CHAPTER-7

Conclusion
In the present age, Arthur Miller, is perhaps, the most

conscious and aware literary artist working in the American

Theatre. He is gifted with a very powerful imagination, fine

sensitivity and a keen power of imagination. Expert craftsmanship

is the distinguishing trait of his literary work. He possesses an

unerring sense of the theatre and has the capacity to create

meaningful people in striking situations. Miller is diligent literary

artist who is in the habit of writing page after page at a sitting,

revising them and making necessary changes till he is fully

satisfied. This is not due to lack of ideas or imaginative power but

due to excess of self-criticism and very high standard of excellence

that he sets for himself.

Arthur Miller's plays are gripping and powerful in their

impact, because he is primarily concerned with a play's ultimate

relevancy to the survival of the human race. Thus, Miller has tried

to achieve through a critical analysis of man's commitment to his

fellow human beings and to himself as an individual. Miller

discusses in depth the themes of man's relatedness, responsibility;

guilt and integrity in order to formulate a rational stand for the

individual in the world. A balance had to be struck between the

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individual's longings, inner questions and private lives and the life

of the generality of men called society.

Thus, Miller's plays are concerned with the vital problem as

to how are we to live in a social and humanistic sense in the world

of today. Miller is also obsessed with the idea of making the

outside world a home - a theme that constantly recurs in his plays.

Miller has depicted the alienation of contemporary man from a

sense of community or relatedness to others, the estrangement

from social values and relationships or feelings of solidarity with

others in society. The playwright, with his analytical approach, has

been successful in discerning the virus eating into the heart of

family structure which he calls the virus of selfishness. His power

as a playwright lies in his understanding of and compassion for

human beings in their most personal relationships - with the

members of their family or with themselves. Arthur Miller can

press right home to the living nerve of a human situation. No

significant detail escapes his keen eye of observation.

Miller regards the theatre as a serious business and not

merely something to spend our feelings. The theatre should bind

isolated human beings into their essential corporateness and make

human beings less alone in this world. According to Miller, the

proper concerns of the theatre are social and what he asks for is a

theatre of heightened consciousness. The stage is the place for

ideas, for the most intense discussions of man's fate. How the

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social relevance of theatre in America could be established was

Miller's primary concern. He wanted the theatre in America to

become a vital part of communal life. Moreover, it must be deep-

rooted in the conditions of life of common men, their hopes and

aspirations.

Miller has also condemned and shown his deep hatred and

disgust for a grossly competitive society which leads to

commercialization of human relationship. Miller's plays reveal his

earnestness and passionate desire to point one and to correct the

weaknesses and injustices of a society based on material rewards

and successes. Miller has not only been diagnose, explore and

locate the virus eating into the structure of our society but has also

pointed out in a subtle and artistic manner the way out of the

pervasive malady. Miller's plays strike us by their vivid portrayal

of individual struggle for self-preservation against the stresses of a

technological society, search for meaning in life by an individual

against collective pressures and the problems arising out of the

loss of social, moral and cultural values. In Miller's plays, there are

veiled suggestions and hints to bring about a change in the present

structure of society. Miller distils a message of hope and love and

has taken recourse to oblique and indirect strategies to achieve his

purpose.

Arthur Miller is one of the most inventive dramatists of the

modern times whose work seems to be highly illustrative of the

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artistic as well as social preoccupations of his age. Too eager to

deal with the central issues of his time, he embarked on one

experiment after another to evolve a new form for his plays,

achieving a unique blend of art and social criticism. Miller is a

highly conscientious experimentalist-keenly responsive to the

technical challenges offered by the theme in hand. His quest for

new forms continued for a long time and he steadily matured,

from a steadfast craftsman and tireless experimenter, into a major

dramatist of society.

Arthur Miller has extended the line of enquiries into a new

area of national experience. He has employed new and supple

techniques in place of the conventional and obsolete methods.

Beyond the objectivity of social analysis, Miller has other qualities

of a great dramatist too-imaginative, freshness, tenderness and

humanity. His poetic sensibility and pointer's eye are revealed

again and again in his plays. In respect to his art, he might well be

compared with miniaturists. Thus, we can say that Miller is

primarily an artist possessing a deep insight and the disciple of a

social thinker.

