Willy Loman most certainly is a major dramatic character, and so he necessarily needs to be considered when we estimate who merits inclusion in the vital company of major American literary characters. If there is a legitimate tragic drama by an American author, then it must be Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller's grand insight into Willy Loman is that his protagonist is slain by his need for love, for familial love. Insofar as Loman possesses tragic dignity, that eminence derives from his relation to fatherhood. Linda's comment upon her husband "a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man"-would be an aesthetic disaster if Loman's exhaustion were his salient quality. The exhaustion of Willy Loman simply lacks the cognitive and spiritual qualities that mark the exhaustion of King Lear. (Brenda Murphy, Susan C. W. Abbotson, 1999)
All that Loman actually shares with Lear or Oedipus is agony; there is no other likeness whatsoever. Miller has little understanding of Classical or Shakespearean tragedy; he stems entirely from Ibsen. Yet Loman is hardly Ibsenite either. A tragedy of familial love is not primarily a social drama, one concerned with the illusions of society, and Ibsen was careful to keep the two modes unconfused. Miller is richly confused, and never more so than in his depiction of Loman. That confusion, aptly castigated by the critic Eric Bentley, nevertheless does not destroy Loman as a dramatic character, perhaps because in Miller's (and Loman's) true tradition, family tragedy and social realities are inextricably linked by a tragic social history. The history of the Jewish people is marked by an inward turn in family romance, precisely resulting from the terrors, or at least the discomforts, of societal persecution. Willy Loman is not Jewish, if we are to follow Miller's intentions, but Loman makes little sense as a character unless we see him as a kind of internal exile. (Harold Bloom, 1987)
Miller remarks of Salesman that it "was written in a mood of friendly partnership with the audience." In reply to an interviewer's question as to whether he was influenced by Jewish tradition, the playwright stressed the Jewish refusal of nihilism:
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