Arthur Miller's Play, The Price

In his play The Price, Arthur Miller attempts to bring moral and familial issues far closer to home than he believes he had done in some of his "larger" social and political plays. He writes in his autobiography Timebends about his own vision and purpose with respect to the play and its very personal message:

Two brothers, one a policeman, the other a successful surgeon, meet again after an angry breakup many years before. . . . Grown men now, they think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice; and they part unreconciled. Neither can accept that the world needs both of them---the dutiful man of order and the ambitious, selfish creator who invents new cures (Miller Timebends 542).

The play is a tragedy because there is something in these brothers which prevents them from a reconciliation. They are incapable of fully accepting in themselves and in one another the differences between them. The message of the play is a good and moral one, but the heart of the story (the confrontation between Victor and Walter) is told too awkwardly and undramatically to carry the impact Miller intended. There is also a wearying repetition to that confrontation which unfortunately underestimates the intelligence of the reader, as if Miller thought he had to beat the message of pride into the dull heads of his readers and audience.

For example, we hear far too many ti

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letely disagrees with Weales that the allegiance of the audience or reader shifts from brother to brother and back again. Instead, this reader simply grew weary of the undramatized exchanges between the brothers, and came to care little for either of them. On the other hand, the exchanges between Victor and Solomon is dramatically compelling, and leads this reader to care for both characters and to empathize with the suffering of Victor in the process of those exchanges. Miller himself at least partially recognizes the problem at the heart of the encounter between the brothers. In Timebends, the author writes that "Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and life seemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusions because the truth was too costly to face" (Miller Timebends 542). The problem is not that the brothers are incapable of reconciliation. The problem is that Miller has not solved the dramatic problem of how to present their irreconcilable differences in a way that does not irritate the readers or audience but instead causes them to have sympathy for both brothers. it is simply not enough to write in a production note at the end of the play, as Miller does, that "A fine balance of

Category: Literature - A