'He brings tragedy down on himself, not by opposing the lie, but by living it' By comparing Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', discuss.

Introduction to an A-Level Coursework Comparison Essay
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman are two novels intrinsically concerned with the status of the individual in modern society. Having himself escaped ‘the treadmill of Dublin’[1] in favour of a nomadic European lifestyle as an adult, it is no surprise that Joyce’s protagonist in his partly autobiographical künstlerroman, Stephen Dedalus, wishes to break from the same ‘centre of paralysis’[2]: synecdochally representative of ‘all the nets flung at [him] to hold [him] back from flight’. In much the same way, the tragic figure of Willy Loman is indebted to Miller’s own status as a peripheral member of society, and his existence as a socialist’s depiction of an American ‘low man’ renders him fundamentally torn between ‘his native identity and the image that society demands of him’[3]. As a result, both works become ‘realistic, unprepossessing, unattractive’[4] critiques of modern life in their confrontational portrayals of the world in which the authors lived. Yet this ‘unattractive’ realism, and the continuous failure of their protagonists to fully realise their own individuality, is not without purpose, and instead forces the reader to both reflect upon their own state of modernity, and to be critical of it. [1] H. Levin, ‘The Artist’, in A.E. Dyson, Casebook Series: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1978[2] K. Rulo, Modernism and the AntiModern in the ‘Men of 1914’, Akademiai Kiado, 2015[3] G. Weales, ‘Arthur Miller: Man and his Image’, Tulane Drama Review 7, 1962[4] E. Garnett, ‘Reader’s Report’, in A.E. Dyson, Casebook Series: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1978