Portrayal of Protagonists by Arthur Miller

The purpose of this paper is to analytically present the "Portrayal of Protagonist by Arthur Miller". Since the writings of Arthur Miller (1915-2005) are diverse, it seems essential to delimit the scope and sweep of the dimensions of the discussion to only three of his plays: Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1959), and After the Fall (1964). Before actually opening with the portrayal of protagonist in the plays, it seems essential to briefly highlight the circumstances of his age and life and the urgencies thereof that lead to the formation of a broad framework. This framework, when probed deeply, turns out to be the essential basis for formulating the characteristic features of the concept analyzed. These features or perspectives, put together, form the qualitative framework for discussing and analyzing the essential nature of the protagonists involved. This necessitates a brief but incisive probe into the broad qualitative features of these protagonists. The se characteristic features include: (i) Tragic experience of the protagonist pertinent to his thinking, feeling, actions and eventual insight; (ii) The interpersonal relationship s of protagonist with various persons around them; and (iii) Probing the individuality of the protagonist as an organism as a whole, showing the protagonist as a social organism where he functions, evolves and operates.Arthur Miller's Life and AgeArthur Asher Miller, the son of a women's clothing company owner, was born in 1915 in New York city. At around the age of 14, his father's business collapsed with the Stock Market crash at the beginning of the 1930s Depression and the family was forced to move to a smaller home in Brooklyn. His father 's business was devastated by the Depression, sowing the seeds of his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. After graduating from high school, Miller worked at jobs ranging from radio singer to truck driver to clerk in an automobile-parts warehouse. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan at Ann Arbour in 1934 at the age of 19, where he majored in English and journalism. It was here that he was slowly introduced to playwrights such as Ibsen and August Strindberg.After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1938, Miller began writing in earnest. His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All The Luck (1944), about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success, opened to horrible reviews. Its unfavorable reception disheartened Miller, and he decided to write one more play. If that were not successful, he would give up playwriting.Fortunately, All My Sons was a huge broadway hit. Concerned with issues of morality, this play appealed to audiences who had just suffered through war and Depression. As Welland says, growing up in the Depression has also affected Miller in many ways more complex than one would infer from the nostalgia of his autobiographical essay, "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn." "It was a good time to be growing up", he has said, "because nobody else knew anything either," but he also comments, "nobody could escape that disaster". And it is this image of Depression that predominates in his later plays. The Depression taught many things, such as a man trapped in a whirlpool of commercialism. Stark economic reality can devastate the world of man. Common Americans, including Miller, were compelled to do all kinds of petty and clumsy jobs in order to satisfy their hunger. So this helplessness of the man in the merciless world created by capitalism stirs Miller 's conscience to write such plays.Much before the publication of his other significant plays, Miller had come to be launched into the realm of greatest living American playwrights with the publication of his masterpiece Death of a Salesman (1949), which presents the tragic Willy Loman, a failed businessman attempting to reconstruct his life. …