixing these synecdochic devices of symbolism, imagery, and metaphor with colloquial prose dialogue, Miller combines prose and poetry to create a unique dramatic idiom. Most critics, readers, and audiences seem to overlook this aspect of Millers work the poetry is in the prose and the prose is in the poetry.Indeed , poetic elements pervade most of Millers plays. For example, in both My Sons, spiritual allusions, symbols, and images place the themes of sacrifice and redemption in a Christian context. In closing of a Salesman, the extended metaphors of sports and directs convey Willy Lomans struggle to achieve the American Dream. In The Crucible, the poetic language illustrates the conflicts that polarize the capital of Or selfn community as a series of opposing imagesheat and cold, livid and black, light and dark, soft and hardsignify the Salemites dualistic view of the world. In A View from the Bridge, metaphors of purity and innocence give mythical importance to Eddie Carbones getledgeable, psychological, and moral struggles. afterwards the Fall uses extended metaphors of childhood and religion to support Quentins psychological quest for redemption. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan connects metaphors of transportation and travel to Lyman Felts literal and figurative fall, and Broken Glass u ses images of mirrors and glass to relatethe world of the European Jew at the beginning of the Holocaust to Sylvia and Phillip Gellburgs shattered sexual world.That most critics continue to fail to recognize Millers sophisticated use of poetic elements is striking, for it is this very facility for which many other playwrights are praised, and the narration of drama is intimately intertwined with the history of poetry. For most of Western dramatic history, plays were written in pen the ancient Greek playwrights of the fifth century b.c.e. composed their tragedies in a verse frequently accompanied by music the rhyming couplets of the Everyman dramatist were the de rigueur medieval form and incline Renaissance plays were poetic masterpieces. Shakespeares supremacy as a dramatist lies in his adaptation of the early modern English language into a dramatic dialogue that combines prose and poetry. For example, crossroadss quintessence of dust speech is lyrical prose. In the twentieth ce ntury, critics praised the verse plays of T. S. Eliot, Maxwell Ander tidings, Christopher Isherwood, and W. H. Auden. sluice more baffling about this critical neglect is that Miller readily acknowledged his attraction to poetry and dramatic verse. His views on language, particularly poetic language, are evident in the prodigious number of essays he produced throughout his career. comment has mostly ignored this large body of nonfiction paper in which Miller frequently expounds on the nature of language and dialogue, the tension amongst realistic prose and poetic language in twentieth-century drama, and the analyzable evolution of poetic language throughout his plays.3 For example, in his 1993 essay About plain run-in he writesIt was inevitable that I had to confront the problem of dramatic language. . . .I gradually came to wonder if the essential compress toward poetic dramatic languageif not of stylization itselfcame from the inclusion body of society as a major element in the plays story or vision. Manifestly, prose realism was the language of the individual and mystic deportment, poetry the language of man in crowds, in society. Put another way, prose is the language of family relations it is the inclusion of the larger world beyond that naturally opens a play to the poetic.. . . How to find a style that would at one and the equivalent time deeply engage an American audience, which insisted on a recognizable reality of characters, locales, and themes, while opening the stage to considerations of public morality and the mythic social fatesin short, the invisible? (82)* * *Millers attraction to poetic dramatic dialogue can be traced back to his development as a playwright, particularly his time as a student at the University of Michigan in the mid-1930s and the early years of his great achieveres in the 1940s and 1950s, when his views on dramatic form, structure, aesthetics, and language were evolving. Miller knew little about the dramatics when he arrived in Ann Arbor from his home in Brooklyn, but during these formative college years, he became sensible of German expressionism, and he read August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen, whom he often acknowledged as major influences on him. Christopher Bigsby has pointed out that Miller always remembered the effect that reading Greek and Elizabethan playwrights at college had on him (Critical contain 419). However, Miller was markedly affected by the social-protest work of Clifford Odets. In his autobiography, Timebends (1987), Miller describes how Odetss 1930s plays wait for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing (1935), and Golden boy (1937) had sprung forth a new phenomenon, a left challenge to the system, the poet suddenly leaping onto the stage and disposing of middle-class gentility, screaming and yelling and cursing like