【正文】 Death of a Salesman. 5 Chapter 1 Stage Design As one of the most prominent American playwrights in the 20th century, Arthur Miller is renowned in the literary circle for his plays dealing with social and moral problems. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, is reputed as the epitome of classic American dramas in the history of dramatic position, a play which confines itself to exposing business corruption, domestic disputes, collapse of citizen morality, or the illusional American Dream. According to J. T. Nourse, Miller has skillfully bined the merits of Henrik Ibsen?s plays, Expressionism and Experimentalism, so that his plays boast wellconstructed and pact plots, unrestrained and unlimited flows of stream of consciousness and psychological analysis, on account of which he imprints his surpassing and skillful stage design on the audience?s minds. As an arena to mount a play, the stage plays an important role in a dramatic performance. Generally speaking, a stage functions as follows: providing space for anizing and presenting dialogues and actions, serving as a melieu for their recurrence and demonstrating the underlying sense and significance in them. In addition, one stage consists of a platform, stage scenery, stage properties, lighting and so on. The interplay of those interlocking elements, acting as a whole, influences the charm and charisma of plays. Stage Scenery In Death of a Salesman mingle the present reality, the reminiscence of the past and Willy?s hallucinatory experiences. Still, this kind of temporal and spatial crisscross expands the limited stage space to a boundless range, instead of bringing to it a sense of confusion and chaos. 6 In Act One, Miller gives a detailed introduction to the stage scenery: “The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially transparent. The roofline of the house is onedimensional。 his two sons were breezy and cheery and everyone respected and revered him. When Willy buries himself in his interior world, all the sceneries on the stage are shadowed by darkness, only a beam of intense white light illuminating his face. The distinct contraction of white and black makes a sharp indiscrimination, just as a closeup shot in a movie. In the end, lighting also dissects the whole stage into several parts to suffice the specific requirements. For example, as the reality and fantasy alternatively take place, lighting on the stage will bee bright or dark in succession, therefore, making the focal point stood out. 12 Chapter 2 Characterization Set in a mon American family, Death of a Salesman depicts a senior citizen?s memories, fantasies and dreams and puts on a modern tragedy: Willy Loman, the main character, sincerely and firmly believes in an achievement of success driven by individual charisma and painstaking hardworking. However, things don?t turn out the way he wants. After rendering a nearly lifelong service to the pany, he gains neither the promised shares nor a decent job with stable salaries. What?s worse is that, suffering from age and psychological infirmity, he is dismissed by the younger boss, who has borne a grudge for his poor sales. Living from hand to mouth and up to his neck in debts, he bees delirious, murmuring about the past. Although stuck in the predicament, he believes, naively, that he will leave a premium for his sons to open a sporting goods store. Driven forward by that pipe dream, he dies in a car crash. In this play, the dramatist adopts a approach of multiple personality to expound his hero, Willy Loman?s intricate mentality and ardent psychological struggles, which is also used in Shakespeare?s reputable tragedy King Lear. Willy Loman and Multiple Personality Disorder In Death of a Salesman, Miller employs this method to analyze Loman?s multilevel and multiform ego and resultantly reproduces his subtle and flighty states of mind, all of which pose a heartfelt and heartrending symphony. Moreover, his multiple personality is not only a token but also an externalization of his psychology, which externalizes 13 the character?s personal feelings and makes them explicit images tangible and audible to the audience. For example, Willy sees more than one time the Boston hotel and room and hears of the woman?s laughter. And the most appropriate example happens in the restaurant in Act Two. Subject to his dismissal, Willy es to the arranged rendezvous to meet his sons and wishes to hear good news that Biff has lent some cash, which, in fact, Biff has failed to borrow. When Biff tries to console him and to let him realize that Success is not a necessity, Willy turns down Biff?s advice and blames everything on himself. At the same time, the day when young Biff flunked math and went to him recurs to him. It is 。米勒；《推銷員之死》；舞臺設(shè)計；人物塑造；情節(jié)安排 2 Introduction One of the major playwrights of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan on 17 October, 1915, the second son of Isadore Miller, a welltodo but almost illiterate clothing manufacturer, who lost his wealth after the stock market crash in 1929 and Augusta Bart Miller, a schoolteacher as well as an avid reader. At the University of Michigan, he became conscious of German Expressionism, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, and began to delve into plays. He died in Connecticut on February 10, 2020. Arthur Miller?s early Broadway plays include The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), which earned him a Theater Guild award, All My Sons (1947), which gained the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Death of a Salesman (1949), his masterpiece. In the following two decades, his major works prise one adaptation of Henrik Ibsen?s play An Enemy of the People (1950) as well as The Crucible (1953), A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), A Vie