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Pathos
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Death of a Salesman narrates a single day’s events in late 1940s Brooklyn. Much of the play unfolds in Willy’s house and its immediate urban surroundings. Many of the work’s conflicts are implicitly staged in its settings, too. Miller offers the audience glimpses of a changing American socioeconomic landscape through his treatment of place: Willy’s suburban home, for instance, is increasingly “boxed” in by a “solid vault of apartment houses,” imposing structures that encroach upon his hopes of striking it rich. He shows his age—and the vulnerability of his own aspirations—as he half-stumbles through the city on a string of everyday errands.
The events leading up to Willy’s suicide are, by most accounts, ordinary: he eats breakfast, unsuccessfully petitions his boss for a pay raise, visits his neighbor’s office, and eats dinner at a restaurant with his sons. But the play makes up for this apparent mundanity with its manipulation of time. Death of a Salesman travels through a more expansive range of settings by way of Willy’s fragmented recollections. Willy’s thoughts continually drift into the past, summoning distant backdrops from his earlier years. In fact, one of the play’s other central locations—the Boston hotel room where his son uncovered his extramarital affairs—never makes an actual appearance along his trip through the city. Memory becomes a place unto itself.
This journey through time represents a kind of liberation for both the play and its protagonist. Like the dying salesman himself, Death of a Salesman transcends its immediate physical limits through memory. As past overlays itself onto the present, the two timeframes combine to form a more varied and vibrant journey.