Miller is constantly concerned with the writer's place in

society and the fulfilment of his moral responsibilities to it. There

are two forces working in the mind of Miller social consciousness

and his desire to create. It is his constant concern with a genuine

relationship between the writer and the problems of his time,

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between art and social concerns that, in fact, elevate Miller to the

statue of a major writer. The relation of an individual to his society

has been with Miller a definite point of view and an essential part

of his philosophy. And, therefore, if we want to understand his

work and his social outlook, it would not be possible to separate in

such a study, the dramatist from a social critic and the artist from a

citizen. In his view, if a writer wanted to contribute anything of

lasting value, he could not longer keep his artistic pre-occupation

remote from his cultural and social concerns. Miller has

emphasized the writer's concern more with facts and conditions of

life than with anything abstract. He felt that an average man is

only dimly aware of what kind of society he is living in. It is the

writer's business to tell him about it and his role in that particular

society.

Miller has maintained the delicate balance between art and

social criticism, aesthetic and social values. In Miller, we find a

very judicious balance of art and social responsibility. What he has

given to us in his plays is essentially the vision of an artist of a

better and more integrated society. Miller fully understands that

the Structure of modern society is precarious and may, at any

moment, convert the most civilized age into the most chaotic and

barbaric one.

In the opinion of Miller, one of the noblest aims of the artist

in the present-day society should be that he must seek, above all

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else, to restore the dignity of the human spirit which is being too

much foggy by the mechanical and industrial inventions. In the

works of Miller, there has been a common concerns of the people

between art and society. In him, we find a strong sense of aesthetic

individualism and a deep concern for social revolution between

the inner world of collective social experiences. One can not fail to

discern the social commitment that he displays in his dramatic

works. Miller's plays reveal his deep concern with human destiny

in an indifferent and hostile world. He places the responsibility for

creating a viable society for all men, not on government but on the

individual. The plays, thus, reflect Miller's deep concern for

society.

One finds Miller's work as of central importance is not

merely his fascination with the total view of society. Miller's

primary concern is on depicting the plight of the individual in a

mechanically advanced in-which institutions have acquired deep

power to enslave the human mind.

Some see Miller primarily as a 'social dramatist'. Considered

in this prospective, Miller is part of a tradition, which decends

from Ibsen to Shaw, and playwrights of the 1930s. Such dramatist,

as the theory goes, presents man in conflict with a repressive social

environment. The underline implications of their plays are that

society is flowed, that the majority of man are too blind,

superstitious, to see it and that what is needed is a radical re-

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examination of conventional ideas in preparation for a complete

overhauling of the system. 'All My Sons', Death of A Salesman'

'The Crucible' After the Fall and 'Who Had All The Luck' are the

social plays in the usual sense of that term.

There is no question that one of Miller's greatest strengths is

his penetrating insight into familial relationships. But to call him a

dramatist of the family is also misleading if only the range of his

play is surprisingly narrow. The typical Miller family consists of

an ill-educated father, a mother with some cultural aspirations and

two sons, sisters, grandparents and very young children hardly

ever appear nor are their problems discussed further more; the

families are almost in variedly lower middle class. There are no

problems of the rules whether these are considered to be

politicians, scientists, engineers; salesman, financiers or even

writer and artists.

Even within this limited family unit it is only the man who is

convincingly portrayed. It is one of the weaknesses of the plays as

a whole that Miller fails to create believable women. The female

characters in the plays are rarely shown except in their

relationship to some man. They are not presented as individuals in

their own right, but rather as mothers, wives or mistresses. The

moral dilemma in Miller's plays is almost invariably seen from a

man's point of view, and to a large extent woman exists outside

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the arena of real moral choice because they are either too good or

too bad.

Arthur Miller's dramas deal with man's relationship with

society and family. He has brought back into the theatre the drama

of social questions. His plays are obviously family concerned. But

his heroes are failed husbands and fathers because he has

recognized that the most impressive family plays have modified

the concept of the family and of the individual under the pressure

of society. Miller Criticizes this society, a business-oriented society

in which corruption, selfishness, indifference, a system that turns

men into machines yet it is seen clearly that his primary concern is

with personal morality, the individual's relation to a society. Miller

is not a social reformer but he is a social critic. He condemns faults

of capitalism and contemporary social values.