approximatelyone off the Manhattan streets (229). Most important for Miller, Odets brought to American drama a concern for language For the very first time in A merica, language itself had marked a playwright as unique (229). To Miller, Odets was The only poet, I thought, not only in the social protest sign, but in all of in the altogether York (212).After Miller won his first Avery Hopwood Award at Michigan, he was sent to Professor Kenneth Rowe, whose chief voice to Millers development was cultivating his interest in the dynamics of play construction. Odets and Rowe clearly were considerably sozzled influences on Miller as he developedhis concern with language and his form broke out of what he termed the dusty naturalistic habit (Timebends 228) of Broadway, but other influences would also compel him to write dramatic verse. The work of Thornton Wilder, particularly Our Town (1938), spoke to him, and in Timebends Miller acknowledges that Our Town was the nearest of the 1930s plays in reaching for lyricism (229). Tennessee Williams is another playwright whom Miller frequently credited with influencing his art and the craft of his langua ge. He credited the newness of The Glass Menagerie (1944) to the plays poetic lift (Timebends 244) and was particularly struck by A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), proclaiming that Williams had given him license to speak in dramatic language at full throat (Timebends 182).Moreover, Miller practiced what he had learned and espoused. In fact, he reported that when he was first beginning his career he was up to his neck in writing many of his untrimmed and radio plays in verse ( question 98). When he graduated from Michigan and started his work with the Federal field Project in 1938, he wrote The Golden Years, a verse play about Montezuma. In a letter to Professor Rowe, he reported that he found writing verse ofttimes easier than writing prose I made the discovery that in verse you are forced to be brief and to the point. compose squeezes out fat and youre left with the real meaning of the language (Bigsby, Arthur Miller 155). Also, he explained that much of Death of a Salesman and all of The Crucible were originally written in verse the one-act version of A View from the Bridge (1955) was written in an intriguing mixture of verse and prose, and Miller regretted his failure to do the same in The American Clock (1980) (Bigsby, Critical door 136).However, Miller found an American theater hostile to the poetic form. Miller himself pointed out that the United States had no tradition of dramatic verse (Interview 98) as compared to Europe. In the 1930s, Maxwell Anderson was one of the few American playwrights incorporating blank verse into his plays, and the English theater witnessed several(prenominal) interest in poetic drama in the 1940s and 1950s, most notably with Christopher fry and T. S. Eliot. In reality, dramatic verse had been in sharp decline since the late nineteenth century, when the realistic prose dialogue used by Henrik Ibsen in Norwaywas adopted by George Bernard Shaw in England and then later employed by Eugene ONeill in the United States. Mill er also judged that American actors had difficulty speaking the verse line (Interview 98). Further, Miller came of age at a time when American audiences were demanding realism, the musical comedy was gaining in dominance, and commercial Broadway producers were disinterested in verse drama.Christopher Bigsby has pointed out that Miller was in his own mind, an essentially poetic, deeply metaphoric writer who had found himself in a theater resistant to such, particularly on Broadway, which he continued to think of as his natural home, despite its many deficiencies (Critical Study 358). Struggling with how to accept this reality, Miller accommodated his natural inclination to verse by developing a dramatic idiom that reconciled his poetic urge with the realism demanded by the aesthetics of the American stage. Thus he infused poetic language into his prose dialogue.* * *lets examine how some of these poetic devicessymbolism, imagery, and metaphor operate in Millers masterpiece, Death of a Salesman. From the outset of the play, Miller makes trees and sports into metaphors signifying Willy Lomans struggle to achieve the American Dream within the warlike American strain world. Trees symbolize Willys dreams, sports the contestation for stintingal success.4 Miller sustains these metaphors throughout the entire text with images of pugilism, burning, wood, nature, and fighting to make them into crucial merge structures. In addition, Millers predilection for juxtaposing the literal and figurative meanings of words is particularly evident in Salesman as the abstract concepts of competition and dreaming are vivified by concrete objects and actions such as boxing, fists, lumber, and ashes.Trees are an excellent illustration of how Miller uses literal and figurative meanings. ii references in act 1, word picture 1, immediately establish their importance in the play. When Willy unexpectedly arrives home, he explains that he was unable to drive to Portland for his sales call because he keptbecoming absorbed in the