《推銷員之死》英語畢業(yè)論文

1、中文摘要1949年阿瑟米勒的推銷員之死獲得了普利策獎。這部作品描述了威利洛曼一生中的最后24小時所發(fā)生的事情。威利是一名63歲的旅行推銷員，他的一生是悲劇的，無論是作為父親、丈夫還是推銷員，他都是失敗者，最后他自殺了。本文開篇介紹了阿瑟米勒以及他的作品推銷員之死 ，然后介紹了造成威利死亡的社會因素，包括當時盛行的美國夢以及大蕭條的社會背景。接著詳細分析了造成威利死亡的自身方面的原因。該篇論文旨在分析造成威利死亡的原因，最后得出結論：美國當時的社會環(huán)境以及威利自身方面的原因最終導致了他的死亡。關鍵字：威利的死;社會因素;個人因素;美國夢abstractin 1949 arthur miller

2、was awarded the pulitzer prize for his death of a salesman. this play presents the last twentyfour hours in the life of willy loman, a traveling salesman aged sixtythree. willy loman lives a tragic life. he is a failure as a father, a husband and a worker. at last, he commits suicide. the present pa

3、per starts with the introduction to arthur miller and his play of death of a salesman. then the paper presents the international and domestic study of willys death. then, it discusses some social factors in willy lomans death, such as the influence of the american dream and the great depression. it

4、also makes a detailed study on the flaw s in the character of willy loman, some of which contribute to his own death. the paper aims at a further stud y on willy lomans death and attempts to put forward the authors view on various causes of his death. finally draw the conclusion that willys death is

5、 the results of the american society and own flaws in his character. key words: willys death；social factors；personal flaws；american dreamcontentsintroduction1chapter 1 background information21.1 the introduction to arthur miller and his play of death of a salesman 12chapter 2 .literature review2.1th

6、e international study 42.1.1the poor management52.1.2 the distorted relationship52.2the domestic studies5 2.2.1the victim of american dream62.2.2 the victim of materialism7chapter 3 the causes of willys death-social factors83.1 the american dream93.2the great depression93.3social values9chapter 4 wi

7、llys own tragic flaws94.1 willys false values104.2willys distort relationship with his family104.3 the inaccurate selling concept 10chapter 5 conclusion10introductionarthur miller is regarded as one of the most celebrated american dramatists in the twentieth century. death of a salesman is probably

8、his most popular play, which won the pulitzer prize for the best play of 1949. death of a salesman is a deceptively simple play. it only contains two acts and a requiem. its plot revolves around the last twenty-four hours in the life of willy loman. willy loman is a traveling salesman aged sixty-thr

9、ee. he has worked for the wagner firm for thirty-four years, unsuccessful and being about to lose this job. at the very beginning of the play, he comes back home and is tired to death. linda, his wife, loves him and even admires him. she is the only person who understands willy and tries her best to

10、 help him. but what she does is of no avail. willy is still unhappy. he often goes back to the happier past in the year of 1928. at that time, his son biff is a football star in high school with several scholarships. willy himself has the most beautiful yearning for future success. but for the last

11、fourteen years, biff has been unable to find a satisfied job and willy has been taken off salary. everything goes worse. willy is in a trance. happy, the other son of willy, suggests that they ask for a loan to begin a business of their own. this idea makes everybody feel encouraged. they go to slee

12、p with hopes. but the following day, when willy and his sons meet in the restaurant, both of them bring bad news. willy is fired and biff does not succeed in borrowing money. realizing his responsibility for biffs aimlessness and disillusionment, willy has a hallucinatory talk with his brother ben a

13、nd decides on suicide to provide biff with insurance money. on willy lomans death, there are various interpretations. some consider him as the victim of the american dream, while some believe that he himself is responsible for his downfall, and there are also a few scholars reaching a conclusion tha

14、t willy lomans death is a personal tragedy as well as a social tragedy. the present paper attempts to study will lomans death and make a detailed analysis of the causes of his death on both the social and personal flaws. chapter 1 background information1.1 an introduction to arthur miller and the pl

15、ot of death of a salesmana leading american playwright, arthur mille, who was born on october 17,1915 in new york city. mille began writing plays when he was a student at the university of michigan, where several of his dramatic efforts were rewarded with prizes. with his first success all my sons (

16、1947; film, 1948), winner of the drama critics circle award , and death of a salesman (1949;film,1952), winner of both the drama critics circle award and the pulitzer prize . miller is best known as the author of death of a salesman, and it was lauded as the greatest american play. it was millers mo

17、st successful play attempting at creating individual characters with universal significance when it first appeared on the stage in america. and it was considered to be one of the best three plays in the early 20th century. the work is a critique of the industry-driven society of the city. it condemn

