Death of a Salesman & Oedipus the King
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An overwhelming desire for personal contentment and unprecedented reputation can often result in a sickly twisted distortion of reality. In Sophocles Oedipus the King, a man well-known for his intellect and wisdom finds himself blind to the truth of h
life and his parentage. Arthur Millers play, The Death of a Salesman, tells of a tragic character so wrapped up in his delusional world that reality and illusion fuse causing an internal explosion that leads to his undoing. Each play enacts the strugg
of a man attempting to come to grips with his harsh reality and leaving behind his comfortable fantasy world. In the end, no man can escape the truth no matter how hard he may fight. In choosing the fragility of illusion over the stability of reality,
th characters meet their inevitable downfall.
At the moment of his birth, Oedipus receives a prophecy from the Delphic Oracle which states his destiny, “to grow up to murder his father and marry his mother (Sophocles 22).” Shocked and dismayed by this horrific prophecy, his parents King Laius and
een Jocasta of Thebes try to elude this inevitable curse by turning the infant over to a loyal servant, a Theban shepherd, to take Oedipus to “a woody dell of Cithaeron” to be killed (63). After riveting his ankles together and leaving him to die of the
lements, the old shepherd has a change of heart and hands the child over to a traveling shepherd from Corinth to take back to the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope to raise as their own son. For the next twenty years, Laius and Jocasta rule in The
s believing their son to be “done away with (69).” Unfortunately, Hera sends a drought associated with a sphinx to bedevil Thebes. A desperate Laius travels back to the Delphic Oracle for a reading while, in Corinth, Oedipus grows to manhood believing P
ybus and Merope, the King and Queen of Corinth, to be his real parents. Soon, he too learns of his dreadful fate and seeking to avoid it, he flees Corinth. As fate would have it, along the road, Oedipus crosses Laius path in a chance meeting and after
arly being “jostled off the road” by Laius, feels “infurious and land[s] him a blow” that kills him, unwittingly fulfilling the first half of the prophecy (54). Traveling on to Thebes, Oedipus saves the city from the drought by solving the riddle of the
phinx. Declared the new King of Thebes, he marries the widowed Queen Jocasta – his mother, unknowingly fulfilling the second half of the prophecy. For the next two decades, Oedipus rules successfully in Thebes until Hera sends a second drought to plague
he city. After sending his brother-in-law, Creon, back to the Delphic oracle for a reading, Oedipus learns that the second drought will not be lifted until the city of Thebes “discovers and banishes the just blood of Lauis assassin (26).” An over-confi
nt, yet unknowing King Oedipus takes charge of the investigation, and in doing so, condemns himself.
From the beginning of this unfortunate play Oedipus the King, Oedipus takes many actions and makes many choices leading to his own downfall. He could have endured the plague, but out of “compassion for his suffering people,” he has Creon go to Delphi (
). When he learns of Apollos word, he could have calmly investigated the murder of the former King Laius, but in his hastiness, he condemns the murderer saying he will be “cut off from every fellowship of speech and contact, sacrifice and sacramentt
ust out of every home, the very picture of pestilence” and in doing so, unknowingly curses himself (32). Oedipus chooses to ignore multiple warnings of the truth of his life and parentage. He chooses to ignore the ruinous prophecy of his “destiny to mur
r his father and marry his mother” because he feels he can escape the prophecy of the gods (22). Oedipus attempts to defy the gods by fleeing his homeland, Corinth, but instead flings himself directly into the hands of fate. Oedipus ignores another very
nlightening warning of truth in disregarding the words of Tiresias. He believes he has successfully escaped his own destiny and therefore, Tiresias words mean nothing, but Oedipus couldnt have been farther from the truth. In a few moments, Tiresias pr
ides Oedipus with everything he needs to know concerning his fate by saying, “the rotting canker in the state is you…you and your most dearly loved wrapped together in a hideous sin – blind to the horror of it” (37). Despite this obvious proclamation
truth, Oedipus “being his own worst enemy” chooses to wallow in his pleasant fantasy, that he has escaped his inevitable fate (38). Oedipus own foolish decisions ultimately lead to his downfall in this tragic play. Oedipus chooses to kill Laius. He ch
ses to marry Jocasta. He chooses to forcefully and very publicly assume the mission of discovering the identity of Laius killer saying ironically, “I shall not rest until Ive tracked the hand that slew Laius…[because] such ties swear me to his side
if he were my father” (32). He proceeds on this mission and chooses to ignore the warnings of Creon, Jocasta, Tiresias, the messenger, the shepherd, and anyone who attempts to stand between him and the truth; and he chooses to blind himself. In the en
Oedipus most foolish choice prevails throughout the play, the choice of illusion over reality, ultimately causing his demise.
The play, Death of a Salesman tells the tragic story of Willy Loman, a little man sentenced to discover his smallness rather than a big man undone by his greatness. Willy, a sixty-three year old family man, the father of two sons, has worked hard all h
life as a salesman, “way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” Willy sustains himself with the illusion that he has countless friends, and that everything will always be all right, and the success of he and his sons, Biff and Happy
will be unprecedented (Miller 138). The extreme to which Willy takes this illusion causes him to create his own reality where he, “knock[s] em cold in Providence,” and “slaughter[s] em in Boston” and where “five hundred gross in Providence” becomes “r
ghly