countryside scenery, where the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm (14). Although these trees merely seem to distract Willy from driving, he also indicates their connection to dreaming. He tells Linda I absolutely forgot I was driving. If Idve gone the other way over the white line I mightve killed somebody. So I went on againand louver minutes later Im dreamin again (14). Willys inability to concentrate on driving indicates an emotional conflict larger than mere daydreaming. The play reveals how Willy often exists in dreams rather than realitydreams of being well liked, of success for his son sluggard, of his imaginings. All of these dreams intimately connect to Willys confrontation with his failure to achieve the tangible aspects of the American Dream. He is a traveling salesman, and his inability to drive symbolizes his inability to sell, which guarantees that he willing fail in the competition to be a hot-shot salesman. The a ction of the play depicts the last day of Willys life and how Willy is increasingly escaping the reality of his failure in reveries of the early(prenominal), to the point where he often cannot differentiate between reality and illusion.The repeating of the mention of trees in Willys second speech in scene 1 cements the importance of trees in the play as a metaphor for these dreams. He complains to Linda about the apartment houses surrounding the Loman home They shouldve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two pretty elm trees out there? When lick and I hung the swing between them? (17). However, these trees are not the trees of the real time of the play rather, they exist in Willys past and, more important, in the imaginings of his mind, the place where the more important dramatic action of the play takes place.Millers workings title for Death of a Salesman was The Inside of His Head, and sure Willys longing for the trees of the past illustrates how dreaming wo rks in his mind. Throughout the entire play, treesand all the other images connected to themare composite symbols of an idyllic past for which Willy longs in his dreams, a world where lagger and croak are young, where Willy can trust himself a hot-shot salesman, where Brooklyn seems an unspoiled wilderness. The irony is that, in reality, the past was not as idyllic as Willy recalls, and the play gradually unfolds the reality ofWillys failures. The metaphor of trees also supports Willys unresolved struggle with his son Biff. Willys memory of Biff and himself hanging a hammock between the elms is ironic as the two beautiful trees absence in the present symbolizes Willys failed dreams for Biff.Throughout the play, Miller significantly expands upon the figurative meaning of trees. For example, in act 1, scene 4, Willy moves to kick the buckets claims that he will anesthetise Willy for life by remarkingYoull retire me for life on seventy goddam dollars a week? And your women and y our car and your apartment, and youll retire me for life Christs sake I couldnt imbibe past Yonkers today Where are you guys, where are you? The forest are burning I cant drive a car (41)Willys example that the woods are burning extends the tree metaphor by introducing an important sense of destruction to the trees of Willys idyllic world of the past. Since the trees are so identified with Willys dreams, the image implies that his dreams are burning toohis dreams for himself as a successful salesman and his dreams for Biff and Hap. The images of burning and destruction are crucial in the play, especially when Linda reveals Willys suicide attemptshis own form of destruction, which he enacts at plays end. We realize that since Willy is so associated with his dreams, he will die when they burn. In fact, Willy repeats this same exact line in act 2 when he arrives at candids Chop star sign and announces his firing to Hap and Biff. He says Im not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that physique because the woods are burning, boys, you understand? Theres a big blaze release on all around. I was fired today (107). This line not only repeats Willys warning utter from act 1 but also foreshadows Biffs climactic plea to Willy to take that faux dream and burn it (133). The burning metaphornow ironicalso appears in Willys imagining in the Boston hotel room. As Willy continues to ignore Biffs eruption on the door, the woman says, Maybe the hotels on fire. Willy replies, Its a mistake, theres no fire (116). Of course, nothing is threatened by a literal fireonly by the figurative blaze inside Willys head. erst aware of how tree images operate in the play, a reader (or keen theatergoer) can note the commotion of other references that sustain the metaphor in other scenes. For example, Willy wants Biff to help trim the tree ca-ca-go that threatens to fall on the Loman house Biff and Hap steal lumber Willy plaintively remembers his father press cuttin g flutes Willy tells Ben that Biff can fell trees Willy mocks Biff for wanting to be a carpenter and similarly mocks Charley and his son Bernard because they cant hammer a nail Ben buys timberland in Alaska Biff burns his sneakers in the furnace Willy speculates about his