"PRICE, THE" (ARTHUR MILLER).   Term Paper ID:22380 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Critical analysis of tragedy's characters, plot, themes, emotional impact, strengths & weaknesses.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Critical analysis of tragedy's characters, plot, themes, emotional impact, strengths & weaknesses. Paper Introduction: In his play The Price, Arthur Miller attempts to bring moral and familial issues far closer to home than he believes he had done in some of his "larger" social and political plays. He writes in his autobiography Timebends about his own vision and purpose with respect to the play and its very personal message: Two brothers, one a policeman, the other a successful surgeon, meet again after an angry breakup many years before. . . . Grown men now, they think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice; and they part unreconciled. Neither can accept that the world needs both of them---the dutiful man of order and the ambitious, selfish creator who invents new cures Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. London:Michelin House, 199 .Lewis, Allan. . The play is a tragedy because there is something in these brotherswhich prevents them from a reconciliation. . He writes in his autobiographyTimebends about his own vision and purpose with respect to the play and itsvery personal message: Two brothers, one a policeman, the other a successful surgeon, meet again after an angry breakup many years before. . . And on another two pages we find these dull lines aimed at allowingfurther exposition: "What for? Instead, thisreader simply grew weary of the undramatized exchanges between thebrothers, and came to care little for either of them. On the other hand,the exchanges between Victor and Solomon is dramatically compelling, andleads this reader to care for both characters and to empathize with thesuffering of Victor in the process of those exchanges. . . it is simply not enough to write in a production note at the endof the play, as Miller does, that "A fine balance of sympathy should bemaintained in the playing of the roles of Victor and Walter" (Miller Price117). . . There is also awearying repetition to that confrontation which unfortunatelyunderestimates the intelligence of the reader, as if Miller thought he hadto beat the message of pride into the dull heads of his readers andaudience. . . Works CitedBigsby, Christopher (ed.). New York: Viking, 1968.---. . Only when he is onstage with Solomon is Victorhimself, the play's protagonist, a compelling and involving individual.This reader hoped against hope that Solomon would finally intervene in theconfrontation between the brothers, rather than having been "moved to theperiphery of the central action" by Miller. They are incapable of fullyaccepting in themselves and in one another the differences between them.The message of the play is a good and moral one, but the heart of the story(the confrontation between Victor and Walter) is told too awkwardly andundramatically to carry the impact Miller intended. . The Price. As Richard Dreyfuss, an actor who played Victor in anotherproduction, says, "What [Victor] does to himself and to the people directlyaround him is a puzzle" (Bigsby 151). continues to be a formidable presence even when he has moved to the periphery of the central action (Weales 23). In Allan Lewis's American Plays and Playwrights of the ContemporaryTheatre, we read that Miller is "fascinated by the theme 'he is strongestwho stands alone'" (Lewis 45). For example, we hear far too many times about the money of thefather. What happened?. This is certainly true in this reader's opinion, but it isnevertheless a major problem with the play, for we should be far more movedby and involved with the brothers, particularly Victor, than we are withthe character of Solomon. . But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice; and they part unreconciled. It is no coincidence that thisplay is not one of Miller's more popular works. Solomon is clearly meant by Miller toserve as the realistic foundation of the play, but he is so strong and sorelentlessly fascinating that Victor and his brother pale in comparison.Solomon is the only character who truly "stands alone." Solomon also turns up in a number of comments on the play inChristopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller and Company. . American Plays and Playwrights of the ContemporaryTheatre. In Timebends, the author writes that"Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and lifeseemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusionsbecause the truth was too costly to face" (Miller Timebends 542). In his play The Price, Arthur Miller attempts to bring moral andfamilial issues far closer to home than he believes he had done in some ofhis "larger" social and political plays. Who the hell was supposed to keep him alive, Walter? I had no idea. . Grown men now, they think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. Ifwe do not understand the effects the main character has on those aroundhim, or on himself---if any---then we can hardly connect to the play in theway which Miller clearly intended. Thisreader completely disagrees with Weales that the allegiance of the audienceor reader shifts from brother to brother and back