Miller was a keen observer endowed with a strong

humanitarian spirit. Every one of his plays reflects his love and

sympathy for poor sufferers who were callously exploited by the

capitalists. He had progressive views on all aspects of life. It was

for his radical progressive views that he was summoned by the

senate. He was so disgusted with communism that he severed all

relations with political activities and dedicated himself entirely to

literature, particularly drama. It may be said; however, that

Miller's chief qualities as a man and writer are indomitable

courage and humanism. An account of his life and the incidents of

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his life are indispensable because his work is by far

autobiographical. Miller was a very keen observer endowed with a

keen psychological insight into human nature. He was fully aware

of the lot of the poor. He knew how painfully the poor were

exploited by the, profiteering class of capitalists. He has a radical

and progressive outlook with socialistic bearings. It was for this

reason that he was summoned by the senate committee to

investigate his antisocial activities. It was suspected that he had

communistic affiliation. Since then he severed his connections with

political parties. But his interest in and sympathy for the suffering

humanity was never abated. He was always guided by his spirit of

strong humanitarianism and unending sympathy. It may be noted

that about that time America was hit hard by a very bad economic

disaster which was known was Depression. As a lover of

humanity he was deeply affected by it. It threw thousands of

people out of job. Naturally, the old faith that America is a land of

plenty was shattered. It was the crisis that made a deep impact

upon him. He himself said to some of his friends that Depression

was his book. It robbed people of their courage and sense of moral

justice.

In his plays Miller has referred to the hidden forces of life

which are too powerful for the individual to bear. In a Greek

Tragedy a man is always the victim of forces which are opposed to

his own actions and desires. In the Greek Tragedy it was called

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fate or Destiny. In the world of today it is called the force of

capitalism which tends to shape the individual. But whereas the

Greek drama highlights the individual's moral regeneration,

Miller's plays deplore the fact that in the modern drama there is a

lot of pessimism unrelieved by the positive values.

Miller was a great technical expert. He was a great

experimentalist, an impressionist, an expressionist and a

symbolist. But he was not a complete realist. He was aware of the

limitations of Realism. He asserts that the requirements of the

present theatre demand a more liberated and effective mode than

Realism. This fact has been fully illustrated by his plays like The

Death on a Salesman. The interest of the audience and of the liter;

world has not been diminished by any means. A light dawns with

a new play written by him. He plays strike the reader not only

with a new courage but also with a new light of truth. Miller is

rightly called as one of the intellectual leaders of his country. His

critical writings have a great deal to deal with the different aspects

of literary art.

His first successful play is All My Sons. It lays stress on the

fact that a man should realise his social and moral responsibility to

the world outside his home. Among his most successful plays, The

Death of a Salesman occupies a very eminent place. It was

welcomed as a modern classic and has assured to Miller a place

among the foremost playwrights of the century. It also brings to

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light the fact that though in many respects man is the victim of the

evils of a commercial society; he himself may be too weak to face

the forces of society. This is the reason why he himself is

responsible for his own misery. Willy Loman the old salesman

meets with failure and disillusionment both in his private and

professional life. His two sons Happy and Biff also do not care for

their father's expectations. All this is responsible for Willy's

frustration and early death.

Arthur Miller's play The Man Who Had All the Luck dealt

greatly with Miller's reflection to the Depression. In this play is

Dave Beeves fear of failure. While Dave's friends are all failing and

not receiving good fortune, Dave constantly believes throughout

the play that his luck, too, will run out. For example, Dave Beeves

even contemplates committing suicide simply due to his fear that

one day his luck will run out and everything he owns will be lost.

Dave even says "I'm a lucky man John. Everything I've ever gotten

came ... straight out of the blue. There's nothing mad about it. It's

facts. When I couldn't have Hester unless Old man Falk got out of

the way, he was killer just like it was especially for me"1 (The Man

Who). Dave is very aware of his good fortune and worries without

end that his luck will end. In the play, another major character,

Dibble, makes an important speech to Miller about the mink farm

that he owns. Dibble foreshadows what will happen to Dave if he

continues to worry about failure and his fate. Dibble says "...and

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I've seen them die of just plain worry"2 (The Man Who). These

minks are a representation of Dave Beeves life in that if Dave

persists in his worrying about fate, it will lead to his demise.

