October 9, 2017 - October 13, 2017 Weekly Agenda

Monday, October 9th: 

Turn in Oedipus Rex

Multiple Choice questions #16 – 20 on Oedipus Rex

Vocabulary:

Peripetatic: wandering

Calamity: disaster

Impiety: not religious; blasphemous, not being religiously devout

Tuesday, October 10th: 
Absent 
Make-up work today

Wednesday, October 11th: 
Make-up work today

Thursday, October 12th: 
PAM and NMA monthly meeting today.

Friday, October 13th: 
Turn in The Oedipal Cycle 
Read Death of a Salesman  
Read to page 1550
For the weekend, please read Act One
Please do reading log:
The reading log should include:
The act and scene
Brief summary with analysis
Themes
Characters
Irony
Foreshadowing
Figurative Language

Example:  
Death of a Salesman
The setting: Post War New York and Boston
Brief summary:
Act One, Scene One:
The opening of Death of a Salesman is late at night as Willie Loman, a sixty-year old salesman, returns home after a long trip on the road selling some undetermined product up and down New England. Although Willie is a salesman, Miller chooses not to tell the audience what exactly it is that he sells. The play is nonlinear in which the past and present blur in Willie Loman's mind.  The decades of driving on the road have taken a toil on him and his confusing of past with present seems to hint at encroaching dementia. Willie Loman confesses to his faithful, patient wife Linda that while driving home he lost track of where he was and nearly ran off the road. His two grown sons who are home visiting and sleeping in their shared childhood bedroom, overhear the conversation and share their concerns about their father's diminishing vigor. In their whispered conversation, the two sons also reveal their fears and frustrations about the emptiness of their own lives.

Devices:
The play echoes the confusion of Willie's mind by crossing back and forth between the present and the past, merging the past when his two boys were living at home as high school students and now when they are adult and visiting their parents.

Devices:

The play echoes the confusion of Willie's mind by crossing back and forth between the present and the past, merging the idyllic past when his two boys were living at home as high school students and the brutal deteriorating present when they are adults and visiting their parents.

Themes:

One of the recurring themes is those who privilege appearance over substance will be destroyed by their delusion.  

The present of the first scene blurs into the hazy idyllic past when Loman's beloved sons were in high school. They are presented as “winners” - Biff is a football hero “ with a “…a crowd of girls behind him every time the classes change.” Their father describes both of his sons as “Adonises” and the “man who makes an appearance in the business world…gets ahead.” However,  Biff is failing math and may not graduate, and Linda tells Willie that he is rough with the girls and their mothers are afraid of him. Bernard, their nebbishy high school friend says Biff stole some basketballs and needs to return them. 

 The  boys are now men, living empty unfulfilled lives. Biff, once so promising as a high school star, is working on another man’s ranch in Texas, and Happy has a meaningless job, a lonely apartment in New York, and a long string of girlfriends with no emotional connection to any of them. The delusion of being winners is predicated on lies, violence, and theft. 

Themes: 

Those who are unable to change or adapt are condemned to irrelevance.

Willie enters late at night complaining about the claustrophobic closeness of the recently built apartment buildings, the superiority of the old classic cars, and even the change of cheese Linda gives him for his late night snack. At work Willie, at sixty, is feeling the ticking of the clock and a growing sense of irrelevance. He confesses to Linda that “people don’t seem to take to me”…”they seem to laugh at me”…”they just pass me by”… Someone called him a walrus and “…I cracked him right across the face.” “I get the feeling I’ll never sell anything again, and that I won’t make a living for you, or a business, a business for the boys.”  This ties in not only with the gnawing fear of passing into oblivion by time but also clinging to the delusion of the past - that they were all winners. Willie was a great salesman - and perhaps at one time many years ago, he was -  and his boys were football stars and “Adonises”.  But the times have changed and passed by Willie, his values, and his beliefs, and his sons are living frustrating desperate lives. 

Other possible themes: 

Believing in “the American Dream” or winning at all cost without a guiding moral principal can bring about lies, deception, suffering. Willie yells at the brainy but nebbishy Bernard to give Biff the answers to the math test. Bernard says he does but he can’t give Biff the answers to the New York Regents exam - “They’ll arrest me!” There is a chorus played by Bernard and Linda listing all of Biff’s sins - “He better give back that football, Willy, that’s not nice!” “He’s too rough with the girls! All the mothers are afraid of him!” “He’s driving the car without a license!” “Mr. Birnbaum says he’s stuck-up!” Willie becomes agitated, threatens to beat Biff, and then defends his son by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with him! You want him to be a worm like Bernard? He’s got spirit, personality….”  We see the future devastation this will have on his son by the bitter futility of his adult life. 

Toxic masculinity (closely aligned with the American Dream): 

The need to cling to old values: winning at all cost, even if one must resort to lies and cheating; being successful as a womanizer; resorting to violence to resolve conflict - all having deleterious effect on society and those in the man’s personal sphere,  his wife, family, and associates. 

Character: 

Linda is on the surface a typical 1950s housewife - patient, kind, loving, giving. She is the foundation to Willie’s life. He tells her, “You’re my support, Linda”; she is the one who provides a safe secure home for him and their children; however, she is the holder of enormous silent strength. 

Willie

Biff

Happy

Irony: 

The names of the two sons, Biff and Happy, are stereotypical names representing the banality and mindlessness of the American middle-class. 

The fact that Willie’s second son is named Happy, despite being deeply unhappy and unfulfilled, is ironic.