again. As one cast member of oneversion of the play says, "The joy of Gregory Solomon lies in the richnessof the character and the colorful nature of [his] language" (Bigsby 154).Again, the problem is not the richness or strength of Solomon, but ratherthe fact that his character so overwhelms Victor and his brother in bothcharacter and language that we lose interest in, and are even bored andirritated by, the brothers in comparison with Solomon. . What nursing homes?" (8 -81). . Timebends. Arthur Miller and Company. The brothers,as Weales point out, keep introducing new twists on the past and theirinterpretation of the past, but they are like stick figures who appear tobe incurably dense. However, the heart of the play issupposed to be the confrontation between the brothers, which in fact fallsflat when compared to the Victor-Solomon exchanges. This view, however, is not unanimous, as we see in a study ofcritical comments on the play. . Where did you imagine the rest of his living was coming from? . What talk? Weales does acknowledge that the character of Solomon is the mostcompelling part of the play. The reader comes inevitably to the conclusion that the play is not adramatic presentation of the differences between the brothers, but insteada half-digested attempt by the author to make a point which takes the formof a debate without compelling force. The character's impact is also apuzzle to this reader, and a central and unsolved problem in the play. He says that the strength of the work lies in the character of Gregory Solomon, who dominates the play when he is on stage and . The problem, in terms of the application ofthis belief to The Price, is that Solomon becomes the strongest characterin the play, and that the brothers are exposed as squabbling, boring, andunsympathetically weak characters. The most interesting parts of the play involve confrontations notbetween the brothers, whose positions are all too clear and who neverreally have a hope of reconciliation because of their mutual immaturity andintransigence, but between Victor and Solomon, the old furniturebuyer/seller. . Doesn't that matter to you? New York: Crown, 1965.Miller, Arthur. The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 196 s.Toronto: Macmillan, 1969.----------------------- 1 . Neither can accept that the world needs both of them---the dutiful man of order and the ambitious, selfish creator who invents new cures (Miller Timebends 542). . . Theproblem is that Miller has not solved the dramatic problem of how topresent their irreconcilable differences in a way that does not irritatethe readers or audience but instead causes them to have sympathy for bothbrothers. . We hear over and over again about the differences between thebrothers and their obvious failure to come to any compassionate or humblingunderstanding of one another's positions. But what's that got to do with you? The reader comes to feel little butirritation for the brothers, rather than the compassion for them whichMiller certainly intends for us to feel. In those interchanges between Victor and Solomon, Miller isable to dramatically and compellingly show (rather than tell) the naturesof two characters who are able to truly butt heads (without undueexposition) and, as a result, to come to some kind of a mutualunderstanding by the end of the play. Miller himself at least partially recognizes the problem at the heartof the encounter between the brothers. . For example, on two pageswe read the following "straight lines" which weaken the dramatic flow andmake the reader aware that the author has not found a dramatic way tointroduce this new information: What did I say?! Although Gerald Weales acknowledges that theplay is full of "the expositional past" (Weales 21), he neverthelessconcludes that Miller is successful in portraying the confrontation betweenthe brothers: Their encounter is a long, quarrelsome discussion, a kind of mutual analysis, which would be impossible (they characters are always saying that they want to get things clear, as though they were panel participants) if it were not that Miller so carefully builds the scene that the audience gets caught up in the self- justifying attacks, shifting allegiance from one brother to the other as new revelations, new modifications, new admissions are uncovered (Weales 22). (Miller Price 9 -91). What's wrong with that? . . Miller is leaving up to the actors to execute action and dialoguewhich he has not successfully or dramatically written into the play itself. The exchanges between the brothers should be the most exciting partof the play but instead it is the most tedious and annoying. Theproblem is not that the brothers are incapable of reconciliation. . . Over and over again, both characters mouth lines whichshow this mental density and which are far too awkwardly designed to allowthe other character to introduce such new twists. New York: Grove, 1987.Weales, Gerald. . However, this reader was simply and completely put off by bothcharacters as they go on and on with their repetitive, "long, quarrelsomediscussion." Drama is no place for such a long-winded "mutual analysis"between characters whose positions should be dramatized rather thanpresented as a seemingly endless and increasingly irritating debate. . If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.