Michelle Howe
Professor Anderson
English 102
04/03/15
Compare/Contrast Death of a Salesman with Oedipus Rex Death of a Salesman and Oedipus Rex are deep and complex tragic stories. Death of a Salesman features the main character Willy Loman, a depressed man. Willy’s life is full of daydreams and what he perceives as a perfect life. As the story comes to an end, Willy makes the decision to end his life as it is not worth living. On the other hand, Oedipus Rex is about Oedipus who is disowned by his birth parents the King and Queen of Thebes. The same happens due to a prophecy about Oedipus killing his father King Laius. After this revelation, the king has the child taken to a faraway location to be left for dead. Instead of fulfilling the Kings wishes, the child is shown mercy by a shepherd who gives Oedipus to the king and queen of Corinth. As predicted, Oedipus crosses paths with his father and kills him. Oedipus becomes king and with no clue as of his parents being the king and queen of Thebes, he marries his mother and has children with her as he also searches for King Laius’ killer. For the two stories, both similarities as well as differences can be…show more content… The protagonists in this case are characterized by fundamental distance from reality. For Death of a Salesman, Willy is incoherent and delusional; he hallucinates. Willy is also a dedicated character with certain illusionary vision of achievement and success which buffers his relationship to reality for the most part of the story. (http://www.enotes.com). Willy is old having served a part of his lifetime in a traveling salesman job. Declining in terms of his faculties, Willy is no longer needed by the company where he was once their star salesman. Despite all this, Willy does not allow his dream to crumble. He is in denial of the reality and instead slips off to a world of his own (Miller,