need for a little lumber (72) to build a guest house for the boys when they get married Willy is proud of weathering a twenty-five-year mortgage with all the cement, the lumber (74) he has put into the house Willy explains to Ben that I am building something with this firm, something you cant feel . . . with your hand like timber (86). Finally, there are the leaves of day appearing over everything in the graveyard in Requiem (136).Miller similarly uses boxing in literal and figurative ways throughout the play. In act 1, scene 2, Biff suggests to Hap that they buy a ranch to use our muscles. Men built like we are should be working out in the open (24). Hap responds to Biff with the first sports reference in the text Thats what I dream about, Biff. Sometimes I want to bonnie rip my garments off in the middle of the insert and outbox that goddam merchandise manager. I mean I can outbox, outrun, and outlift anybody in that store (24). As an athlete, Biff, it seems, should introduce the sports metaphor, but, ironically, the sport with which he is identifiedfootballis not used in any extensive metaphoric way in the play.5 Instead, boxing becomes the extended sports metaphor of the text, and it is not introduced by Biff but rather by Hap, who reinforces it throughout the play to show how Willy has prepared him and Biff only for sensible competition, not business or economic competition. Thus Hap expresses his frustration at being a second-rate worker by stressing his forcible superiority over his managers. Unable to win in economic competition, he longs to beat his coworkers in a carnal mates, and it is this contrast between economic and physical competition that intensifies the dramatic inte rplay between the literal and the figurative language of the play.In fact, the very competitiveness of the American economic system in which Willy and Hap work, and that Biff hates, is reproduciblely put on physical terms in the play. A failure in the competitive workplace, Hap uses the metaphor of physical competitionboxing man to manyet the play details how Hap was considered less physically impressive than Biff when the two were boys. As an adult, Hap competes in the only physical competition he can winsex. He even uses the imagery of rivalry when talking about his sexual conquests of the store managers girlfriends Maybe I just have an overdeveloped sense of competition or something (25). Perhaps knowing that they cannot win, the Lomans resort to a significant totality of cheating in competition Willy condones Biffs theft of a football, Biff cheats on his exams, Hap takes bribes, and Willy cheats on Linda. All of this cheating signifies the Lomans moral failings as well.The box ing metaphor also illustrates the contrast between Biff and Hap. Boxing as a sports metaphor is quite different from the expected football metaphor a boxer relies completely on personal physical strength while fighting a single opponent, whereas in football, a team sport, the players rely on group effort and group tactics. Thus the difference between Biff and HapHap as evoker of the boxing metaphor and Biff as a player of a team sportis emphasized throughout the text. Moreover, the action of the play relies on the clash of dreams between Biff and Willy. Biff is Willys favorite son, and Willys own dreams and disappointments are trussed to him. Yet Hap, the second-rate son, the second-rate physical specimen, the second-rate worker, is the son who is most like Willy in profession, braggadocio, and sexual swagger. Ultimately, at the plays end, in Requiem, the boxing metaphor ironically points out Haps significance as the actual competitor for Willys dream, for he decides to stay in the city because Willy fought it out here and this is where Im gonna win it for him (139).Biffs boxing contrasts sharply with Haps. For example, Biff ironically performs a literal boxing competition with Ben, which juxtaposes with the figurative competition of the play. The boxing reinforces the emphasis thathas been dictated on Biff as the most physically prepared specimen of the boys. Yet Biff is frustrated by Ben in reality he is ill prepared to fight a boxing match because it is a man-to-man competition, unlike football, the team sport at which he excelled. He is especially ill prepared for Uncle Bens kind of boxing match because it is not a fair match conducted on a level playing field. As Ben says Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. Youll never get out of the jungle that way (49). Thus the literal act of boxing possesses figurative significance. Willy has not knowledgeable Biff (or, by extension, Hap) for any fightfair or unfairin the larger figurative jungle of the play th e workplace of the American economic system.Willy, too, uses a significant amount of boxing imagery, much of it quite violent. In the first imagining in act 1, Biff asks Willy about his recent sales trip, Did you beg them dead, Pop? and Willy responds, Knocked em cold in Providence, slaughtered em in Boston (33) when he relates to Linda how another salesman at F. H. Stewarts insulted him, Willy claims he cracked him right across the face (37), the same physical threat that he