“The Glass Menagerie” and “Death of a Salesman”
Choose ONE of the following prompts on which to write your final paper.
1. It is easy to name the absentee parents, the abandoners: Willy’s dad and Laura’s father. Willy got abandoned at age 3; Laura at 7 or 8. But who is the worst of the present parents, Linda, Willy or Amanda? You will need a list of good parenting traits, each one getting its own body paragraph. Put both plays in each body paragraph.
2. Of the four grown children in these two plays, some are really bad. Biff is 34, Happy is 32, Laura is 24 and Tom is all of 22. You will need a list of good adult characteristics, each of which gets its own body paragraph, to show how bad one child from each play really is. Remember to “juxtapose texts topically.” If you write all about “G,” stop, then write all about “S,” your paper will fail with a D at best.
3. The very nature of this new kind of tragedy–epochal–implies that the modern world is not so great. Walt Disney was no fool. When he built “Main Street U.S.A.” as the first thing one sees upon entering Disneyland Park, he meant that life in small town America had its advantages. In communities that small, people knew each other. There was no anonymity in mass society because no mass society existed yet. Remember I wrote you about my wife’s asking me “How do you know the name of every kid in your hometown?” Her town was home to 100,000 people in 1966; mine had 1,000, and many were old, so there were not that many kids. Here is the question: In what ways is the modern world as presented in “G” and “S” not good?
