Sooner or later most discussions of the merits of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman turn to the question of the possibility of modern tragedy. Given the conditions of the modern world, the question runs, is it possible to write true tragedy in our time? Of course the very asking of the question sounds the negative. But there are likely to be answerers around who will invoke the names of certain moderns—Ibsen, or Strindberg, or O'Neill, or [Sean] O'Casey, or even Arthur Miller—who are alleged to have made tragedies out of the common materials of modern life. And Miller himself, in response to commentators who have denied that Salesman is a tragedy, has vigorously affirmed, in an essay called "Tragedy and the Common Man," the right of his play, and the matter it is made of, to the epithet tragic. (p. 82)

To put the matter very simply, Arthur Miller has a very general or very loose and vague theory of tragedy, or perhaps no clear theory at all, while the critics have a fairly definite one derived from a couple of thousand years of literary tradition. The traditional view of tragedy, founded very largely upon the principles of Aristotle and the practice of Sophocles and Shakespeare, assumes at least two prior essentials to be inherent in the materials of any tragic action. First, the hero must have "stature": this means that while he must in some way represent the general human condition, he must also be larger and grander than the norm—certainly in the inherent fineness and depth and energy of his mind and character, and perhaps also in his exterior societal role—so that his fall will have deep emotional consequence for the audience. Second, the world in which the tragic hero acts must be sensed as bounded or permeated by some meaningful and larger-than human order—call it a Moral Order, or the Natural Law, or Providence, or even Fate—which he in some way challenges or violates and which correspondingly exacts, but not without some sense of ultimate justice in the exaction, the tragic hero's life in consequence of that violation. The first part of this formula, the requirement of "stature" in the tragic hero, Miller's play obviously fails to live up to. Willy Loman is a childish and stupid human being, and his societal role of salesman is of only very minor consequence. And since one of the thematic intentions of the play is to present the picture of a world in which there can be no moral appeal to an order more profound than those of commerce and the machine, Salesman obviously cannot meet the second requirement either.

So by the test of tradition, Death of a Salesman, whatever else it may be, is no tragedy. But wait, Miller seems to say in "Tragedy and the Common Man," by the test of feeling it is tragedy. "The tragic feeling," he writes, "is evoked when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity."… Miller is affirming, then, a continuity in tragedy that is not dependent upon historical accidents: what counts is the tragic sense, not the mechanical details of an abstract formula for the tragic. In spite of history, Miller is saying, in felt significance Death of a Salesman is just as much a tragedy as Sophocles' Electra or Shakespeare's Hamlet. Putting aside formulas and abstractions, let us examine it on its own grounds—not only in the light of the kind of play it is ("bourgeois tragedy," with a pretty weighty tradition of its own behind it from Ibsen to Clifford Odets), but also in the more universal light of the truth and depth and integrity that we expect from any piece of real literature, regardless of its time or type.

Two things will strike us when we consider Miller's focal character, Willy Loman, and both of them are in Miller's favor. First, we cannot miss the force of Willy's imagination, the energy of his language, the ferocity of his hope and rage…. We know that Willy is a pathetic fool, but we nevertheless feel him vividly as a vital human being. He may be mediocre, even barbaric, but he is not dull. And second, we cannot miss Willy's failure always to translate imagination and feeling into effective action. His continual inconsistencies, for example: Biff is both a "lazy bum" and "hard worker" to Willy in Act I, and in Act II Willy's advice to Biff on conducting his interview with Bill Oliver is that he should both "talk as little as possible" and "start off with a couple of … good stories to lighten things up." Willy says of himself at one point, and all in one breath, "I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people just don't seem to take to me." Willy's great intensity provides a recognizable touch, at least, of something like "stature." And perhaps his incoherence of mind and will resembles the "flaw" of nature or judgment usually borne by the traditional tragic hero. Like Hamlet—or at least the Hamlet that some of the critics think they see—Willy's personal tragedy is that he is inherently unable to bring himself to take the rational action necessary to save himself and put his world in order. But unlike Hamlet, Willy seems to have suffered his tragedy all his life. With reflections of the past playing continually over the present, Miller's play focuses on the end of that life when, ironically, the last opportunity for creative action remaining to Willy is the opportunity to destroy himself.