18、ed the american ideal of prosperity on the grounds that few can pursue it without making dangerous moral compromises. many critics regard death of a salesman as the perfect embodiment of the modern american drama. death of a salesman tells us a story about the unfortunate fate of willy loman, a comm

19、on salesman, who had a deep faith in the american dream in the american society, that is, people believed that even the poorest, through hard work and determination, could eventually work their way to the upper class. willy loman was no exception. he believed that he could be rich and achieve succes

20、s by hard-working and being liked by others. for this goal he traveled around the country to sell products. but he reached a critical point whereby he could not work as a traveling salesman any longer when he was over sixty years old.when he finally summoned the courage to ask his employer to be tra

21、nsferred to new york, he was fired. at the same time, he was disappointed with his son biffs unwillingness to fulfill his dream. the old man was driven to the edge of desperation. he even tried to commit suicide by car accidents or gassing himself. when he was reminded of the insurance money, he hop

22、ed that he could get that money (twenty thousand dollars) which could ensure that his sons could continue their american dream. he decided that he could worth more dead, so he committed suicide. linda was left at his grave uttering the famous lines “were free and clearand therell be nobody home.”thi

23、s play deals with both the filial and social realms of the american life, exploring and exploding the essence of the american dream. at the same time, it questions the american ideals of business. it has spoken to the concern of lower-class workers worldwide and their struggle for existence in capit

24、alist society. arthur miller was brilliant in his efforts to develop a new modern type of tragedy and his strong and serious concern with social issues affecting his fellow countrymen.3.3baekground of death of a salesmandeath of a salesman stemmed from both arthur millers personal experiences and th

25、e theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. the depression in the early thirties, for miller, was not only incidentally a matter of money, rather it was a moral catastrophe , a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of american society in which success was only val

26、ued in terms of dollars. americans had struggled through the depression, then fought a world war to keep the nations democratic dream alive. the american dream was, broadly speaking, a dream of self-realization. america, with its ideal of freedom challenged its citizens to see how far they could go

27、in a lifetime-一“to end up big”(arthurmillerl1949:26). the only imperative was to do with survival. the only relationship of value was generated by genuine human necessity. authenticity was no longer to be confirmed by a social system whose integrity and even practical viability were now profoundly s

28、uspected. past values, promises, social aspirations had very little relevant to a new generation that had to construct itself in the acknowledgement that all gods were dead, all faiths void, all promises were deceptions. as the son of an illiterate immigrant father, who had risen to wealth only tolo

29、se it in the depression, miller absorbed the double lesson offered by hope and disillusionment. miller looked for a relationship between the self and an environment undamaged by modernity. although the play premiered in 1949, miller began writing death of a salesman at the age of seventeen when he w

30、as working for his fathers company. in its short story form, it concerned an aging salesman who couldnt sell anything, berated by company bosses and must borrow subway change from the young narrator. but the script remained unfinished until 1947.of all the historical and personal forces that led the

31、 making of death a salesman, none was more important than a moment in 1947 when miller met his uncle manny newman outside the colonial theatre in boston, where millers all sons was having its pre-broadway preview: i could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from new york in his litt

32、le car, the hopeless hope of the days business without so much as knowledging my greeting, he said buddy is doing very well. (arthur millerl987: 130-31)newman miller has written, was a competitor at all times, in all things, and at every moment.(arthur miller, 1987:122) he saw miller and his older b

33、rother kermit running neck and neck with his sons buddy and abby in some races that never stopped in his mind.(arthur miller,1987:122)although miller had not spentmore than a few hours in newmans company, he had been fascinated by his traveling salesman uncle since his childhood. even in the few hou

34、rs he spent in newmans presence when he was a child, his uncle drew him into some kinds of imaginary contests. he said: i always had to expect some kinds of insinuation of my entire lifes probable failure. (arthur miller,1987: 122) he was so absurd, miller remembered so completely isolated from the

35、ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions, and despite his ugliness so lyrically in love with fame and fortune and their inevitable descent on his family, that he possessed my imagination until i knew more or less precisely how he would react to any sign or word or idea. (ar

36、thur miller,1987: 123)deeply involved in the production of all my sons, miller gave no more than a passing thought to the meeting with his uncle at the time, but the moment and its suggestiveness remained in his imagination. miller has identified the sudden appearance of manny newman as the spark th

37、at brought him back to an idea for a play about a salesman that he had had ten years earlier. now he had a new focus of interest in the simultaneity of past and present that had occurred in that meeting.miller had known that he and his cousins were as alive to manny newman at that moment as adolesce

38、nt competitors as they were as men in their thirties. he thought that it would be wonderful to do a play without any transitions at all, dialogue that would simply leap from bone to bone of a skeleton that would not for an instant cease being added to, an organism as strictly economic as a leaf, as

