ng that tragedy "enlightens--and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom" (Miller 538). This argues that the tragic hero stands in dialectical opposition to freedom's enemy, the dramatic antagonist. Tragedy, by which Miller seems to mean catastrophe or disaster, arises because of the tragic figure's "compulsion to evaluate himself justly" (538).
Willy Loman's decision to crash his car can be interpreted as the outgrowth of a flood of new and disagreeable information he receives--Biff's revelations about being in jail instead of gainfully employed, the persistent problem of never getting "free and clear," and the constant sense of envy of Charley's high-achieving son Ben. His self-evaluation leads him to conclude that he is worth more dead than alive to a family that can file an insurance claim. Miller's view that tragedy is positioned against the enemy of human freedom is more problematic vis-à-vis the Aristotelian definition of the term because it implies that tragedy comes knocking from the outside rather than from within a generally decent individual whose misery can be traced to an some "error" (Aristotle 48). Now Willy is far from perfect--a father by turns cloying and bullying, a far from faithful husband, and a man who has so internalized the values of American hustle culture that he has few firm opinions, and none that reach higher moral sensibility. And because he has never really gotten even superficial satisfaction from bourgeois culture, "free and clear," he can scarcely articulate what he wants beyond the reliability of material artifacts of the culture. A broken refrigerator is a master conspiracy, for example. Elsewhere, he voices completely opposite opinions of the Chevrolet. "Chevrolet, Linda, is the greatest car ever built. . . . That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car!" (27; 28). He has conflicting views about everything, which is to say no view ...