Wednesday, December 25, 2019

A Critical Look at Death of a Salesman

Have you ever loved a rock band that had lots of great songs you cherished? But then the band’s hit single, the one everyone knows by heart, the one that gets all the airtime on the radio, isn’t a song you particularly admire? That’s the way I feel about Arthur Millers  Death of a Salesman. It’s his most famous play, yet I think it pales in comparison to many of his less popular dramas. Although it’s by no means a bad play, it certainly is overrated in my view. Wheres the Suspense? Well, you have to admit, the title does give everything away. The other day, while I was reading Arthur Miller’s esteemed tragedy, my nine-year-old daughter asked me, â€Å"What are you reading?† I replied, Death of a Salesman, and then at her request, I read a few pages to her. She stopped me and announced, â€Å"Daddy, this is the world’s most boring mystery.† I got a good chuckle out of that. Of course, it’s a drama, not a mystery. However, suspense is a vital component of tragedy. When we watch a tragedy, we fully anticipate death, destruction, and sadness by the play’s end. But how will the death occur? What will bring about the destruction of the protagonist? When I watched Macbeth for the first time, I guessed that it would conclude with Macbeth’s demise. But I didnt know what the cause of his undoing would be. After all, he and Lady Macbeth thought they’d never be â€Å"vanquished until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.†Ã‚  Like the main characters, I had no idea how a forest could turn against them. It seemed absurd and impossible. Therein lay the suspense: And as the play unfolded, sure enough, the forest comes marching right up to their castle! The main character in  Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, is an open book. We learn very early on in the play that his professional life is a failure. He’s the low-man on the totem pole, hence his last name, â€Å"Loman.† (Very clever, Mr. Miller!) Within the first fifteen minutes of the play, the audience learns that Willy is no longer capable of being a traveling salesman. We also learn that he is suicidal. Spoiler! Willy Loman kills himself at the end of the play. But well before the conclusion, it becomes clear that the protagonist is bent upon self-destruction. His decision to kill himself for the $20,000 insurance money comes as no surprise; the event is blatantly foreshadowed throughout much of the dialogue. The Loman Brothers I have a hard time believing in Willy Loman’s two sons. Happy is the perennially ignored son. He has a steady job and keeps promising his parents that he’s going to settle down and get married. But in reality, he’s never going far in business and plans to sleep around with as many women as possible. Biff is more likable than Happy. He has been toiling on farms and ranches, working with his hands. Whenever he returns home for a visit, he and his father argue. Willy Loman wants him to make it big somehow. Yet, Biff is fundamentally incapable of holding down a 9-to-5 job. Both brothers are in their mid-thirties. Yet, they act as though they are still boys. We dont learn much about them. The play is set in the productive years following World War II. Did the athletic Loman brothers fight in the war? It doesn’t seem like it. In fact, they don’t seem to have experienced much during the seventeen years since their high school days. Biff has been moping. Happy has been philandering. Well-developed characters possess more complexity. By leaps and bounds, their father, Willy Loman, is the strongest, most complex character of Arthur Miller’s play. Unlike many of the show’s flat characters, Willy Loman has depth. His past is a complicated tangle of regrets and undying hopes. Great actors such as Lee J. Cobb and Philip Seymour Hoffman have mesmerized audiences with their portrayals of this iconic salesman. Yes, the role is filled with powerful moments. But is Willy Loman truly a tragic figure? Willy Loman: Tragic Hero? Traditionally, tragic characters (such as Oedipus or Hamlet) were noble and heroic. They possessed a tragic flaw, usually a bad case of hubris, or excessive pride. In contrast, Willy Loman represents the common man. Arthur Miller felt that tragedy could be found in the life of ordinary people. While I agree with this premise, I also have found that tragedy is most powerful when the main character’s choices become whittled away, much like a masterful yet imperfect chess player who suddenly realizes he is out of moves. Willy Loman has options. He has a lot of opportunities. Arthur Miller seems to be criticizing the American Dream, claiming that corporate America drains the life out of people and casts them away when they are no further use. Yet, Willy Loman’s successful neighbor continually offers him a job! Willy Loman declines the job without ever explaining why. He has a chance to pursue a new life, but he wont let himself give up his old, soured dreams. Instead of taking the decent paying job, he chooses suicide. At the play’s end, his loyal wife sits at his grave. She does not understand why Willy took his own life. Arthur Miller claims that Willys internalization of the dysfunctional values of American society killed him. An interesting alternate theory would be that Willy Loman suffered from dementia. He exhibits many of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In an alternate narrative, his sons and his ever-attentive wife would recognize his failing mental condition. Of course, this version would not qualify as a tragedy either.