Growing up after the Great Depression, Miller saw that the society

would never have the faith in the American economy again.

Though they were beginning to rebuild their lives, they

continually believed that, once again, they would lose their

fortune. This theme is Arthur Miller's reaction to how the

American people responded the growth of the economy after the

Great Depression had ceased.

Miller is a representation of Dave Beeves during the Great

Depression. He feels that even though his friends are struggling to

survive, Beeves is prospering due to luck. This draws parallels to

Miller's life during the Depression. Only after did Miller truly look

back and notice the pain his peers were going through. Ironically,

Miller did not write this play until 15 years after the stock market

fell. Miller was inspired to write this play only after looking back

and realizing the pain his friends were going through during this

time in American history.

In order to present a contemporary situation in the crucible,

the author makes use of history as allegory. The second Great

World War was followed by the well-known Cold War between

Russia and America. It was responsible for the wide spread fear of

communism in America. In The Crucible we go back to the

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seventeenth century when witchcraft was also a source of fear to

the Americans. It caused a great deal of mental uneasiness to a

large number of people. Some people also fall a victim to this fear.

John Proctor, the protagonist involved. He was lured for it. During

this period much of the evil and hypocrisy of the society was

exposed. At the end when Proctor is given a chance to save his life

by signing confession complicity with it, he prefers death to

implicating his name in falsehood which would be caused by loss

of his identity." Thus, the play is more heroic and positive, in tone

than the previous plays. In this play as in the other ones Miller

aims at depicting man as the victim of the evil which is widely

spread in society.

Some of his plays are very appealing. For example A View

From the Bridge is a play of passion. Miller introduced into a new

aspect of human personality – the hidden forces of instinct and

passion. In the earlier plays man is sometimes shown as a victim of

outside forces beyond his control. Similarly he can also be a slave

of the mysterious forces working within himself. He also

introduced into the play a new technique. The narrator comes to

the stage from time to time and addresses the audience directly

like a chorus he also provides to the audience the narrative

background. This also points out his departure from realism.

The next play After the Fall came after nine years. Some of

the critics regard it as a very complicate autobiographical play. Its

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action starts in the mind of the protagonist himself. Thus, the

hero's mind serves as the stage. The other characters move in the

mind of the hero just like memories and ideas appear in the mind

without any apparent connection. Thus, it may be said that the

whole play is a self analysis and examination of guilt in the hero's

relationship with his two wives and with the society in general.

The complexity of the play is also a source of help to the author. It

brings to light some very important aspects of human personality.

Another interesting thing in the play is the character of his second

wife Maggie who may be said to have some resemblance with

Maryline Monroe, his second wife.

The troubled American social and political conditions from

1960 to 1970 contributed to the appearance of several plays. These

got highly intensified because they depicted real life circumstances

and important social and economic concerns. Among the most

important of these plays was Donal Fried's The United States Vs

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Daniel Barringam's The Trial of the

contansville centres round the 1968 trial of nine Roman Catholic

dissenters including Daniel Barringam and his brother Philip. Both

these brothers were priests who burnt selected service Files against

the Victorian War. There also appeared a poetic celebration of a

girls refused to be refusal by her family environment.

Here is traced the direction of Miller's style and the main

concerns. Since his first play which brought him the highest light

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of distinction as one of the greatest dramatists of Modern America.

Plays like The crucible and After the Fall demonstrates that the old

patterns which make man suffer from a tragic flaw no longer finds

approval with the modern dramatists. They have discovered that

man suffers only because he has some imperfections or that he was

committed some guilts. The wrong and cruel acts of some other

persons also combine to contribute to his disaster. Another play

Prince also occupies an important place among the plays written

by Arthur Miller. In this play the playwright makes use of the

conventional realistic form. The two sons Victor and Walter meet

in their father's house after many years. Their father has died.

