The Tragedy of the Untenanted Mind: Illusion, Memory, and Emotional Escape in Death of a Salesman

Abstract

This study offers  with a psychological and a  narrative analysis of Willy Loman’s tragic disintegration in the context of  Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, arguing that his downfall represents not merely an economic failure but also a  profound cognitive and emotional collapse. The paper looks at how illusion, memory and emotional escape are inter-related survival tactics where Willy struggles to maintain dignity and identity in the capitalistic society that has outmoded him. Through the cultural analysis of the non-linear dramatic form of Miller, specifically, the method of mobile concurrency, the paper shows how subjective memory substitutes the time-based reality and turns the stage into a reflection of polarized consciousness that Willy lives in. Using the trauma theory, socio-economic criticism and linguistic analysis, the paper will examine the functioning of the American Dream as a pathological blueprint, which manipulates self-perception and moral judgment. Willy strikes with his compulsive escapes into idealized memories, his untrustworthy self-ventilation as well as to linguistic fragmentation, indicates a mind that is steadily unable to balance past desires with present obscurity. Ways of life that represent symbolic motifs that include seeds, stockings, and flute are explored as physical expressions on guilt, loss, and longing to mark someone. The paper critically reflects the interpretations of Harold Bloom, Sheila Huftel, and Raymond Williams to opine that the last suicide of Willy is the ultimate emotion-seeking out. The paper concludes that Death of a Salesman is a tragedy of the contemporary person whose identity fails under the added burden of cultural myth, distortion of memory, and dehumanization in the system, and, therefore, death of a salesman should be redefined as a crisis of consciousness as opposed to something heroic.