will later make against Charley in act 2 on the day of the Ebbets Field game. Willy wants to box Charley, contest him, Put up your hands. Goddam you, put up your hands (68). Willy also says, Im gonna knock Howard for a loop (74). Willy uses these violent physical terms against men he perceives as challengers and competitors.As with the tree metaphor, this one is sustained throughout the scenes with a plethora of boxing references a punching bag is inscribed with cistron Tunneys name Hap challenges Bernard to box Willy explains to Linda that the boys gathered in the cellar obey Biff because, Well, thats the training, the training Biff feebly attempts to box with Uncle Ben Bernard remarks to Willy that Biff never trained himself for anything (92) Charley cheers on his son with a Knock em dead, Bernard (95) as Bernard leaves to argue a case in front of the Supreme judicial system Willy, expressing to Bernard his frustration that Biff has done nothing with his life, says, Why did he lay down? (93). This last boxing reference, associated with taking a dive, is a remarkably imagistic way of describing how Biff initially cutdown his life out of spite after discovering Willys infidelity.* * *Miller also uses images, symbols, and metaphors as central or unifying devices by employing repetition and recurrenceone of the central tenets of so-called cluster criticism, which was pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s.6 In short, cluster criticism argues that the deliberate repetition of words, images, s ymbols, and metaphors contributes to the unity of the work just as significantly as do plot, character, and theme. These clusters of words can operate both literally and figuratively in a textas I. A. Richards notes in The Philosophy of Rhetoricand, therefore, contribute significantly to the overall aesthetic and thematic impact. For example, in Arthur Miller, Dramatist, Edward Murray traces word repetition in The Crucible, examining how Miller, in a very subtle manner, uses key words to gather together the texture of action and theme. He notes, for example, the recurrent use of the word soft in the text (64). My own previous work on The Crucible has examined how the tenfold repetition of the word weight supports one of the plays crucial themes how an individuals struggle for truth often conflicts with society.Lets examine an intriguing example of word repetition from Death of a Salesman.7 The words paint and ikon appear five significant times in the play. The first is a literal u se at the end of act 1, Willy tells Biff during their argument, If you get tired of hanging around tomorrow, paint the ceiling I put up in the living room (45). This line echoes Willys previous mockery of Charley for not knowing how to put up a ceiling A man who cant deal out tools is not a man (30). In both instances, Willy is asserting his superiority on the basis of his physical prowess, a point that is consistently emphasized in the play.The second time paint appears is in act 2, when Biff and Hap abandon Willy in stark(a)s Chop House to leave with Letta and neglect Forsythe. Hap says to Letta No, thats not my father. Hes just a guy. Come on, well catch Biff, and lamb were going to paint this town (91). Of course in thisline Miller uses the clich Paint the town red for its well-known meaning of having a wild night of partying and dissolutionalthough it is notable that Miller uses a truncated form of the phrase. Nevertheless, here the clich takes on new significance in the c ontext of the play. Willy defines masculinity by painting a ceiling, but Hap defines it by painting the town with sexual debauchery and revelry, lording his physical superiority and his sexual conquests over other men.The third, fourth, and fifth repetitions occur in act 2 during the imagining in the hotel room when Biff discovers Willy with the woman. When the woman comes out of the bathroom, Willy says Ahyou better go back to your room. They must be immaculate painting by now. Theyre painting her room so I let her take a shower here (119). When she leaves, Willy attempts to convince Biff that she lives down the halltheyre painting. You dont ideate (120). Here, painting is simultaneously literal and metaphorical because of its previous usage in the playbut with a high degree of irony. Willys feeble explanation that send away Franciss room is literally being painted is a cover-up for the reality that Willy himself has painted the town in Boston. Biff discovers that Willys man is defined by sexual infidelityultimately defining him as a phony little fake.* * *Another relatively unexplored aspect of Millers language is the call of his characters. Miller chooses his characters name calling for their metaphorical associations in most of his dramatic canon. Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernayss 1997 text The Language of Names revived some interest in this technique, which is known as literary onomastics and is considered a somewhat minor part of contemporary literary criticism. Kaplan and Bernays examine the connotative value of names that function in texts as symbolic, metaphoric, or allegorical discourse (175). Although some scholars have discussed the use of this technique in individual Miller plays, most readers well-known(prenominal) with the body of Millers work notice how consistently he chooses the names of his characters to create symbols, irony, and points of contrast.For example, readers and critics who are familiar only with Death of a Salesman among Mill ers works have long noted that Willys last name literally marks him as a low man, although Miller himself chuckled at the overemphasis placed on this pun. He actually derived the name from a movie he had seen, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which a completely mad character at the end of the film screams, Lohman, Lohman, get me Lohman (Timebends 177-79). To Miller, the mans cry signified the hysteria he wanted to create in his salesman, Willy Loman. Many critics also have noted the significance of the name of Dave Singleman, the eighty-year-old salesman who stands alone as Willys ideal.Despite Millers consistent downplaying in interviews of the significance of his characters names, an examination of his technique reveals how extensively he connects his characters names to the larger social issues at the core of every play. For example, the last name of All My Sons Joe Keller, who manufactures faulty airplane parts and is indirectly answerable for the deaths of twenty-one pilots, re sembles killer. In previous work on the play, I have noted the comparison of the Kellers to the consecrated Family, and how, therefore, the names of Joe and his son, Chris, take on religious significance. Susan C. W. Abbotson has noted how the first name of The Ride Down Mt. Morgans Lyman Felt suggests the lying he has lived out. She also has analyzed the similarities between Loman and Lyman, and has argued that Lyman is a kind of alter ego to Willy some forty years later. Frank Ardolino has also examined how Miller employs Egyptian mythology in naming and portrait Hap (Mythological).An intriguing feature of Millers use of names is his repetition of the same name, or form of the same name, in his plays. It is striking how in Salesman Miller uses the name Frank, or variations of it, five times for five different characters, a highly unusual occurrence.8 In act 1, during Willys first imagining, when Linda complains to Biff that there is a cellar full of boys in the Loman house who d o not know what to do with themselves, Frank is one of the boys whom Biff gets to clean up the furnace room. Not long after, at the end of the imagining, Frank is the name of the mechanic who fixes the carburetor of Willys Chevrolet. In act 2, in the moving scene in whichHoward effectively fires Willy and Willy is left alone in the office, Willy cries out three times for Frank, apparently Howards father and the original owner of the company, who, Willy claims, asked Willy to name Howard. Willy also meets the boys in Franks Chop House and, in the crucial discovery scene in the Boston hotel room, Willy introduces the woman to Biff as ignore Francis, Frank often being a nickname for Francis.There are significant figurative uses of Frank too, for, although the word means honest or candid, all of the Franks in Salesman are clearly associated with work that is not completely honest. Biff uses the boy Frank and his companions to clean the furnace room and hang up the washchores that he sh ould be doing himself. Willy somewhat questions the repair job that the mechanic Frank does on that goddam Chevrolet. Despite Willys idolizing of his boss, Frank Wagner, Linda indicates that Frank, perhaps, promised Willy a partnership as a member of the firm, a promise that kept Willy from association Ben in Alaska and that was never made good on by either Frank or his son, Howard. shake off Francis promises to put Willy through to the buyers in exchange for stockings and her sexual favors, but it is uncertain whether she holds up her end of the deal, since Willy certainly has never been a hot-shot salesman. And, of course, Franks Chop House is the place where Stanley tells Hap that the boss, presumably Frank, is going crazy over the leak in the cash register. Thus Miller clearly uses the name Frank with a high degree of irony, an important aspect of his use of figurative language in his canon. Of course, all this business dishonesty emphasizes how Salesman challenges the integri ty of the American work ethic.Millers careful selection of names shows that he perhaps considered the names of his characters as part of each plays network of figurative language. As Kaplan and Bernays note, Names of characters . . . convey what their creators may already know and feel about them and how they want their readers to respond (174). Thus, in his choice of names, Arthur Miller may very well be manipulating his audience before the chimneypiece rises, as they sit and read the cast of characters in their playbills.Finally, being aware of Millers use of poetic language is crucial forhowever we encounter his playsas readers who analyze drama as text or as audience members in tune with the sound of the dialogue. It is, indeed, all about the languagethe language we read in the text and the language we hear on the stage.Notes1. Although