They wish to sell off the furniture and the other valuables. They

are, however, reminded of their past. Victor, a middle aged man

does not like his brother Walter who is a doctor. During their

conversation Victor discovers that his father had enough money.

But this fact was kept secret from everybody. The result was that

Victor could not get good education. Miller wishes to show here

that nobody is responsible here, neither the father nor the two

brothers. Here Miller offers a very poignant idea – Nobody is

perfect. We all have our faults and shortcomings. If we realise, this

fact only then we can live in peace with ourselves.

Auther Miller's protagonist belongs to a strange breed. In

every instance he is unimaginative inarticulate and physically

decripit. His roles as husband and father ate of paramount

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importance to him. Yet he fails miserably in both. He wants to love

and be loved, but he is incapable of either, giving or receiving love.

As he is hunted by aspirations toward a gay life that his humdrum

spirit is quite unable to realise. Yet in spite of all this negative

qualities, Miller's protagonists do engage our imagination and win

our sympathies. The results from the fact that his own attitude

towards his own creations is quite contradictory.

The Death of a Salesman is an expressionistic reconstruction

of a mechanised substance and the result is a powerful, particular

form. The continuity from social expressionism comes clear, as it

may be said that in the end it is not Willy Loman as a man but the

image of the salesman that predominates. Miller was a great

intellectual. He read widely and wrote variously. He came in

contact with different writers and was influenced by deeply books

written on different topics. He had his own preference. He himself

said, "I read books after I was seventeen".3 He was influenced of by

the ideas and temperaments different authors. This is one of the

reason why he was able to render into art the most articulate and

complicated ideas in a fine artistic manner. He says, "in good or ill,

I was not patient with every kind of literature. I did not believe

even then that you could talk about a man without telling about

the world he was living in — what he did for a living. I remember

now reading novels and wandering what do these do for their

living? When do they work? I remember asking the same question

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about the few plays."4 The hidden forces of fate lurked not only in

the characters of people but equally though not imperviously in

the world beyond the family. There were the big gods whose lack

of favour could turn a proud, prosperous and dignified man into

frightened shell of a man, whatever he thought of himself and

whatever he decided and whatever he did not decide to do so that

by force of circumstances he is caught unawares. So he was

fascinated by sheer process itself. How things are connected? How

the native personality of a man was changed by his world, and the

harder questions how he could in term change the world. It was

not academic, it was not even literary or a dramatic question at

first. It was a practical problem of what to believe in order to

proceed with life. For instance, should one admire success for

there were successful people in them, or should one always see

though it is as an illusion which only existed to be blown up, and

its answer destroyed and humiliated.

It may also be noted that Miller uses this play as a

transparent set which is frequently used in the modern theatre. A

transparent set is not at all complicated. It is quite simple and

straightforward. The various parts of the house is only an outline,

but there are not real walls. It is I like a house drawn on paper. In

this kind of set an effective use of light makes all the difference.

The action is shown taking place in Willy's living room. The spot

of light is in the living room, and the other parts of the house will

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be in darkness. However, the spot of light may shift to the boy's

room and Willy's room may go dark. This is equivalent of a change

of scene. But the advantage is that there is no actual shifting of the

scene, only the change of light changes the scene. Also persons in

one part of the house are not supposed to know or hear of what

has gone, on in the other parts of the house, while the audiences

see all the parts of the house." There may be such moment in the

play when the audiences have to watch two or three scenes

simultaneously. One can easily see that this technique offers

enormous scope to the modern playwright. In the opening scene

Willy Loman, a tired old man of more than sixty comes home

carrying two large sample boxes. He is a travelling salesman. His

job is to travel from one place to another place in the nearby towns

and secure orders by showing samples in a persuasive manner; the

samples of different articles. When his wife Linda sees him doing

that arduous work she feels worried. When Willy does not come

back home in time, she feels worried. It is obvious from Willy's

appearance that his condition is not normal because something

unpleasant, appears to have happened to him. He talks to Linda in

a manner that his faculties are getting too weak to function

normally. For example, he tells Linda that while driving he opened

the window shield. Once he told her that he forgot where he was

going. He kept driving off the road too. It is for his reason that he

turned back and because he was scared of consequences.

