Stuck Walking Down Memory Lane

Both Blanche Dubois in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman have gone through tragic events in their past which shape their psyches of the present. Their fragmented minds are both a blessing and a burden because they use their distorted views of reality to cope with the actual events going on around them but, the events occurring around them stem from their traumatic past and hallucinations. They are forced to constantly deal with two types of reality before they eventually reach their demise. Blanche experiences a metaphysical death, being forced to go to the Asylum and Willy faces a physical death because he commits suicide. Both of these ends are tragic but their inevitable demise is only second to the constant onslaught of psychological trauma they must suffer through the traffic of the stage. Their PTSD is also the very driving force that propels the events in the plays, it influences their actions very heavily and causes them to do things that is normally out of their character. For instance: Blanche Dubois begins sleeping around with random men and eventually a student from the school she works in. Willy Loman plants a garden even though he knows nothing will grow and eventually commits suicide from his dead brother’s advice. Throughout the plays both Blanche DuBois and Willy Loman use their past as a coping mechanism, which in turn provides the characters with depth and a purpose to their actions, before descending into their tragic pasts