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Parts Of Speech Parts - 1273 Words

Caleb Morrow English Grammar Research Paper 7 April 2015 Parts of Speech Parts of speech are the basic words that English has. They are what we use every day in our life. There are a total of eight parts of speech but recently there has been another one added. The nine parts of speech are: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, preposition, and interjection. It is important to be able to recognize and identify the different types of words in English, so that you can understand grammar explanations and use the right word form in the right place in any situation. A noun is a person, place, or thing. It is also called a naming word. There are different types of nouns as well. There are count nouns, mass nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns, and collective nouns. Count nouns are anything that can be counted like: five baseballs, a few glass bowls, or a dozen eggs. A mass noun is something that can’t be counted such as water, air, and blood. A collective noun is a noun that can take a singular form but are composed of more than one ind ividual person or items like a jury, team, class, or a herd. An abstract noun is a noun with the kind of word that is not tangible like warmth, justice, grief, or peace. A collective noun is a noun that help with words that can be singular or plural. A verb is a word that describes an action or a state of being something. There are four verb forms. There is a base form, past form, present participle, and a past participle.Show MoreRelatedA Survey On Various Platforms For Sanskrit And Part Of Speech Tagging Methods2103 Words   |  9 PagesA survey on various platforms for Sanskrit and Part-Of-Speech Tagging Methods Sulabh Bhatt, Parmar Krunal Department Of Computer Science, Gujarat University Ahmedabad, India sulabhbhatt@gmail.com parmar.krunal005@gmail.com Abstract - In this paper we present a Natural language processing for Sanskrit using Different approaches. Sanskrit is a oldest and considered as the mother of all languages. The Sanskrit, the world s ancient language has got a wealthy grammar. The Sanskrit grammar text AshtadhyayiRead MoreAdverbs in English Grammar1207 Words   |  5 Pagesin –ly and that describe adjectives or other adverbs. The adverb class is sometimes called the â€Å"trash can† class because grammarians have traditionally placed many words that fit nowhere else into this category. Adverbs can describe just about any part of a sentence or clause. Consequently, there are many subclasses of the adverb class, upon which not all grammarians agree. Adverbs that take the derivational –ly ending comprise the largest subclass of adverbs. These adverbs are the easiest to identifyRead MoreQuestions On The Final Exam2872 Words   |  12 PagesOmar Alharthi Prof. Hagstrom LING 408 12.7.2014 Final Exam Part 1 Discuss briefly any four of the following topics (about 100-300 words each). Provide examples to illustrate your discussion. a. Aspect: Aspect grammatical category of verbs denotes the flow of time related to the event they express. Unlike tense that is semantically rather related to the event in time, aspect is about time moving through the event (Riemer 314). The difference between, for example, â€Å"I walked† and â€Å"I was walking† isRead MoreContoh Skripsi Bahasa Inggris2736 Words   |  11 Pagespronouns and can also be followed by verbs but, except after but and except, the verb must be in the gerund form (Thomson, 1986: 91) Preposition includes to kinds of ‘function words’ which means â€Å"a word that doesn’t belong to one of the four major parts of speech in English (noun, verb, adjective, adverb). â€Å"Their purpose is not only to express meaning but to relate other words to each other† (Hornby, 1975:7). According to (Hornby, 1975:7) there are eight function words among the function words are: 1.Read MorePart of Speech Recognizer3200 Words   |  13 PagesImproving Identiï ¬ er Informativeness using Part of Speech Information Dave Binkley Matthew Hearn Dawn Lawrie Loyola University Maryland Baltimore MD 21210-2699, USA {binkley, lawrie}@cs.loyola.edu, mthearn@loyola.edu Keywords: source code analysis tools, natural language processing, program comprehension, identiï ¬ er analysis Abstract Recent software development tools have exploited the mining of natural language information found within software and its supporting documentation. To make the most ofRead MoreSystem Architecture Of Event And Temporal Information Extraction1420 Words   |  6 Pagessection of this chapter discusses our data source. The system is consist of four components the first component responsible for data preprocessing, the second for tagging, which contain different syntactic and semantic tagging tools, Stanford part of speech tagger, Stanford parser, HeidelTime temporal tagger, Stanford named entity recognizer. Third component is the extractor and finally the template generator. The components are discussed in detail afterward. The architecture is depicted in Fig 6Read MoreWe Propose A Novel Framework For Tweet Segmentation1030 Words   |  5 Pagesterm-dependency in a batch of tweets, respectively. HybridSeg is also designed to iteratively learn from confident segments as pseudo feedback. As an application, we show that high accuracy is achieved in named entity recognition by applying segment-based part-of-speech (POS) tagging. Index Terms-Twitter stream, Tweet segmentation, Named Entity Recognition, Linguistic processing 1. INTRODUCTION Twitter, as a new type of social media, has seen tremendous growth in recent years. It has attracted great interestsRead MoreUsing A Part Of Speech Tagger1291 Words   |  6 Pages The tags used within the proposed patterns do not require the use of a part of speech tagger; in fact, each tag has a list of finite possible values that is dialect dependent. So while the presented patterns themselves, are mostly dialect independent, the range of possible values from which tags in a pattern can be derived, depends on the dialect that is being targeted. Our work and experiments have focused on Egyptian Arabic; and more specifically, the Cairene dialect. In the first phase, theRead MoreGraduation Speech : College Is A Significant Part Of My Life That Influenced My Development Essay1671 Words   |  7 PagesGetting accepted to college is a significant part of my life that influenced my development. Making the transition from high school to college was a difficult to me. During this transition, I was living away from home and my parents for the first time. I had to make critical decisions that will affect their college experience. Magolda said, â€Å"higher education has a responsibility to help young adults make the transition from their socialization by society to their role as members and leaders in society’sRead MoreThe Reaction of Colin Powells Speech at Howard University Essay618 Words   |  3 PagesThe Reaction of Colin Powells Speech at Howard University General Colin Powell did the Commencement speech at Howard University on May 25, 1994. He did the speech after a cloud of controversy had happen at the university. A racist Black Muslim made a speech at Howard University. Howard policy is that anybody can express his or her freedom of speech on there campus. As you can figure out, the white community did not think of that very well. Connie Chung did a report saying that Howard University

