Father Son Conflict in Death of a Salesman and All My Sons

In the sass, French philosophers such as Roland Farther, Gilles Delude, Jacques Deride, Michel Faculty, and Jean- François Leotard departed from conventional studies in the history of philosophy and Egan to address the epistemological crisis reinforcing Western philosophical thought. Their early scholarship focused on the structure of language and its role in forming world-views. The work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Assures, especially his posthumous text entitled Course in General Linguistics, presented the Intellectual Insight Tanat was necessary In order to separate ten synchrony Ana diachronic elements of language.

Dividing language and, in effect, freeing the sign from the signified, permitted obstructionists to redefine language as a system of differential signs. Jacques Dermis’s early writings obfuscate Creature’s linguistic turn. Deride could not stand the fact that the Western philosophical tradition privileges spoken (the sonic) over written language (the graphic). It is within this pyramid that the speaker is accepted to be self-authenticating and in control of meaning. The writer, within this representation, is displaced and, presumably, is not in control of meaning.

Assures, according to Deride, continues the Western tradition by giving more importance to the spoken word over the written word. Deride describes this as phonetics’s, a oppression of writing. His work seeks to invert the hierarchy and so present writing as a necessary displacement of meaning within language. Dermis’s innovative variations on Creature’s linguistic turn inaugurated postmodernism sustained dismantling of the metaphysics of presence in the Western philosophical tradition. Dermis’s critique of language was followed by critiques of truth and meaning in philosophy.

Drawing on the work of the German philosopher Frederica Nietzsche, Deride has disrupted the visualized belief that authors intend meaning and that there is a certain truth to be uncovered in texts. Deride, in the Nietzsche tradition, views philosophy not as a search for truth, but as a rhetorical engagement with the world. Truth and meaning are not fixed: they are metaphorical. Others have extended Dermis’s insights to the study of culture, literature, politics, and psychoanalysis, and, indeed, the displacement of meaning and truth characteristic of postmodernism has proved relevant to diverse academic disciplines.

Cast in the best possible light, postmodernism challenges hierarchies and presents a multiplicity of interpretations with an optimism that is not shared by the majority of scholars. Postmodernism anti-foundations is often linked to, if not actually equated with, the logic of late capitalism (Frederic Jameson) and political conservatism. Emphasis on epistemological undesirability and the loss of the subject appears to have persuaded many scholars to view postmodernism as nihilistic and irrational.

Nevertheless, postmodernism has come to be considered a significant endeavor in culture studies. The French philosopher Jean-Francis Leotard has articulated postmodernism within the aesthetic and political spheres. Leotard’s postmodernism critiques the totaling tendency of modernity’s monolithic world-views. Where there is completion and unity in modernism, one finds deferment and fragmentation in postmodernism. Leotard’s major contribution toward a definition of postmodernism is his theory of intransitives.

Modernity, according to Leotard, privileges all- encompassing narratives such as fascism, Marxism and capitalism. Leotard’s postmodernism encourages little narratives that claim to avoid utilization and preserve heterogeneity. Leotard’s challenge to the tendency to conceptualize history as events in a linear sequence means that, for him, postmodernism never can be represented in language or in history. Postmodernism for Leotard is neither a style nor an historical period. Instead, postmodernism is an unrepeatable deferment of conceptualization and totality.

This is coming from us. And we have not come close to even confronting this thing” (CTD. In Abbots, 2007: 94). Miller by his drama conveys the necessity of a humanistic response to the contemporary world. Such a description closely resembles the objectified picture the postmodern critic, Jameson, creates of contemporary society, where he announces the death of individualism, “symbolized by the emergent Anoraks Hoot; Profaner Zipper/Studies in Literature and Language Volvo. L No. 8, 2010 primacy of mechanical production” (1991 5), by which all becomes identical and exists without individual identity, choice, or spirit.

Miller carefully criticizes the consumer society and its capitalist logic. In fact Wily himself as salesman uses the language of advertisement to earn money. But this consumer world has harsh rules; it exploits everybody and as Wily affirms: “eat the orange and throw the peel away'(Miller: 61) although ” a man is not a piece of Trust” (61 In Tact man must struggle Tort survival In a consumer collect, wanly Is Like a consumer industry produces not things, but dreams disguised as things. Wily by the harsh machinery of the contemporary consumer world is beaten down.

He cannot get up back. Linda exhorts “But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid”(40). Wily is the victim of the American Dream and materialistic condition. Wily loan’s condition is so close to everybody in the consumer world that develops a sense of kinship to each person. He makes the audience aware of a common fatality and vulnerability. The society that Wily belongs to, is the business world. His boss, Howard, is the representative of the business world, which rejects Wily.