Death of a Salesman is a play remarkably lacking in action—which is not to say that it is a bad play for that reason. This lack of action, this continual dispersion of motive in Willy, is of course part of the play's theme. Intensity of feeling plus confusion of intellect yields paralysis of will. Willy's inability to act in any coherent way, an inability that the flashbacks show us is not confined only to Willy's old age, seems to be related directly to his inability to see the truth, or to his inability to distinguish between illusion and actuality, or to harmonize his dreams with his responsibilities. Charlie says to Willy, after Willy has been in effect fired by Howard, "The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that." Charley means that Willy is suffering because he is looking for a deeply human fulfillment in an activity which is conditioned not by what is human, but by goods and cash. (pp. 82-4)

Biff, who functions in the play as an amplification or reflection of Willy's problems, has been nurtured on Willy's dreams too. But he has been forced to see the truth. And it is the truth—his father's cheap philandering—in its impact on a nature already weakened by a diet of illusion that in turn paralyzes him. Biff and Willy are two versions of the idealist, or "dreamer" may be a better word, paralyzed by reality: Biff by the effects of disillusionment, Willy by the effects of the illusions themselves. This is how they sum themselves up at the end of the play, just before Willy's suicide: "Pop!" Biff cries, "I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!" "I am not a dime a dozen!" Willy answers in rage. "I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!" And the tragedy—if it is tragedy—is that they are both right.

But why is it that Willy and Biff, both of them meant by Miller to be taken as men of potential, must be paralyzed and defeated? It seems to be a matter partly of psychological accident. Willy never had a real father, and his hard predatory older brother became his father-substitute. "Never fight fair with a stranger" was Ben's wisdom. And his faith—"When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich!" It seems also to be a matter partly of historical accident: times have changed. If ever there were days when essentially human values and loyalties prevailed in the world of selling, those days passed with old Dave Singleman and Willy's former boss. The business world is now run by cold young materialists like Howard, and though a wise realist like Charley may survive, there is no place in it for the all-too human dreamer and vulgarian, Willy Loman.

Psychology, history—these lead us to the third and most important cause of Willy's suffering, the great evil, the great villain of most modern writing in the realist vein—Society. Keeping in mind traditional tragedy and how it brings the audience's attention to bear on the relation between the tragic hero and the moral order implied in the background of his action, we see that Willy, unlike the traditional tragic hero, is meant to be seen as greater and better, at least in potential, than the world that destroys him…. Willy Loman is potentially better than his world in that he has at least incipient values that are better than the world's values. Society's guilt, as it is projected in Death of a Salesman, lies in its not making available ways and means for a man like Willy to implement and realize those values, and in dooming him thus to frustration, paralysis, and ultimately destruction as a human being.

The values that seem to be represented in Willy, the "good" values that function in the play as implicit criticisms of society's "bad" values, are the familiar romantic ones: nature, freedom, and the body; free self-expression and self-realization; individualism and the simple life…. Willy's memories of the wistaria and elms around the house when the boys were young, his vague dream of having a farm in his old age, his symbolic attempts to plant seeds in the night, and Biff's rhapsodies about the bare-chested life and young colts and the western plains, are all overshadowed and threatened by the encroaching bulwarks of apartment houses and the costly and complicated machines that sap one's resources and won't perform their functions. Willy's life is a continuum of futile worry, and his garden is a shadowed and sterile plot where the life-giving sun can no longer get in. Though Biff was a "young god" and Willy a spokesman for toughness, Society seems to have stifled these goods too: Willy has become soft and fat: Biff and Happy, inhabitants of a world where "getting ahead of the next fella" is the prime goal, find their strength and energy turning into bullying; and all of them display a mistaken and self-defeating contempt for the mind.

Another category of value against which society militates has to do with the feelings, with love, with deep and full and natural human relationship. The real capacities for love of both Willy and his boys disperses itself in meaningless and trivial philanderings. Biff and Happy yearn fruitlessly to run a ranch or a business together—the together is what is important—and to marry decent girls with, as they put it, "substance," just as Willy dreams of a happy old age with his children and his children's children thriving happily around him. But sterility and disharmony obtain: the boys, growing older, do not marry, and Willy's hopes for his family explode with finality in the chaos of the terrible restaurant scene in Act II. The enemy of love, of course, is society's principle of "success"—getting ahead by competition, which is the impersonal opposite of love. It is significant that Willy's vision of fulfillment is made up of characters who stand alone—Willy's father, Brother Ben, Biff as a public hero, Dave Singleman—characters who have succeeded, who stand not with but above and beyond the rest of humanity, and who do not give love but receive it, and at an impersonal distance, from cheering crowds or from faceless respectful voices at the other ends of telephone lines. This vision, created and enforced by the norms of the competitive, success-centered society that Willy lives in, is a denial of the deeply personal and human capacities for love that are inherent in Willy's nature.

