Anti-Heroes and Heroes of “Death of a Salesman” and “Othello”
Nik Kowsar
Anti Heroes are motivated by lower and primordial nature. Although they might look like heroes, but what they commit is not noble enough to the majority.
Unlike the courageous hero, the anti hero’s weaknesses turns him to a villain, in contrast with other honest and kind people living next to him.
James Bonnet (1) believes that heroes have a temptation to struggle for good, and the anti hero is ready to fall down the slope for bad; “On the upside of the passage, the hero resists temptation and goes up the ladder. On the downside, the anti-hero gives in to temptation and goes down the ladder.
We all see our positive side and nature in the hero, whereas the anti-hero has all the negativities we might find in ourselves. Our negative side wants to possess everything it desires, without limit, and control everything it needs.
We sympathize both, but sometimes feel closer to the anti-hero, without knowing why! We admire the hero, but feel to weak to follow his footsteps.
A - The Death of a Salesman
In The Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller is trying to demonstrate the dark side of the “American Dream”. Willy Loman has tried his best to get what he desires, but falls in the trap of his own deception. He not only fools himself, but also based on his beliefs, forces his whole family to debt and at the end, tries to solve the problems by keeping his un-working dream alive.
He falls into the loophole to satisfy himself rather than telling the truth to his wife, Linda, who could be considered the real hero of the story. She has fought all her life to keep the family together and supported Willy regardless of his untruthful manner.
Biff is also an anti Hero who turns out to be the hero of the story, realizing the dark side will also suck him in. He decides to wake up from the alluring dream of salesmanship. The awakening has caused a gap between his mind and Happy, his brother who is totally conceived by Willy’s will.
“Biff feels obliged to seek the truth about himself. While his father and brother are unable to accept the miserable reality of their respective lives, Biff acknowledges his failure and eventually manages to confront it.”(2)
Miller has shown us how the post Depression generation has tried to keep its chin up without realizing who its soul and spirit has been consumed by the nature of its consumerism. Miller depicts achieving wealth and success without regard for principle. Willy has tried for 35 years to satisfy his ego by practicing the skills that made him a salesman, even when his son, Biff learns that Willy is having an affair with a lady in another city, we understand that its just the matter of fulfilling the “dream” while Willy is trying to satisfy his ego and prove himself that he is liked by everyone in New England.
At the end of the story, Willy goes down the ladder. He decides to commit suicide: “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”
B-Othello
Othello is the story of “otherness”. William Shakespeare brings us a noble Moor and a Venetian general who has gained the trust of Venetians.
While he has been charged with witchcraft for seducing Desdemona, the beautiful daughter of Brabantio, a Venetian Senator, Othello defends himself successfully before an assembled Senate and portrays a real hero.
When sent to Cyprus by the order of the Duke of Venice, Othello gradualy shows his weaknesses. He portrays a tragic hero.
The jealousy of his ensign, who wanted the position of Othello’s lieutenant Cassio, created the whole tragic story that led to the death of the main characters of the story.
Iago, Othello's second lieutenant and closest confidant, spends most of the play attempting to bring about Othello's downfall by leading him to believe his wife, Desdemona, is being unfaithful to him with Cassio, his chief lieutenant.
Iago, wreaks havoc on the other characters' lives for no ulterior purpose. (3)
He portrays a soldier that may have been an honest man, but after being passed promotion to the top post to become Othello’s chief lieutenant, he becomes the mean evil character who turns out to be racist and jealous as well.
Iago’s negetivity turns him against his own wife, Emilia, and uses her in his plot against Othello and Cassio and Desdemona. When he forces Emilia to misplace Desdemona's famous handkerchief to Cassio’s position, we learn that the death of all would probably satisfy his evil soul.
Iago is the villain and negative character of the story, but Othello who has once been the real hero, turns to the dark side under the influence of Iago and through his blind jealoussy attempts to kill his own wife. While the weaknesses of Othello arise, his brighter side is lost, and at the end he feels sorry for his mistakes and falling into Iago’s trap. Othello, the noble warrior turns into a ruthless killer who cannot distinguish right fron wrong.