Unwilling to accommodate Will’s inability to travel anymore, Howard says, “No, but it’s a business, kid, and everybody’s goat pull his own weight” (60). Indeed Wily is born as a salesman. Murphy defines this idea: In the scene between Wily and Howard, he nearly sells Howard on the myth of Dave Signalman before he sabotages his sales pitch by losing his temper. Wily Leman is a very confused man, but his confusion about what it means to be a salesman and what it takes to succeed at the Job is as much cultural as personal (CTD In Abbots, 2007:108).

Wily is fired, in the end, not because a hard-nosed employer wants to eat the fruit and throw away the peel but because Wily cannot even sell himself. Bigly(2005) describes Wily Leman “as agent of an intrusive commercialism victim ND martyr creature touchingly, tragically doomed by the business culture he represented but which also leaves him as solitary figure in the social landscape”(110). In the contemporary consumer world the problem of postmodern man is, he is not being himself. He becomes vehicle for participation in a cycle of production and consumption.

He sells a commodity and becomes a commodity. When man thinks he can acquire everything, material or immaterial by buying it, he regards his personal qualities and the result of his efforts as commodities that can be sold for money. Thus man misses the experience of the activity of the present moment and chases the illusory happiness called success. There are many like Wily, who put all their faith in personality, friendship, and personal loyalty-?”Be liked and you will never want” (Miller: 21), but by coming a new way of thinking about salesmanship everything has changed.

Mass production and consumer culture have begun to alter his business economy, therefore, salesmanship has been treated as a profession to be learned. With mass production and increasing competition, buyers and merchants have begun to think more about profit. Murphy s idea about competition is interesting: With the stock market crash in 1929, and the Great Depression that followed it, the competition among salesmen became more and more cutthroat.

As Wily tells Ben in one of the daydream sequences that takes place in 1931, business is bad, it’s murderous . Using all of the tricks that Wily has learned in a lifetime of selling, including seducing the buyer’s secretary and bribing her with stockings, Wily is barely able to eke out a living for his family (CTD In Abbots, 2007:110). But during this period, the prevailing idea was still that, as Wily puts it, “the man who sakes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead” (21).

According to Murphy: in the post-war period, there was a pent-up demand for things like new cars, tires, Dragon-name liquor, Ana nylon stockings, wanly Ana not Eden available ruling ten war. The enormous war industry was being retooled to produce consumer goods, and the advertising business was expanding rapidly as Americans were “educated” into desiring things like Anoraks Hoot; Profaner Zipper/Studies in Literature and Language Volvo. L No. 8, 2010 vacuum cleaners, television sets, and air conditioners, which had not been manufactured in large quantities before the war. CTD. In Abbots, 2007:111). Death of a Salesman does not simply show the predicaments of the modern man stuck in a postmodern world, but also displays the conflicting views of these two worlds. Bigly(2005), suggests: Wily Loan’s American dream is drained of transcendence. It is a faith in the supremacy of the material over the spiritual. There is, though, another side to Wily, a side represented by the sense of insufficiency that sends him searching through his memories looking for the origin of failure, looking for expiation.

It is a side, too, represented by his son Biff, who has inherited this aspect of his sensibility, as Happy has inherited the other. Biff is drawn to nature, to working with his hands. He has a sense of poetry, an awareness that life means more than the dollars he earns. Wily has that, too. The problem is that he thinks it is irrelevant to the imperatives of his society and hence of his life which, to him, derives its meaning from that society (105). The Leman family is caught up in mindless consumerism, “whipped cheese” (6) and that these new products disrupt attempts at meaningful human interaction.

Shockley states: Miller shows the power of advertising and consumerism, and the contradictions of attitudes toward products in the Leman family by having Wily call his Chevrolet both “the greatest car ever built” and “that goddamn Chevrolet” in the space of only a few minutes, and in Willis remark that “Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! ” But while Wily utters these remarks, he still is completely caught up in the pursuit of the dream. (CTD. In bloom, 2007:86) I HAVE MONEY THEN I AM In Death of Salesman the Becoming of man is weighed through his bank balance.

It is the strength of his bank account, which accordingly mirrors the importance of his existence as a being. The alienation that the industrial era brought upon men is witnessed in the character of Wily Leman. Through this alienation, Will’s connectivity to society is severed and his tie to moral responsibility on behalf of mankind is weakened greatly. He brushes with the uglier side of capitalism, and yet seemed unable to recognize or condemn this brutal side. Shockley asserts: In competitive society the rewards of being successful for Wily is to be well liked and to be rich.

To be rich also means to be “free” in the two senses above, with the added goldfinches of being admired, a model for others (CTD. In Bloom,2007: 84). Miller in Death of a Salesman gives the bitterest satire on human condition in contemporary century. He writes about demutualization result from Enlightenment. Miller criticizes the universal values of Enlightenment humanism. In the capitalism society, consumer culture shows the end of Grand narratives and western metaphysics, which bring tremendous rifts and disintegration among people.