It isn’t until they have to face what is deep inside them that people begin to understand what internal searching means in terms of defining the self. This important step in learning how to define oneself is illustrated again and again in literature throughout history. As long ago as Oedipus Rex, people were defining themselves without really knowing who they were while the lessons of Oedipus have still not been learned, as illustrated in more modern stories such as The Death of a Salesman. Using these stories, the development of self-definition will be traced through each story’s main character, Oedipus and Willie Loman.
At the beginning of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is very proud to tell people that he is the man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx and even prouder to think that he has thwarted his prophesied destiny. Oedipus’ personality clearly reflects a continued pride and a determination to force things to go his way. When Oedipus received his own prediction that he was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, he was determined to avoid this fate by taking his future in his own hands. This overwhelming confidence in his abilities is shown when Oedipus determines “Well, I will start afresh and once again / Make dark things clear” (139-140). When Oedipus discovers he was the cause of his real father’s death and is now married to his mother, he looks back upon the events of his life and sees a rash and overly prideful man: “a curse / I laid upon myself. With these hands of mine, / these killer’s hands, I now contaminate / the dead man’s bed. Am I not depraved? / Am I not utterly abhorrent? / Now I must fly into exile and there, / a fugitive, never see my people, / never set foot in my native land again” (983-990). By being forced to face the truth of his past actions, Oedipus is forced to realize that he is not the shining, almost god-like specimen of humanity he’d thought he was but was little more than the blind homeless murdering beggar he is shown to be at the end of the play.
A similar problem occurs in Death of a Salesman as Willy Loman loses himself in the image he’s built up regarding who he is. A great deal of what his family knows about Willy is based upon the image he feels he must portray of himself, therefore preventing his family from knowing the true Willy Loman and isolating him in a world of his own creation. As he is finally brought to the realization that his slipping memory means he cannot work anymore, Willy finds himself grasping for a foundation within his family that cannot now be developed because of the way he has kept his true self hidden behind appearances. Willy’s absolute belief in the American ideal in which a father lived by certain principles to provide his family with their basic material needs was inextricably tied to his ideas of his status within the family unit itself. From this perspective, the only way to attain familial success was to first obtain business success. By clearing away the problem of business success, Willy was finally able to come to the understanding that his son had loved him all along, regardless of whether he had achieved some magic material number and he dies with a sense of peace he never had in life, finally able to define himself as a father.
Both of these characters were unaware of who they really were at the earliest point in time of each of their stories. Oedipus had no idea about his true parentage and thus was led into the trap of fulfilling the fate the oracle had proclaimed. Willie Loman lived his life under a false conception that his sole value as a human being lay in his ability to provide for the material needs of his family until the end of his life when he finally realized that his value to his family was simply in being him. It isn’t until these men are forced, primarily through outside factors, to review those elements of their lives that have molded who they are and what they think of themselves, that they are finally able to understand more completely and correctly, who they really are. Although both men kill themselves, taking their fate again into their own hands, I think Willy is the more successful man in discovering himself because he finally is able to understand that his worth to his family does not rely on external factors while Oedipus is unable to even hear the remaining members of his family in the end.
Works Cited
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking Press, 1949.
Sophocles. Oedipus the King. F. Storr (Trans.). 2008. Web.