Reflection of Death of a SalesmanNo doubt about it, Death of a Salesman is both deep and depressing. It is about a four-person family in 1949 New York after the two sons, Biff and Happy, have moved out. Their mother is called Linda and their father Willy Loman, who is the salesman. The focus of the play is on Biff and Willy. It talks about the importance of hard work and of truth and how the family got both wrong. The family argues and lies a lot, and in the end, Willy kills himself to give his life insurance to his family.
I did not like the play. It was excellently written, and the narrators were very talented, but it was too sad for me. The lives of each individual in the family have been so terrible, especially Willy and Biff, who kept increasing their problems by lying and ignoring the truth. We can see where many of the problems originated by reviewing the scenes the portray the past. In them, we can see that Willy is gone most of the time, but his sons look up to him and enjoy having him around. In return, Willy does not mind when Biff does not do well in school or steals, but rather encourages him and says “Personality always wins the day 1”. This continues, and finally Biff fails math, not allowing him to go to university. He decides to leave home and go work on a farm. This begins over a decade of bad relations between him and his family. Willy always believed that personality was more important than hard work, but this shows that nowadays if you want to get anywhere, you need to work hard. I found that the end of the play was quite vague. The setting is Willy’s funeral, and Linda is very sad. Biff is still insulting Willy, saying that “He never knew who he was 2”, but this time Happy takes Willy’s side. He swears to continues in his father’s footsteps and become a salesman, while Biff maintains that he does not want to be one. There is not much insight to what will happen, and the play silently fades away. I believe that Arthur Miller ended it like this for the audience to think about the message and to wonder about which son made the better choice. 1 p. 46 2 p. 103 The Ballad of CrowfootI chose the Ballad of Crowfoot as my narrative song. It was written by Willie Dunn in 1971. It talks about the inhumane treatment of the aboriginals by colonial settlers. I think that the song is a lot more effective now than if it were in paragraph form. With a few lines in a verse, it is easy to focus on each word, instead of in paragraph form when you skip two or three. The repetition of dates could not have been done as effectively if it was a paragraph, and nor could the rhyming. The writing style would also have been different and would have needed more words to tell the story. Although the content of the song is very important, the rhythm and rhyme also tell a story. For this reason, reading and listening to the song have completely different effects. When the Ballad of Crowfoot is sung, a haunting melody and rhythm is used, talking of the horror of the treatment of the First Nations and how sad and broken they are now. The story is written with eight verses, with the last word of each line rhyming with the last word of the next line. This rhyming makes the text easier on the ears, helping us listen better. The Ballad of Crowfoot has many rhetorical devices that, combined with the haunting melody, send the message across very well. A prominent one is that of repetition. The second last line of each verse says a year of Crowfoot’s life, and that verse describes what happens in that year. That method of describing Crowfoot’s life makes it easy to follow along and understand the different stages of his life. Foreshadowing is also used in the poem in two places. The first is when Crowfoot is thinking about the Sioux and the Nez Percé, how broken they are, and how his tribe will soon be the same. The second is when he is about to sign the treaty, and he knows that the settlers will never keep their side of the agreement. Finally, there is the metaphor, the buffalo. For the aboriginals that lived in the plains, they were a huge part of life. The hide could be used to build tipis, the meat to eat and hunting them was a traditional event. When they began to be slaughtered, the Blackfoot began to die. The song ends with a short verse, hoping that someday there will be less hate and more love for the long-suffering First Nations. AuthorThe narrative song of my choice was written by Willie Dunn, a Canadian of Mi’kmaq, Scottish and Irish descent. He was born in Montreal in 1942, and died in Ottawa in 2013. He was a singer, playwright and guitarist with many songs and videos to his name, his two most famous works being the song “Ballad of Crowfoot”, and a NFB movie with the same name. They both talk about the inhumane treatment of aboriginals by white settlers. In 1993, he ran as an NDP for parliament, coming fourth in his riding. MediographyNews, CBC. "Aboriginal Singer, Activist Willie Dunn Dies at 71 - Arts & Entertainment - CBC News." CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, 09 Aug. 2013. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.
"Willie Dunn." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 July 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014. Themes of DavidDavid is a poem written by Earle Birney in 1942. It is about two mountain climbers, Bob and David, and them climbing different mountains in the rockies. They enjoy the challenge of climbing, but one day the challenge proves too much, and David falls. He is caught on a ledge above an enormous fall, but his spine is broken and he is about to die. He asks his climbing partner to push him over, and his friend complies and saves him from hours of incredible pain.
This poem, as many poems do, has themes. The most obvious one is euthanasia. Euthanasia is and has been illegal for awhile, but it is a very controversial subject. Many believe that it should be legal, and David shows one of their arguments. It show that although people around the person suffering want them to stay forever (Bob), the sufferer knows that it will do no good and wants to move on. Interestingly, there is a foreshadowing of David dying, when David himself shows that he is for euthanasia, killing a young bird that had broken it’s wings. A second theme, used more but not as serious as euthanasia is the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. Almost the whole poem describes in excellent imagery, metaphors and adjectives, the diversity and beauty of the mountains, from the “frozen ocean of rock” to “a gurgling world of crystal and cold blue chasms” to “the darkening firs”. It talks about the fauna and flora, the water and sky, the peaks and the moon. The poem is so well written that you can get lost in the words and imagine yourself with those two young and daring mountain climbers, bent on seeing the world from a bird’s view. These themes complement each other, one making it an excellently written poem, and the other giving it a more profound meaning. I believe that they are what make David such a success. |