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Definition of Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a... read full definition
Dramatic Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Willy's Failing Memory:
Death of a Salesman sets itself apart from other plays through its innovative use of flashback. The play continually circles back through time, creating a nonlinear narrative that disorients the audience and reinforces its tragic character. Willy’s sense of the past is crucial to grasping the full significance of the play’s real-time events.
Flashback is the play’s the principal source of dramatic irony. Death of a Salesman is told mainly through Willy’s own perspective, so the substance of his memories goes unnoticed by other characters. As consequence, the play makes certain knowledge available only to the audience. Willy’s mistress, laughing while “dimly seen” dressing behind a scrim, informs the reader of the infidelities that he withholds from Linda. Elsewhere in Act 1, Willy converses with the ghost of his dead brother, Ben, much to the confusion of his neighbor Charley. As Willy’s dinner and memories of the Boston hotel room converge in Act 2, flashbacks help unearth the scandal that underlies his strained relationship with Biff. he reader recognizes Willy’s declining sanity, even when he himself does not. By granting the audience this privileged access, the play draws attention to all the characters trapped in their faults and personal blind spots.
This blending of past and present adds to the sorrowful plotline by juxtaposing Willy’s happier memories with his current, abject state. Flashbacks flip constantly between Willy’s youthful and befuddled selves, a technique that makes their contrasts all the more jarring. Willy’s “wonderful” masculine appeal is set against his present paunchiness, his former confidence against his pitiful appeals in Howard’s office. Willy’s movement between the past and present sharpens the pathos of his fall.
On the level of the narrative, flashback figuratively symbolize Willy's thwarted aspirations. Reveries of the past meddle with the play’s sequence of real-time events, as though frustrating the more straightforward telling of his story. The characters in Willy’s flashbacks—such as his mistress or Ben—appear almost as lifelike as those in real-time, bending the play’s sense of reality and its normal progression. Willy’s actual errands—much like his personal ambitions—are constantly interrupted, delayed, or deferred by those who wander in from his past.
Related Themes:
Act 1
Explanation and Analysis—Linda's Faithfulness:
Willy’s wife, Linda, creates pathos (appeals to the audience's emotions) through her unwavering devotion to her husband, evoking sympathy for Willy and, in the process, herself. When Biff yells at his mother to “stop making excuses” for Willy’s behavior in Act 1, she rallies to her husband’s defense:
I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that’s ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.
The emotional effect of Linda’s spousal devotion is twofold: her portrait of Willy solicits the audience's compassion by revealing his deeply human ordinariness. To the play’s self-aggrandizing showman, she presents an overlooked dimension of earnestness. The sincerity of Willy’s striving only grows more tragic as she narrates his struggles. The subsequent descriptions of her husband—the “exhausted” salesman traveling hundreds of miles on his own expense, in spite of multiple suicide attempts—introduces a tenderness that the reader would not have otherwise felt.
But the pathos applies itself equally to Linda. Her unswerving faith in her husband makes herself no less of a pathetic figure. Deferent and in denial about her husband’s abilities, Linda is a case study of female subservience. Her devotion to Willy is also an example of dramatic irony, because the play reveals to the audience Willy’s extramarital affairs in earlier scenes, soliciting pity on Linda’s behalf. By furnishing this uncomfortable knowledge, Death of a Salesman forces the audience to share in Biff’s deeply conflicted emotions. Linda adores her “dearest man” with heartbreaking levels of faith, and so much that she gets duped by her own trust in his abilities.
Related Themes:
Act 2
Explanation and Analysis—Willy's Delusion:
One of the play’s many ironies is Willy’s unraveling mind. The audience is aware of Willy’s deteriorating mind, even though he himself is not, and this gap in understanding is an example of pathos: it appeals to the audience's emotions and cultivates sympathy toward the aging salesman. Willy’s fraying memory announces itself early in Act 1, when he first addresses his sons and wife from the past. Repeated flashbacks—he speaks to his deceased brother Ben, Bernard, and Charley—affirm his crumbling sanity and evoke the reader’s pity.
By presenting to the reader what Willy himself is unaware of, the play dramatizes the salesman’s ignorance and, by extension, his delusion. Willy is as oblivious to his faith in upward mobility as he is to his mental weakness. His blindness culminates in his ultimate act of delusion. When Biff declares his separation from Willy, the salesman interprets the gesture instead as an admission of love:
BIFF: Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? (Struggling to contain himself, he pulls away and moves to the stairs.) I’ll go in the morning. Put him—put him to bed. (Exhausted, Biff moves up the stairs to his room.)
WILLY (after a long pause, astonished, elevated): Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!
In this scene, Willy misunderstands Biff's rejection of him and his “phony dream," instead interpreting it as an affirmation of adoration for his father. As with his mental degeneration, Willy is oblivious to his son’s estrangement and even further empowered to support Biff through suicide. Willy’s sacrifice—like his own mental faculties—takes on tragic proportions through its heart-wrenching irony.
Related Themes:
