Tragedy and the Privileged Man

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman follows the emotional breakdown of a man who is forced to come to terms with the unlucky hand he has been dealt and with the fact that, largely, no one is at fault for his undoing but himself. Willy is a man who, nearing the end of his life, realizes he will soon “go out the way he came in” (93)—with nothing—yet he is privileged. In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller notes Willy’s tragic flaw, his “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status” (1). What Miller, and thus Willy, fails to recognize is the privilege in the ability to “secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity,” to find “his ‘rightful’ position in his society” and “evaluate himself justly” (1).

To illustrate, for many in America, and even more across the planet, this right to a journey toward self-actualization is not awarded. Rather, an identity is thrust onto them, a label is placed on both their physical selves and the lives they are to lead far before they ever have the opportunity to question it. At an exceedingly early stage in life, such people come to know and are forced to live with the fact that their places in society exist leagues below those they deserve. Willy, in his ability to willfully delude himself so effectively for so long, allows himself a far more blissful existence than those who never get the chance to believe in a better life in the first place. Those who cannot afford to sit idly and “accept their lot without active retaliation” (1) are those who, unlike Willy, are faced with the reality of their disprivileged lives and, in avoiding such suffering, take real action rather than wallow in self-pity and active ignorance. Miller describes Willy, the tragic hero, as he who actively retaliates against his undeserved suffering at the hand of his society—but what action does he take? He deliberately ignores his reality, drives his family into disarray, even kills himself before accepting the fact that he wasn’t who he wanted to be. Willy has immense privilege in the simple fact that he can afford to complain about a loss of dignity which he could easily regain. “Those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them” (1), the lower class, those marginalized and discriminated against at a systemic level, those who enact real change in this world are the real “common man,” yet are not represented in Death of a Salesman. Not only does Miller fail to depict the true common man in Death of a Salesman, he also fails to define tragedy as applicable to that common man in “Tragedy and the Common Man.”

In summation, many facets of Miller’s argument in “Tragedy and the Common Man” are well-developed and well-supported—that the common man should be represented in high art, that cause and effect hold immense significance in tragedy, and that optimism is a necessity for tragedy to ensue. However, Miller’s foundational argument that tragedy is merely “the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly” (1), the derivative of “the underlying fear of being displaced” (2), is underdeveloped and, frankly, ignorant. As someone whose early life was upset by the financial insecurity of the Great Depression and whose artistic identity only developed after years spent on manual labor, it comes as no surprise that Miller likely found his personal discovery of identity deeply affecting and, as such, wrote Willy in his self-image. Tragedy should be able to accompany any realization, change of events, or development that results in a stark reversal of mood from optimism to pessimism, positivity to negativity, to the extent that it brings immense suffering to those involved. Tragedy is not limited to the cognitive dissonance a privileged man may feel when faced with his own indignity, and to posit as such negates the far more tragic experience of the true “common man.”

Works Cited

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Viking Press, 1949.

---. "Tragedy and the Common Man." New York Times, 1949.