Shakespear demonstrates the path from heroism to anti-heroism under the influence of jealosy and rivalry. Cassio remains the noble officer he has always been, but Othello loses his mind, and Iago’s plot turns to work successfully until the moment that everyone notices the truth and Iago is being tortured to reveal the conspiracy that led to this tragic story.
(1) Member of the Board of Directors of the Writer's Guild of America
(2) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/salesman/
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago
Dionne Brand's Mapping of The Door of No Return-Part1
"I find myself – like another writer said – born into a subject," says Brand.
The title of her book, A Map To The Door Of No Return is taken from the name of that place at which so many slaves were held – West Africa, at the edge of a continent – prior to departing on the Middle Passage physically and culturally toward the diaspora. That door to which there could be no return, Brand suggests, represents both a physical space bound by a common history more definitive than "border" or "nation" – as well as a psychic space.
"[Nations], I think, are artificial, which is not to say that they don’t exist ... What nations do is they include and exclude. That’s the thing that makes them," Brand explains.
At the beginning she explains that she asks here grandfather where they came from, he never remembered. She explains it was a rupture in the quality of being, also a physical rupture, in geography.
There is a mutual disappointment in the family. Her grandfather, her uncle, the father she just met once, and everything… Having no name of the origin means having no history, no past, no connections between the past and present. This is the door of No Return, where the ancestors departed one world for another; the old world for the new. The place where all names were forgotten and all belongings recast.
She describes it as the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signifies the end of traceable begginings.
Dionne tries to trace a map, while she is in an Island far away from Africa, and even close to South America, to the North is Trinidad…she listens to BBC, she knows the outer world, and even London through the radio.
The sea, as the Babylonian map says, is the bitter river that desolates her from the world and her origins.
She says living in the Black Diaspora is to live in a fiction, she describes the door of no return as where the Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the new world. They didn’t
want to leave.
When she goes back, feels the dark shadow of racism, from the slavers, the masters. She tries to see if it could have been called migration, it can’t! There was no choice here.
She describes the black experience in any modern city in North America as haunting, because the history follows and haunts you.
She talks of a documentary by Gates, that he took several African Americans to the door of no return, a slave castle in Ghana, where they notice that their ancestors were actually sold by Africans. It creates sadness.
She then talks about the”Black Body”. How it is known to the world, a dancing, powerful body, it is domesticated and wild (the sign of opposition, transgression, resistance and desire).
Talks about Ben Johnson, when Canada felt it was in that black body for 9.79 seconds, and when it pulled out itself...
The Black body is being brutalized by the police, by the officials, to make it domesticated, not wild.
There is a sense of Nationalism, and having it as a void. No nationalism.
The blacks in the Diaspora feel held captive, although a few hundred years away from the door of no return.
The black Diaspora wants to go back, when it is powerful, but when?
Brand goes through literature to pass through the door, but by reading Naipul’s The overcrowded Barracoon, she learns that he talks about moving as soon as you get used to one point… she sees him sorrowful, like Morrison’s character beloved…
She goes through other people’s works. Books and documentaries, and thinks that going back, the possibility that one might be unwanted, perhaps hated, even forgotten back home.
There is a crushing dislocation of self which landscape does not solve. The tendency to escape, for the black Diaspora and even the 19th century Indians…
Brand talks of Origins, she pinpoints the new Torontonians, and how people of different backgrounds are disappeared.
She wanders through the history of natives of North America, and even Australia that are in way the “others” in the post colonial world.
She recalls her will from the beginning to go to a new home, top marry a fisherman and go to Venezuela and even misled and mishandled by a bad man and run off to Brazil with him, even to live in NY or London… When she goes to London in her journey, she somehow knows the place, possibly through BBC…
In Australia she sees Multiculturalism is relative to the state of white fear. The native becomes the “other”.
She sees slavery as another fact of becoming the other in another way.
In her journey to draw the map, she recalls the Rihlas, the book of travel, like Iranian Nasser Khosrow’s book, the way to pilgrimage…When going to Africa for the first time through Europe, she can’t even sleep.
She talks about history, how even Columbus was funded to find the new land, what a pity…
Conjugations in Disgrace and Paradise
Morrison talks about the blacks among the “Founding Fathers” “Pilgrims” the “West”, in a society so invested in “inherent goodness” she talks of things that people do not like!