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Sometimes he gets mentally blank. His mind is full of dreams and

strange thoughts. Again, like an old man whose mind is no longer

sound he contradicts himself frequently. Now he calls his son Biff

lazy bum, and then just a minute after he says that Biff is not lazy.

He talks to himself and occasionally laughs when alone. It is clear

from the above that Willy is getting more close to the age when he

loses control of his mind Willy's mind becomes an object of

consideration. It appears that he may collapse soon. One also finds

in Willy the glimpses of romanticism. He frequently talks about

the old times. When the house was made at an attractive place full

of fragrance and flowers. He enjoyed the scenery in the house

made grand with two big elm trees interspersed with fine

greenery. As compared to the old trees Willy felt very unhappy

and suffocated because now his house was surrounded by tall

buildings which impeded the free flow of fresh air and light.

These, Willy's dream of Arcadia haunt him throughout the play.

Miller puts a lot of premium on Biffs analysis whose attitude

represents the inevitable and capitulation of, the common man.

Willy thinks that his son's treatment is not what is used to be. It is

bitter and brutal because he thinks that biff hates him. But at the

height of his emotional outburst Biff breaks down into weeping.

How can this be accounted for? Ordinarily Willy should not have

thought Biff hated him. Biffs outburst of emotion is the real

representation of Biff s self. It is nothing but the external forces

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which a man neither understands nor can control. They are too

powerful for man to fight against. Willy now realises that his son

loves him and perhaps loved him all along. Suddenly he begins to

think of Biff s going to be a great man. At the same time he decides

to end his life by car accident. He receives great relief from his

discovery that his son loves him. Her is, however, pleased to think

that the recovery of his Insurance amount will make his dear son

quite comfortable and will raise his status.

In view of the above it will not be wrong to say that Arthur

Miller was a crusader throughout his life. He always indicted

injustice and exploitation. Like the other great dramatists of his life

Arthur Miller also held the opinion that the common man is the

worst sufferer in the commercialised and mechanised society.

In the themes of the different plays written by him he has

invariably stressed that society is always greater than the

individual. He has condemned persons like Joe Keller who did not

care for the loss of the young men's lives because he was lost in the

lust of money. Joe Keller ought to have kept in mind that an

individual should not gain success at the cost of society. His views

on all aspects of social life are radical and progressive. He is

greatly opposed to intolerance, exploitation and war because they

caused hatred and lack of understanding.

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 Miller is aware of the limitations of realism. He believes that

the demands of the modern theatre are for a more liberated and

effective form than realism. In his introduction to the collected

plays Miller writes :

"By the evidence of his plays, shaw, the socialist was in love

not with the working class whose characters he could only

caricature but with the middle of the economic aristocracy, those

men and women who, in his estimate lived without social and

economic illusions. There is a stream of mystic fatalism in Ibsen so

powerful as to throw all his scientific tenets into doubt, and a good

measure, besides, of contempt, in the radical condition for men

and women who are called public."

That liberated and effective mode which miller desired to be

used in modern drama in place of realism associated with Ibsen

and shaw were expressionistic, and realistic techniques as

employed in The Death of a Salesman. Miller observes at out the

art and techniques used by him in his plays.

"For myself it is not possible to generate the energy to write

and complete a play if in advance I know everything it signifies

and all it will contain. The very impulse to write, springs from an

inner chaos crying for order for meaning must be discovered in the

process of the work as it is finished. To speak of a play as though it

were an objective work of a propagandist is an almost biological

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idea and of non sense provided of course, that it is a play which is

a work of art."