some critics have examined Millers colloquial prose, only a few have conducted studies of how poetic devices work in his dialogue. Leonard Moss , in his book-length discipline Arthur Miller, analyzes Millers language in a chapter on Death of a Salesman, a portion of which is titled Verbal and Symbolic Technique. In an article titled Death of a Salesman and Arthur Millers Search for Style, Arthur K. Oberg considers Millers struggle with establishing a dramatic idiom. Oberg judges that Miller ultimately arrives at something that approaches an American idiom to the extent that it exposes a colloquialism characterized by unusual image, spurious lyricism, and closemouthed-ended clich (305). He concludes that the plays text, although far from bad poetry, tellingly moves toward the status of poetry without ever getting there (310-11). My 2002 work A Language Study of Arthur Millers Plays The poetical in the Colloquial traces Millers consistent use of figurative language from All My Sons to Broken Glass.In other studies discussing individual plays, some critics have noted poetic nuances in Millers language. In Setting, Language , and the Force of Evil in The Crucible, Penelope Curtis maintains that the language of the play is marked by what she calls half-metaphor (69), which Miller employs to suggest the plays themes. In an article published in Notes on Contemporary Literature, John D. Engle explains the metaphor of law used by the lawyer Quentin in After the Fall. natural lawrence Rosinger, in a brief Explicator article, traces the metaphors of royalty that appear in Death of a Salesman.2. Thomas M. Tammaro also points out that the diminished prestige of language studies since the height of New Criticism may account for the lack of a sustained examination of imagery and symbolism in Millers work. Moreover, Tammaro notes that Millers plays were not subjected to New Critical theoryeven when language studies were big(a) (10). In his new authorized biography Arthur Miller 1915-1962, Christopher Bigsby clearly recognizes Millers attempts to write verse drama, but this work is largely a critical biography and cultural study, not a close textual analysis.3. Most notable among these works are the following The Family in Modern Drama, which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1956 On Social Plays, which appeared as the original introduction to the one-act edition of A View from the Bridge and A Memory of ii Mondays the introduction to his 1957 Collected Plays The American Writer The American Theater, first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1982 On Screenwriting and Language Introduction to Everybody Wins, first published in 1990 his 1993 essay About sign of the zodiac Language, which first appeared as an afterword to the published edition of The Last Yankee and his March 1999 Harpers article On Broadway Notes on the Past and coming(prenominal) of American Theater.4. For a more detailed discussion of these metaphors, see Death of a Salesman Unlocking the Rhetoric of Poetic Power in my 2002 volume A Language Study of Arthur Millers Plays. Also, in computing Our Past and Present in Wood Wood Imagery in Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Will Smith traces what he describes as a wood trope in the plays.5. When Biff discovers Willy with the woman in the hotel room in act 2, she refers to herself as a football (119-20) to indicate her offend treatment by Willy and, perhaps, all men.6. Frederick Charles Kolbe, Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, and Kenneth Burke pioneered much of this criticism. For example, Spurgeon did groundbreaking work in discovering the clothes imagery and the image of the babe in Macbeth. Kenneth Burke, in The Philosophy of Literary Form, examines Clifford Odetss Golden Boy as a play that uses language clusters, particularly the images of the prizefight and the violin, that operate both literally and symbolically in the text (33-35).7. In his work Arthur Miller, Leonard Moss details the frequent repetitions of words in the text, such as man, boy, and kid. He notes that forms of the verb make occur forty-five times in thi rty-three different usages, ranging from Standard English to slang expressions, among them make mountains out of molehills, makin a hit, makin my future, make me laugh, and make a train. He also notes the nine-time repetition of make money (48). Moss connects these expressions to Millers thematic intention illustrating how the American work ethic dominates Willys life.8. In Im Not a Dime a Dozen I Am Willy Loman The Significance of Names and Numbers in Death of a Salesman, Frank Ardolino takes a mainly psychological approach to the language of the play. He maintains that Millers system of onomastic and numerical images and echoes forms a complex network which delineates Willys insanity and its effects on his family and job (174). Ardolino explains that the name imagery reveals Biffs and Willys failures. He sees the repetition of Frank as part of Millers use of geographical, personal, and business names that often begin with B, F, P, or S. Thus the names beginning with F convey a con flict between benevolence and protection on the one hand and dismissal and degradation on the other (177). Benevolent Franks are Willys boss, the boy Frank who cleans up, and the repairman Frank. Degrading Franks are Miss Francis and Franks Chop House, which contains the literal and psychological toilet where Willy has his climactic imagining of the hotel room in Boston. full treatment CitedAbbotson, Susan C. W. From Loman to Lyman The Salesman Forty Years On. The Salesman Has a Birthday Essays Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman. Ed. Stephen A. Marino. Lanham, MD University Press of America, 2000.Ardolino, Frank. Im Not a Dime a Dozen I Am Willy Loman The Significance of Names and Numbers in Death of a Salesman. Journal of Evolutionary psychology (August 2002) 174-84.