The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (Arthur Miller)

The play veers from the farcical to the tragic and back again and should be performed all-out in both directions as the situation demands, without attempting to mitigate the extremes (Staging Note).

Miller was in the twilight of his career when he wrote the play, and with such a staging note it is clear that he is trying to break free of constructions which he has labored under in earlier plays. Certainly his most famous work is thoroughly tragic, with little humor and certainly less farce. In The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Miller wants to present a play which will defy his image as an exclusively tragic writer, but at the same time retain the tragic elements of his vision. It is as if he were saying life is not merely tragic, but also farcical, and the farcical is as crucial to a full appreciation of life and art as the tragic is.

To properly appreciate this play, it is also necessary to realize that Miller is a writer whose works generally carry profound social and political messages of a liberal bent. This liberal philosophy is expressed in this play as a critical analysis of the Reagan era, the era of greed and self-indulgence. The life of Lyman Felt is meant to be representative of that decade of selfish greed. He is a man who was once a much more sensitive man---a poet, in fact---and who becam

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adual learning to appreciate other human beings and the simple miracles of everyday existence. He must forget himself in order to be saved. This is illustrated in his sudden profound appreciation of the discussion about shoes among the nurse and her husband and son in the boat on the lake. Salvation may not have come fully to Lyman, but Miller has indicated that it is at least a possibility. Lyman has practiced selfishness for a long time, so it will take a long time before he learns to care about others as much as he learned to care about himself. What makes Lyman's awakening a believable possibility is that Miller has shown him to possess all along at least a blunted sense of right and wrong, of the requirements of love. Up till the end, however, he has not been much willing to fulfill those requirements. Miller writes at one point that Lyman "moves away from [Theo] and her awful caring" (106). Lyman sees love as "awful" in the sense of its being "full" of "awe." He knows that love requires him to lose himself and it terrifies him. Bibliography Miller, Arthur. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. New York: Penguin, l992. This study will examine the characterization of Doc in John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row. The novel is a celeb
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2712
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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