Monday, December 9, 2019

Death Of A Salesman Willys I Essay Example For Students

Death Of A Salesman Willys I Essay Willy Loman is destroyed by his own ideals;Willy Loman is a travelling salesman who has worked for the Wagner firm for 34 years. He is now 61 years old and his job has been taken off salary and put on commission. He has a family and he boasts to them that he is vital in New England,; but in fact he isnt vital anywhere. Willy has many strong beliefs that he strives to achieve. He wants to own his own business and he wants to be bigger than Uncle Charley; and especially he wants to be a great success and he tries to emulate Dave Singleman. He wishes to die the Death of a Salesman; and have many buyers and salesmen mourn for him. He also tries to be a good father, and husband. However Willys aims in life have been useless as he hasnt really achieved anything. He got fired by Howard, his sons are both failures and they abandoned him in a restaurant toilet. His relationship with his wife is plagued by his guilt for committing adultery. He has to borrow $50 a week from Charley. He cant even keep his mind on one thing for a long time. He cant drive a car. Willy gets so fed up with all of these things that he wants to commit suicide and eventually, he does. This topic suggests that Willys deterioration occurs because the principals he believes in. To a large extent this is true. After 34 years of Willys life, he loses his job. To a normal person under normal circumstances, being retrenched is a time when you feel useless. But for Willy, since everything else is going wrong at the same time, he feels like a useless old man. Willy thought that just because he named his boss, that he would have a secure future with the company but as Charley said them things dont mean anything? You named him Howard, but you cant sell that.; Even though Willy wasnt even getting paid a salary, Howard didnt want him to even represent the company in case Willy cracked up; again. Although Willy is mostly destroyed by his own ideals there are other things that destroy him as well, like Howard, Happy and Biff. Willy is emotionally destroyed when Howard fires him. Then, both of his sons disown and abandon him in Franks Chop House. Both Happy and Biff left their father talking to himself in the bathroom while they wanted to have a good night out with the girls. That also destroyed Willy because it showed that his sons didnt really care if he lived or died. Willy cant even drive a car though because he cant keep his mind on anything for a long period of time. In the past he has had a few car accidents because his mind keeps wandering Where are you guys, where are you? The woods are burning! I cant drive a car!; Willy knows though that he is deteriorating and that nobody can help him except for him. Willy Loman, is indeed a low man. He has a very low self esteem and the only person that really doesnt love him is himself. Willy had great goals (ideals) in practice, but the only thing that he didnt realize is that if he didnt achieve those goals it wouldnt be the end of the world. Willy took it a step to far though, he thought that his life wasnt worth living anymore, therefore Willy Loman was definitely destroyed by his own ideals.

