Death of a Salesman & Oedipus the King

An overwhelming desire for personal contentment and unprecedented reputation can often result in a sickly twisted distortion of reality. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a man well-known for his intellect and wisdom finds himself blind to the truth of h life and his parentage. Arthur Miller's play, The Death of a Salesman, tells of a tragic character so wrapped up in his delusional world that reality and illusion fuse causing an internal explosion that leads to his undoing. Each play enacts the strugg of a man attempting to come to grips with his harsh reality and leaving behind his comfortable fantasy world. In the end, no man can escape the truth no matter how hard he may fight. In choosing the fragility of illusion over the stability of reality, th characters meet their inevitable downfall. At the moment of his birth, Oedipus receives a prophecy from the Delphic Oracle which states his destiny, "to grow up to murder his father and marry his mother (Sophocles 22)." Shocked and dismayed by this horrific prophecy, his parents King Laius and een Jocasta of Thebes try to elude this inevitable curse by turning the infant over to a loyal servant, a Theban shepherd, to take Oedipus to "a woody dell of Cithaeron" to be killed (63). After riveting his ankles together and leaving him to die of the lements, the old shepherd has a change of heart and hands the child over to a traveling shepherd from Corinth to take back to the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope to raise as their own son. For the next twenty years, Laius and Jocasta rule in The s believing their son to be "done away with (69)." Unfortunately, Hera sends a drought associated with a sphinx to bedevil Thebes. A desperate Laius travels back to the Delphic Oracle for a reading while, in Corinth, Oedipus grows to manhood believing P ybus and Merope, the King and Queen of Corinth, to be his real parents. Soon, he too learns of his dreadful fate and seeking to avoid it, he flees Corinth. As fate