In the play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller uses an old style of reality that deals with emotional and financial struggles. These struggles are viewed throughout the whole play. The play was written around the 1940s, which was around the time of the Great Depression. This was a very difficult time in which a lot of people struggled just like the Loman family did in the play. Arthur Miller uses several elements in the play which are: stream-of-consciousness, setting, protagonist, symbolism and climax. These elements are very helpful to the understanding of the reader.
The first element is stream-of-consciousness. Stream-of-consciousness is a literary genre that reveals a character's thoughts and feeling as they develop by means of a long soliloquy. Throughout the whole play Willy Loman is pretty much always talking to himself, and the rest of the time he talks to Uncle Ben. The problem is that Uncle Ben is dead, but to Willy he’s still alive. He is an old man in his mid sixty’s he is losing his mind, so that is one of the reasons why he talks to himself. The other reason is because he’s constantly traveling due to the fact that he is a salesman; he has no one else to talk to but himself.
Setting, I would say is a very important element in a story because is where and when the story take place. In this particular play the story takes place in their house, which is surrounded by many buildings and there is very little mother nature to be seen. It also takes place in Boston, which is where his affair took place. The other places that are not really mentioned are those where he traveled to because of his job.
The Protagonist of a story is the main character, which in this play is Willy Loman. He is a salesman in his mid sixty’s and is delusional. Throughout the story we see that he has a hard time accepting reality. He has this concept of an “ideal family” and he thinks his family is like that.
Symbolism is another element Arthur miller used in his play. Symbolism is the practice of representing things by means of symbols or of attributing...