The Present-Past Interaction in Miller's Death of a Salesman

Abstract

Written in 1949, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1998) is a cornerstone piece that tackles capitalism in the postmodern world, showcasing how people's money and assets are influential to their life. Thus, our paper divulges how such a social background connects with characters' experience of nostalgia as a means of escaping reality. Considering Lina Hutcheon and Mario Valdes's viewpoint (1998) regarding the dialogue between irony, nostalgia, and the postmodern, the paper emphasizes how Willy Loman keeps switching between the past and the present attempting to escape his depressing present. We argue that nostalgia does not always revolve around escaping a reality to retain a much-pleasant past; rather; it is deployed by Willy Loman as a reminder of the pain and suffering experienced by him and his family, which suggests that nostalgia in this specific play is ironically used to crystallize and mock the past by stressing its inescapability.