Arther Miller makes use of a simple, direct and dramatic

language in his plays. The language may at times seem too prosaic

but it is deliberately so. His language is carefully evaluated to be

profound. Arthur Miller accepted words, gestures and shapes of

the familiar world, and tried to expand with an imposition of

various forms in order to speak more directly of what has moved

me behind the visible facades of life. We find Miller expanding in

two directions. He had a desire to enrich his style with an

evaluation of life - a conscious articulation of ethical judgment. But

soon Miller encountered a problem. In The Man who had All the

Luck, he realised after comparing the work, he had not been able

to avoid a theoretical or discursive presentation of his theme. The

plan in All My Sons was to seek cause and effect, loved actions,

facts, the geometry of relationship and to hold back any tendency

forced out of a character's mouth. The following lines from The

Introduction are relevant to get an idea about Miller's Realism, He

says,

"A play I think ought to make sense with common sense

people. I know what it is to have been rejected by them. But the

only challenge worth the effort is the widest one and the tallest

when I think, is ought to be the barrier" Excess in experiment and

exploitation of the bizarre even as it is the proper aim of drama to

–::186::–
break down the limits of conventional unawareness and outmoded

and brand forms in whatever way it is achieved. The first aim of

the play to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the rout

bf passion may be opened up new relationships between man and

men. The ultimate justification for a genuine new form is the new

and heightened consciousness, it creates and makes possible a

man, unconscious of causation in the light of known but hitherto

explicable of effect. As an expressionist Miller believes that the

most significant consequences, Composing a character's

inheritance from past decisions might be mental and emotional,

not physical. He is interested not only in the physical but also in

the mental and emotional aspects of the characters. In the Death of

a Salesman he introduced expressionism to get at the passion

behind the physical facades. As stated above Arthur Miller is a

very arduous worker. It is clear from the fact that he led a crusade

against the old and conventional plays, which for the most part

were undramatic.

His plays are not melodramatic, not pessimistic. They are

tragedies. A tragedy as opined by some critics is a piece of drama

in which the action and the language are elevated, and the ending

is unhappy and sad. It ends in the fall or the disaster of the hero. It

has a serious language and elevated action, the hero has qualities

which may be called heroic like undaunted courage and power

and patience to suffer. Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of the

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world in English language has brought out a number of tragedies

which strike a spectator with power of regeneration. Joe Keller also

made efforts to seek for something extraordinary in the

protagonist. But despite all that they had, they fell a victim to

society. In Shakespeare's plays tragedy is perpetrated by villains.

As Othello's disaster is caused by the machinations of Iago. In

Miller's plays the disaster is brought about by the society.

One can trace the direction of the technique he has employed

in a number of plays. He has such a wide range of observation that

his characters and incidents have been drawn from various section

of society. Play like The Crucible and After the Fall demonstrate

that the older pattern in which man suffers from mysterious tragic

flaw is no longer valid. And the evils of society are various arid

complex. If a man must feel guilty it may not be necessary for his

own sons to suffer for his faults. He shares the collective

responsibility of wrong acts committed by others anywhere else.

This exactly is the subject matter of his next short play called

Incidents of the Vichy. In a small French town called Vichy people

are picked up from the road, and brought in for investigation by

Gestapo, the secret German city police. The suspects, several of

whom are not jews hope that they would be released after the

investigation. But a Jew named Ledue is fighety and nervous

because he is sure that he will be killed. He is sure they would find

out that he is a jew. As such he will not be spared. But one of the

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persons whose name is Van Berg, a non-jew who has just been

released gives over his pass to Ledue to save his life. In the process

his own life is endangered. His act is one of atonement for the rest

of his race. Thus, it may be said that Miller has offered al

important message to the world. The message says that ought to

face the evil of the society together. One individual cannot face the

society alone.

Miller again tries his hand at the realistic techniques in

another play entitled The Peace. The theme of the play is similar to

that of All My Sons. A man has two sons names Victor and Walter.

Shortly after their father's death they met together at their father's

house. They decide to sell off the furniture and the other valuables

left by their father. While waiting for customers they are reminded

of their past. The play has a parallel story. Victor is a middle-aged

police sergeant. On the other hand his brother Walter is a doctor.

He has a lot of money. Victor does not like him because he himself

does not have money. It is said that their family was poor. But in

spite of their poverty their father had money. But this fact was not

known to anybody. Victor could not get good education because of

the poverty of the family. Miller brings to light the fact that

nobody in the world is perfect. We all have our pitfalls which

annoy others. The only way to live in peace is the reconciliation

which can make things smooth for all of us.

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 Miller has had a wide experience of the world. As a true

artist he has to try to apprise people of no different ways which

make men of the world miserable. He offers the message in play

after play that people should raise themselves above their

prejudices and try to understand people in their true perspective.

