Who is ben in death of a salesman
Willy, like Everyman the mediaeval character, generates other personalities, which are mental creations, and represent fragmented aspects of himself. In this sense, Death of a Salesman can be regarded as a psychomachia. Miss Francis, his older brother Ben or Frank Howard. But he also discusses with figures who surge up from the inner world of his consciousness: He engages in conversations with characters who, like his sons or Charley, belong to his real, immediate environment. Willy spends most of his time on stage, in a continuous flow of words. So this memory within a memory contributes to increase Willy’s sense of guilt. The stocking is the metonymic object that brings together the two women in Willy’s life: Linda is darning her stockings while Miss Francis is offered brand-new ones by Willy: “And thanks for the stockings.
It seems that the mistress is laughing at the wife’s generous remark: Her laughter permits the shift from one level of the past to another. In this second recollection, the Woman (Miss Francis) appears, first her voice can be heard. the scene is set in the past, it stages Willy and Linda, when they were younger, from this first recollection emerges another recollection (a memory within a memory). Willy is conversing with Ben and, at the same time, answering Linda’s repeated invitations to come to bed. the restaurant scene, and simultaneously, allusions to the day when the Regents results were disclosed – Bernard’s choric voice may be heard and little by little echoes from the Boston hotel become more and more perceptible. WILLY: Sure, sure! If I’d gone with him to Alaska that time, everything would’ve been totally different.ĬHARLEY: Go on, you’d froze to death up there.īEN: Opportunity is tremendous in Alaska… There are several properties I’m looking at in Alaska. WILLY: Naa he had seven sons There’s just one opportunity I had with that man…īEN: I must make a train, William. One character takes up the words of his opponent, thus creating antithesis or parallel syntactic constructions : Stychomythia is a form of repartee in drama: the words of the locutor and those of his interlocutor echo each other. As soon as Charley leaves, we enter the past: “through the wall line of the kitchen”. The card game scene in stichomythic dialogue.
#Who is ben in death of a salesman full#
Recollectionsįirst there are scenes that are fully immersed within the past (the boys simonizing the Chevy the episode of the punching ball the cellar full of boys the contrast between Bernard the anaemic and Biff the Adonis). In a sense, the exploded house, with its transparent walls, its scrims and curtains is an objective correlative (a concrete, practical, tangible image) for an exploding consciousness, in which spatial and temporal fragments get intertwined.
#Who is ben in death of a salesman series#
The dramatic unities, notably time, have been abolished in the most radical sense, indeed the function of memory entails a multiplicity of temporal levels, a series of different locations (Boston New York but also the Prairie – through Willy’s father), and finally a loss of any fixed identity. Similarly, the same actors play their present and past selves, this is the case not only for Willy’s sons but also for Bernard, who has become a successful lawyer. In Death of a Salesman, Willy is both the self-remembering I, looking back upon himself, and the remembered I itself, that is to say the salesman as he used to be. In this state of nervous breakdown, past and present are inextricably mingled, time is, as it were, exploded. In a way, Willy is schizophrenic overwork, worry and repressed guilt have caused his mental collapse. In Willy’s mind, past and present exist on the same level, Willy perceives himself both in the present and in the past – which is made up of various strata. Better than the erroneous term flashback, the phrase double exposure would be more appropriate. There are no flashbacks in Death of a Salesman. For example, Biff and Happy are seen as teenagers and adults successively. Thanks to the expressionistic technique of scrim and curtain, the characters may exist in both the present and the past. There is no clear cut boundary between them. In Death of a Salesman both past and present are given theatrical representation. Miller’s aim in Death of a Salesman is to erase any gap between a remembered past – that would be evoked through words – and a present that would be performed on stage.