Death of a Salesman and Fences
ANSWER ONE OF THE FOLLOWING in a well-organized essay of at least FIVE paragraphs.
Use at least two quotations from the plays in at least three different paragraphs; that’s at least SIX quotations from the plays.
1. What makes a good father? Who is the better father, Willy or Troy? Compare and contrast him with the father figure in your life.
2. The play Fences suggests that our fathers are always in us: Troy can feel his own father “kicking in my blood” (53), and for Cory, “everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me.” Cory is desperate “to find a way to get rid of that shadow” (97). Rose tells him that “that shadow wasn’t nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you. But that’s all you got to make life with. That’s all you got to measure yourself against the world out there” (97).
How are the sons in these two plays dealing with the shadows of their fathers? How are you doing it in your own life?
3. What is success? In these two plays, who do you think has the best chance of achieving success? Why? What is in the way of the other boys?
What about you? What makes you likely to succeed in the terms in which you define success? What are the things inside of you which stand in your way?
4. Many of the plays we read this year--indeed, much of world literature--treat our seeming need to kill (literally or figuratively) our father in order to attain independent adulthood. Literature is full of the anxiety of both parents and children, the difficulty of the task of the child, the cost of growing up. Write a paper in which you show how any two or three great literary works explore this theme. What does it have to do with your own process of growing up?