In Paradise, blacks can never live peacefully because of racism, and in Coetzee's Disgrace, whites can never peacefully live without racism.
In her book she uses symbols, metaphors, like the harassed dog in chains, that even if she sets it free, might attack her, is she describing herself like that confused dog? To her, a good dog is aggressive and unfriendly…
She sometimes goes back to her Caribbean Origin, like in 1999 to Granada, the coup and her bad experiences of how black people turn against each other and Americans get in… is it all about Morrison’s and Coetzee’s books?
She goes through the history of her region, the Black Napoleon, the revolution in Haiti, 1791, the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture against the French on St. Dominique.
At the end she even goes through Museums to find her past. To Amsterdam to find out about the west Indies, Surinam…
Back in Canada in her survey, she talks about her loneliness, her confusion and the door.
Other sources to read:
Biography
Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1970 Brand emigrated to Canada. She studied at University of Toronto, where she earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy, an M.A. in the Philosophy of Education, and worked on a Ph.D. in Women's History. Currently she teaches at University of Guelph.
In addition to her writing, Brand has directed four documentary films for the National Film Board of Canada, including: Listening for Something: Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation.
She has been an active fighter for the rights of marginalized communities, especially black people and women. Brand is also a lesbian and frequently explores themes of gender, race, and sexuality in her writing.
In 2006, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Brand has made a living as an educator for much of her writing career, spending time in many different parts of Canada (and in several other countries) but maintaining Toronto as her home base.
In 1983, Brand's activist impulses came to the fore once again as she returned to her native Caribbean to serve as information and communications officer for the Agency for Rural Transformation in Grenada.
Brand's various academic appointments--including a course she developed for Vancouver, British Columbia's Simon Fraser University covering the works of African-American writer Toni Morrison--have allowed her to explore the experiences of African peoples through the use of interviews. She edited or coedited two volumes of recollections of black Canadians and other minorities, Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism and No Burden to Carry. The latter book investigated the role of black women in Canadian history.
"It's all about Brand's inability to fit in pretty much anywhere she goes," noted the Ottawa Citizen.
Reviewed in University of Toronto Quarterly by George Elliott Clarke
The essential trouble here is that Brand writes out of wilful hypocrisy: she skewers the 'romantic' nationalisms, mystical 'myths of origins,' and unconsidered liberalisms of other black and Third World writers, rightly, rudely; but Brand never queries her own essentialist posture, namely, that all black people - save, perhaps, Africans - are disturbed, disfigured - by the experience of slavery and thus yearn for some form of re-collection, although they are often sadly ignorant of this need. Her position is arrogant: the author dons a mantle of 'blacker-holier-smarter-than-thou' to decide who is confronting the ramifications of slavery and U.S.-Euro imperialism, and who are the compradors, the sell-outs, the failures. Her stance is convenient - Europe, United States, Canada are cold, forbidding, rotten states, and pity those black people who find their histories linked with those of their former masters - but it is also self-serving: Brand, who enjoys touring the outposts of 'ye olde empires,' tells the unenlightened - benighted - locals, such as the blacks of Nova Scotia, the immigrant blacks and browns of Toronto, even the white yokels in semi-northern Ontario, how they accept romanticism, myths, stupidity. Her schooling in racial-geographical-historical determinism is used to show these inferiors, in turn, how badly they have forgotten Africa, how idiotic they have been in trying to build black communities in white-dominated societies (here Caribbean nations are, intriguingly, excused from contempt), how backward and irredeemably racist (rural white) Canadians are (a fact which advances nothing).
Really, the passion animating this essay is a defeated Marxism channelled into a 'migrant Black intellectual' superiority complex.
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Reviewed by Elisabeth Harvor
"You can't go home again"
A Map to the Door of No Return, of her difficulty in asking for help?
Brand goes deeply into her longing for solitude, even into her own longing (and need) to be a recluse.
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Suzanne Methot
Governor General’s Award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand has created a work that is part memoir, part travelogue, part history, and part philosophy. It’s a reflection on her art, her origins, and her place in Canada (and elsewhere), described from her vantage point as a descendant of slaves taken from the slave-forts of Africa – the doors of no return – and relocated to the Caribbean.
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