Comparing Tragedy And The Common Man

Arthur Miller’s Tragedy and the Common Man emphasizes on how the common man is the most appropriate being to be compared to heroic characters tragic literature, as the common man shares many similarities with them. From exploring and studying tragedies in literature, it has helped me think about tragedies that happen in recent news in a new way, by understanding certain kinds of deaths, like suicides, and thinking about a more significant reason for suicide, which is the common man’s fear of displacement.
The common man has the ability, similar to heroic protagonists in tragic literature, to not fully acknowledge and his fears and when these fears seem to besiege them, the common man ends up dying by a self-inflicted death. In this case, it is fear and the possibility of being somewhere that you wouldn’t want to be. Arthur Miller used the quote:
The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best (Miller 2).

Willy Loman, the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, had this idea of a certain image he wanted him and his son, Biff Loman, to possess and Willy believed that he had that image until reality hit him really had and he learned he wasn’t where he wanted to be, which is his greatest fear. This lead to a series of events that would cause him to commit suicide. His fear of being different than what he had imagined had caught up to him and he inflicted his own death upon