2007. In many works of literature, past events can affect, positively or negatively, the present activities, attitudes, or values of a character. Choose a novel or play in which a character must contend with some aspect of the past, either personal or societal. Then write an essay in which you show how the character's relationship to the past contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
A character’s past can affect his present state. In the case of Willy in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the past actually mixes with the present. Willy’s falsely idealistic view of the past contrasted with the dark reality of the present shows a breakdown in the American dream.
Willy lives in both a reconstructed past and in the reality of the present. His hallucinations of Ben in particular overlay what is happening in the real world. These hallucinations do not represent the actual past, and rather are Willy’s idealized reconstruction. This is contrasted with a grim present. In Willy’s past, for example Ben and Biff both have supernatural qualities. In the present, Ben has died and Biff is a failure. The house has suffered a similar deterioration. By presenting the past as a reconstructed ideal, Miller shows that the American dream is a fabrication.
In Death of a Salesman, the origin of Willy’s conflict with Biff is never directly addressed in conversation. This gap in the past pokes a literal hole in Willy’s past, and only when he is at his lowest point does his affair come to light, and even then it is in private. Willy’s shameful fall in the past can explain the problems in the present, just as the fall of man in Genesis explains man’s current situation. The past in Death of a Salesman is always a glossed memory, illustrating the American dream’s falsehood.
Your argument is very straightforward and easy to follow and your body paragraphs contain adequately satisfactory amount of scholarly analysis. I especially like your connection of the Death of a Salesman to Genesis. I feel that you can strengthen your argument by supporting your analysis with pieces of evidence in the form of literary techniques such as setting, diction, imagery, and many others. Try to relate these aspects of the novel with Willy's personality and his reliance on the past to serve as an optimistic but falsified reality for the present. Overall, you may want to add more details to your essay in order to increase the content and give the reader a solid base for judging the credibility of your intended thesis and following analysis.
ReplyDeleteI think all of your ideas here are represented well throughout this essay and are thought-provoking as well as convincing. However, here I do think that you need technique details to support your statements. While we're all familiar with Death of a Salesman and it might seem silly to incorporate these details for our understanding, most AP readers didn't analyze Death of a Salesman last week so some clarity might be necessary for their behalf. Overall though, well done.
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