Monday, December 2, 2019

Karl Marx Essays (2211 words) - German Lutherans,

Karl Marx Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in Prussia, now, Germany. He was one of seven children of Jewish Parents. His father was fairly liberal, taking part in demonstrations for a constitution for Prussia and reading such authors as Voltaire and Kant, known for their social commentary. His mother, Henrietta, was originally from Holland and never became a German at heart, not even learning to speak the language properly. Shortly before Karl Marx was born, his father converted the family to the Evangelical Established Church, Karl being baptized at the age of six. Marx attended high school in his home town (1830-1835) where several teachers and pupils were under suspicion of harboring liberal ideals. Marx himself seemed to be a devoted Christian with a "longing for self-sacrifice on behalf of humanity." In October of 1835, he started attendance at the University of Bonn, enrolling in non-socialistic-related classes like Greek and Roman mythology and the history of art. During this time, he spent a day in jail for being "drunk and disorderly-the only imprisonment he suffered" in the course of his life. The student culture at Bonn included, as a major part, being politically rebellious and Marx was involved, presiding over the Tavern Club and joining a club for poets that included some politically active students. However, he left Bonn after a year and enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. Marx's experience in Berlin was crucial to his introduction to Hegel's philosophy and to his "adherence to the Young Hegelians." Hegel's philosophy was crucial to the development of his own ideas and theories. Upon his first introduction to Hegel's beliefs, Marx felt a repugnance and wrote his father that when he felt sick, it was partially "from intense vexation at having to make an idol of a view [he] detested." The Hegelian doctrines exerted considerable pressure in the "revolutionary student culture" that Marx was immersed in, however, and Marx eventually joined a society called the Doctor Club, involved mainly in the "new literary and philosophical movement" who's chief figure was Bruno Bauer, a lecturer in theology who thought that the Gospels were not a record of History but that they came from "human fantasies arising from man's emotional needs" and he also hypothesized that Jesus had not existed as a person. Bauer was later dismissed from his position by the Prussian government. By 1841, Marx's studies were lacking and, at the suggestion of a friend, he submitted a doctoral dissertation to the university at Jena, known for having lax acceptance requirements. Unsurprisingly, he got in, and finally received his degree in 1841. His thesis "analyzed in a Hegelian fashion the difference between the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus" using his knowledge of mythology and the myth of Prometheus in his chains. In October of 1842, Marx became the editor of the paper Rheinische Zeitung, and, as the editor, wrote editorials on socio-economic issues such as poverty, etc. During this time, he found that his "Hegelian philosophy was of little use" and he separated himself from his young Hegelian friends who only shocked the bourgeois to make up their "social activity." Marx helped the paper to succeed and it almost became the leading journal in Prussia. However, the Prussian government suspended it because of "pressures from the government of Russia." So, Marx went to Paris to study "French Communism." In June of 1843, he was married to Jenny Von Westphalen, an attractive girl, four years older than Marx, who came from a prestigious family of both military and administrative distinction. Although many of the members of the Von Westphalen family were opposed to the marriage, Jenny's father favored Marx. In Paris, Marx became acquainted with the Communistic views of French workmen. Although he thought that the ideas of the workmen were "utterly crude and unintelligent," he admired their camaraderie. He later wrote an article entitled "Toward the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right" from which comes the famous quote that religion is the "opium of the people." Once again, the Prussian government interfered with Marx and he was expelled from France. He left for Brussels, Belgium, and , in 1845, renounced his Prussian nationality. During the next two years in Brussels, the lifelong collaboration with Engels deepened further. He and Marx, sharing the same views, pooled their "intellectual resources" and published The Holy Family, a criticism of the Hegelian idealism of Bruno Bauer. In their next work, they demonstrated their materialistic conception of history but the book found no publisher and "remained unknown during its