A final set of values implicit in Willy's character, and defeated by the circumstances in which he finds himself, are his unformed impulses toward two of the original American virtues—self-reliance and individualism of spirit. These virtues, implying basic self-sufficiency and personal creativity, not domination of others, are perhaps the pure forms underlying the corrupt and destructive societal imperatives of success and getting ahead. Willy has the self-reliant skills of the artisan: he is "good at things," from polishing a car to building a front porch, and we hear of his beloved tools and his dream of using them some day to build a guest house on his dreamed-of farm for his boys and their families to stay in. But self-reliance has collapsed, the tools rust, and Willy has become the futile and pathetic victim of a machine culture…. If, then, the leading character and world of the play are made to interact in such a way as to engage our conviction, can we agree with Arthur Miller that, whatever the formula, the feeling evoked by Death of a Salesman succeeds in being "tragic"? I think we are likely to have to answer, No. All formulas for the tragic aside, when we say a play is tragic we are ascribing perhaps the highest literary value to it. We are saying that it is an instance of the most serious form of literature, and that it engages not only the emotions but also the intellect and the moral sense in their fullest and most profound state of awareness. This, I think, is what Death of a Salesman is not able to do. For to read it as literature betrays in it a softness, a damp sentimentality, an intellectual and moral confusion that destroys the effectiveness both of its moral themes and its central character. As I have said, in portraying the victimization by society of one of its members, Death of a Salesman functions as both a negative criticism of society and a positive assertion of counter-values. But one simply cannot look too closely at the values implied by the play without feeling real doubt as to what they amount to, nor at certain of the characters that embody them without feeling confusion, embarrassment, possibly even boredom. (pp. 84-6)

The theme of Success, while it undergoes criticism in the play, seems always to be before us—the idea of the romance of selling, for example, is articulated by solid Charley as well as by Willy—in some desirable, even worthy manifestation. In fact, the bourgeois religion of Success haunts Death of a Salesman throughout, and in the end pretty well defeats the values that all along Miller had seemingly wished to pit against it.

There are many fine elements in the play, of course, perhaps the finest of them Willy himself. In Willy, the pathetic bourgeois barbarian, Miller has made an intense and true character, perhaps a nearly great one, surely a greater one than Sinclair Lewis's mythic but rather flat Babbitt. Just as Willy is a humanly great character, there are humanly great scenes, too—like the powerful and devastating restaurant scene, which corresponds to the "catastrophe" of traditional tragedy. And while Miller is surely no poet of the theatre, there are moments even of real expressive power. Though the writing is consistently bad—dull, cliché-ridden, vacuously corny—around Biff and what he stands for, Willy's talk always has great energy and validity; and his cry, "The woods are burning!", the emblem of his personal tragedy, is poetry, and as that it is memorable.

Willy's requiem, a kind of ritual elegy or coda in which, each in his own way, those who loved Willy pay tribute to him in death, is a graceful completing touch. Biff, having learned from his father's sacrifice, proclaims the mistakenness of Willy's ambitions, and will head west again; Happy, as if in duty to Willy's memory, will stay behind in the hope—probably futile—of licking the system on its own terms; Charley rhapsodizes the meaning and value that survives the defeat ("A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."); and Linda utters the simple human grief of one who, without thought, loved. A graceful touch structurally and tonally—that is it would have been so, a fitting recognition of the whole range of relevant human response to Willy's destruction, had the play that it completes and depends on for its significance been the intellectually coherent one it ought to have been. But appended to Death of a Salesman as it stands, the requiem lacks meaning; it is only a touch, a sentimental flourish, an exercise of dramatist's technique for its own sake.

Death of a Salesman's failure, then, lies in the failure of its intellectual content and order. So when the traditionalist critics protest that the play is not a tragedy they are right, but I think for the wrong reasons. And when Miller says it is tragedy because it creates tragic feeling, I think he is wrong, unless the audience he has in mind is an intellectually inadequate one. For the play fails simply because it is sentimental: and by that I mean that if we read it with the full awareness and intelligence that we try to bring to a great playwright like Shakespeare or a great novelist like [William] Faulkner—or even to a good non-tragic dramatist like Shaw—we discover that Miller is relying not on ideas but on a frequently self-contradictory and often quite arbitrary melange of social and moral clichés and the stock emotional responses attached to them. (pp. 87-8)