39、trim as an ant. (arthur miller,1987.131)manny newman and his sons were not the sole origin of the lomans, but it was manny who lodged himself in millers imagination and created a dramatic problem that he felt compelled to solve. the plot of the play might have come from millers questions about manny

40、s death, not long after the all my sons meeting. miller wrote that he had known three suicides up to that point, two of them salesmen, and that manny had died with none of the ordinary reasons given. (robert.a.martin.1978:131) he sought a meeting with his cousin abby, the younger of mannys sons, in

41、order to ask him what had been the one thing manny had wanted the most. millers suspicion about mannys death provided death of a salesmans minimal plot. abbys answer to his question supplied its motive: he wanted a business for us. so we could all work together. a business for the boys. (robert.a.ma

42、rtin.1978: 130) miller was greatly impressed and repeated newmans words in the play. miller remembered, i suddenly understood him with my very blood.(roberta.martin.1978: 130)manny was transformed into a man with a purpose, he had been trying to make a gift that would crown all those striving years,

43、 all those lies he had told, all his imaginations and crazy exaggerations. even the most military discipline he had laid on his boys was in this instant given form and point.it would be misleading and inappropriate to claim that manny newman was the sole model for willy loman. there were many source

44、s for willy and the other characters as well as numerous parallels between the events in the play and millers own life. however, no matter what topic he chose and what kind of protagonist he developed, his writing in a secular society was the result of his heterogeneous experiences, which bore the t

45、raits of the societys development of values. 111arthur millers early experiences and theirinfluence on death of a salesmanthere is no doubt that a persons views of world and concepts of life are greatly influenced by his experiences and environments. for miller, his works bore an acknowledged autobi

46、ographical nature. miller once explained:“the writer who, wants to describe life must describe his own e experiences.,(robert.a.martin.1978:55)going even further, he maintained that“ the best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him一where he puts himself on

47、the line.”(arthurmiller.1958:32)therefore, it is the best way to know about his growing experience and factors impacting him emotional or psychological for the sake of understanding him and his works well. 3.1familyandedueationbaekgroundarthur miller was born in new york city on oetober17, 1915, the

48、 second of three children of isidore mille, a jewish manufacturer of womens coats who had migrated from austria. he lived his first fourteen years of his life in harlem, which was then a fairly prosperous middle一class area of mixed ethic composition. like a growing number of middle一class american je

49、wish boys, he was quite at variance with the tradition of his eastern european heritage, an indifferent student but a promising athlete. millers early circumstances were comfortable, but the crash of 1929 and the depression were the major influence on the playwrights developing views of life. in his

50、 middle teens at that time, miller never forgot the hopelessness that overtook his father and the tensions that it produced between his parents. actually, the 1929 crash impressed miller greatly. “the hidden laws of fate lurked not only in the characters of people, but equally if not more imperiousl

51、y in the world beyond the family parlor. out there were the big gods, the ones whose disfavor could turn a proud and prosperous and dignified man into a frightened shell of a man whatever he thought of himself, and whatever he decided or didnt decide to do.”(anhurmiller.1959:36) miller attend james

52、madison high school in brooklyn, where he concerned more on athletic than on the curriculum and was consequently rejected by the university of michigan in 1932 because of his poor academic performance. since his grades ruled out the possibility of a college scholarship, he embarked on a private of r

53、eading and went to work for his father. working in his fathers factory was a relevation. if the economic effects of the depression had begun to awaken his social conditions, in the seventh avenue district shocked him. the arrogance, cruelty, hardness and vulgarity of the buyers affected him in a way

54、 he never forgot. he saw his father and the companys salesmen treated like dirt. in a sketch written at that time, in memoriam, he described a salesman who committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. it seemed certain that the salesman in the sketch for whom he felt sympathy in the 1930

55、s was the basis for the salesman on whom he based willy. after several attempts, miller was accepted by the university of michigan in1934. he was drawn to the study of history and economics. he became interested in the spanish civil war and found himself increasingly attracted to the socialist ideal

56、s of the time. he first was exposed to the articulation of the despair and confidence and analysis of the depression and the new deal. like many idealistic young people of the time, he saw the great depression and the governments fumbling attempts to deal with it as an indictment of the capitalist s

57、ystem. along with most of his idealistic contemporaries he became convinced of the need for change and progress in society. in his second year a t michigan, miller tried for one of the annual hopwood literary prizes, which were awarded for drama, fiction, poetry and essay. miller had never written a play, nevertheless, he resolved to submit a drama to the judges and accordingly spent six days writing no villain. about three months later he was awarded the first prize of $250 and his playwriting career had begun. considerably encouraged by his success, miller transferred out of journalism