Death of a Salesman

A major theme in Death of a Salesman that caught my attention was the "American Dream" idea. This idea is that through hard work and determination, one can achieve happiness and wealth in their life. As seen in the play, Willy Loman epitomizes the American Dream. Even at the age of 63, he still travels hundreds of miles working countless hours to make another sale. His only goal in life is to make money so he can have a happy life and make his family happy too. However, in his quest for this American Dream, I feel Willy loses himself and becomes detached from his family. Due to his excessive traveling, Willy becomes lonely and ends up cheating on his wife with a woman at a hotel. Biff catches him with the woman which destroys their relationship and Biff can never look at his father the same way again.

I also feel that it is not fair of Willy to put this kind of pressure on his sons to become super rich businessmen, spending their entire lives trying to make money. I think that if Willy had encouraged his sons to pursue what they liked, they would have become more successful then what the ended up becoming: nothing. However, at the end I feel there is hope for Biff because he decides he wants to go down south to Texas and work outside, which is what he enjoys doing. I think that everybody can have their own version of the "American Dream" and Biff wants to fulfill his own and not Willy's.

Fires in the Mirror

A scene that intrigued me from Fires in the Mirror was “Isaac”. In this scene Letty Cottin Pogrebin tells a story of her uncle Isaac who lived in a concentration camp during World War II and was forced to herd Jews into a gas chamber in order to save his own life. Isaac discovered later that his wife and children were in the gas chamber.

This scene intrigued me because it came right after a scene where Minister Conrad Mohammad described how the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans over hundreds of years is the worst crime in history and that the Holocaust was not nearly as terrible. I think the Isaac scene is a response to the assertion from Mohammad that enslavement of Blacks was a lot worse than the Holocaust and therefore we should feel bad for the blacks, not the Jews.

After I read the Seven Verses monologue by Minister Conrad Mohammad, it made me agree with his argument. After all, slavery persecuted African and African-Americans for hundreds of years while the Holocaust only lasted half a decade. However, after reading the story about Isaac and the Holocaust, I don’t believe in Mohammad’s argument as much. The usage of a personal story to describe the Holocaust evokes the human emotion of empathy and touched me on a much more emotional level than Mohammad’s fact based argument. The image of Isaac going into the gas chamber after the people had died and seeing his wife and children sent shivers up and down my spine.

I have read my syllabus and accept the terms of the course.