It is only their understanding and their freedom from the

prejudices that can make their lives comfortable. The playwright

tries to highlight the tyranny of commercialism of the modern

society which exploits the helpless individuals caught in its web.

When we met Happy we find him cheerful. He has slept

through the night. He is happy at the reconciliation with Willy old

and decrepit man. He is unable to conduct the business in remote

places and so he seeks for a place in, New York. Thinking that his

boss might help him in his difficulty he meets young Howard, but

in vain. Howard is an embodiment of American commercialism.

According to Miller as he has been presented in his plays,

American commercialism, the spirit is to exploit the worker as

much as you can. The commercial capitalist has no sympathy with

his workers. As Miller says in The Death of A Salesman Wily

Loman served Howard heart and soul for more than sixty years so

much so that he has grown so weak that he finds difficult to travel

from place to place. Owing to this difficulty he makes an earnest

request to his boss to let him work in New York so that he may not

have to travel much. The purpose of Miller to present his scene is :

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how cruel, inconsiderate, and callous the capitalists are. He has

drawn a true picture of the working of commercial capitalism. For

Willy's own employer young Howard does not appear to have

time to see him. Willy makes all efforts to catch his attention. But

when at last he turns to Willy, instead of listening to his problems

and difficulties he asks why he has come to New York. He ought

to have been working in Boston taking care of business. Instead of

a sympathetic response Willy receives from his employer nothing

but humiliation and frustration. One can only imagine the plight

of Willy at the cruel response of the employer. What a pity! After

having put in hard labour, for more than thirty four years he is not

able to pay his insurance premium. Instead of hearing the words

of sympathy to assuage his suffering he is at once, dismissed from

his employment in spite of the fact that he has requested him to let

'him work in New York. This is the purpose of Miller's play : to

show how cruelly poor employees are treated by their rich

employers. And he has had full success in the fulfillment of his

aim. Willy says,

"I put thirty four years in your service and now I can not pay

my insurance."5 Ben, Willy's brother, is a rich man. He wanted

Loman to go to Alaska. He expected that both of them would earn

a lot of money there. But fie did not go.

In the beginning of the second act we find Willy happy at

breakfast. As a matter of fact he had slept only last night after

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several months. Willy centred al his hopes on Biff, his favourite

son. Willy compares a worker with an orange. After eating the

orange the peels are thrown away. Here is a fine metaphor.

Orange implies the real self of Willy and the peel is the body. It

means that Loman becomes so old that he can not work, he is

dismissed from service.

Miller has introduced into his play, A View from the Bridge

a new aspect of personality. He refers to the hidden forces of

instinct and passion. Just as in the earlier plays man is sometimes

shown to be a victim of outside forces beyond his control, similarly

he can fall a victim to the mysterious forces working from within

his body. In technique Miller also introduced here that new

element of the narrator who comes from time to time and

addresses the audience directly. He is like the chorus who

provides the narrator the background to the play also. This gives

an idea of a further departure in Arthur Miller's art from

conventional Realism in which he had been writing in his earlier

plays.

One can trace the form of Miller's style to his first famous

play Al My Sons. His plays like The Crucible and After the Fall

demonstrate that the old pattern in which man is shown suffering

from his own tragic flaw have got outmoded. A man suffers not

from his own guilt. He shares the collective responsibility of

wrong acts, committed by the other men and women any where

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else in any circumstances. It is clear from the above that and

individual alone is not responsible for what he suffers from. All of

them are collectively responsible for suffering.

Thus in the end it can be summed that All my Sons, Death of

A Salesman, The Crucible, Man who had All his Luck and After

the Fall are social dramas. Miller my not be social reformer, but he

is a social critic. He does Condemn faults of capitalism and

contemporary so social values. But his purpose is not political.

Miller criticizes society, a business-oriented society is which

corruption, selfishness, indifference, a system that turns men into

machines. Allan Lewis says about Miller :

"His plays have consisted of family dramas in which

the social issue is revealed through the personal

dilemma. The Family is a microcosm of a world

beyond, and the behaviour of an individual in love sex,

or parental relation is evidence of the choices imposed

by social necessity."

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