____________. The Mythological Significance of Happy in Death of aSalesman. The Arthur Miller Journal 4.1 (Spring 2009) 29-33.Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller A Critical Study. New York Cambridge UP, 2005.____________. Arthur Miller 1915-1962. London Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008.____________. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, Volume Two Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. New York Cambridge UP, 1984.____________. Miller and Middle America. Keynote address, Eighth International Arthur Miller Society Conference, Nicolet College, Rhinelander, WI, 3 Oct. 2003.Brantley, Ben. A Dark New Production Illuminates Salesman. New York Times 3 Nov. 1998 E1.Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 2d ed. wand Rouge Louisiana State UP, 1967.Couchman, Gordon W. Arthur Millers Tragedy of Babbit. Educational Theatre Journal 7 (1955) 206-11.Curtis, Penelope. Setting, Language, and the Force of Evil in The Crucible. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible. Ed. John H. Ferres. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, 1972.Engle, John D. The Metaphor of Law in After the Fall. Notes on Contemporary Literature 9 (1979) 11-12.Gi lman, Richard. Getting It Off His Chest, But Is It Art? Chicago Sun Book Week 8 Mar. 1964 6, 13.Kaplan, Justin, and Anne Bernays. The Language of Names. New York Simon &Schuster, 1997.Krutch, Joseph Wood. Drama. Nation 163 (1949) 283-84.Marino, Stephen. Arthur Millers Weight of Truth in The Crucible. Modern Drama 38 (1995) 488-95.____________. A Language Study of Arthur Millers Plays The Poetic in the Colloquial. New York Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.____________. Religious Language in Arthur Millers All My Sons. Journal of Imagism 3 (1998) 9-28.Miller, Arthur. About Theatre Language. The Last Yankee. New York Penguin, 1993.____________. The American Writer The American Theater. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. New York Da Capo Press, 1996.____________. Arthur Miller An Interview. Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron. 1966. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Ed. Matthew C. Roudan. Jackson UP of Mississippi, 1987. 85-111.____________ . Death of a Salesman schoolbook and Criticism. Ed. Gerald Weales. New York Penguin Books, 1967.____________. The Family in Modern Drama. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York Viking Press, 1978.____________. Introduction to the Collected Plays. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York Viking Press, 1978.____________. On Broadway Notes on the Past and Future of American Theater. Harpers Mar. 1999 37-47.____________. On Screenwriting and Language Introduction to Everybody Wins. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. New York Da Capo Press, 1996.____________. On Social Plays. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York Viking Press, 1978.____________. Timebends A Life. New York Grove Press, 1987.Moss, Leonard. Arthur Miller. New Haven, CT College and University Press, 1967.____________. Arthur Miller and the Common Mans Language. Modern Drama 7 (1964) 52-59.Murra y, Edward. Arthur Miller, Dramatist. New York Frederick Ungar, 1967.Oberg, Arthur K. Death of a Salesman and Arthur Millers Search for Style. Criticism 9 (1967) 303-11.Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller. capital of South Carolina U of Missouri P, 2002.Richards, I. A. Richards on Rhetoric I. A. RichardsSelected Essays, 1929-1974. Ed. Ann E. Berthoff. New York Oxford UP, 1991.Rosinger, Lawrence. Millers Death of a Salesman. Explicator 45.2 (Winter 1987) 55-56.Simon, John. Whose paralysis Is It, Anyway? New York 9 May 1994.Smith, Will. Figuring Our Past and Present in Wood Wood Imagery in Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Miller and Middle America Essays on Arthur Miller and the American Experience. Ed. Paula T. Langteau.Lanham, MD University Press of America, 2007.Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeares Tragedies. 1930. New York Haskell House, 1970.Tammaro, Thomas M. Introduction. Arthur Miller a nd Tennessee Williams Research Opportunities and Dissertation Abstracts. Ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi. Jefferson, NC McFarland, 1983.Teachout, Terry. Concurring with Arthur Miller. Commentary 127.6 (June 2009) 71-73.