Characterization in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman: A Comparative Reading

Abstract

The overarching argument of this article is that Willy, in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman (1998), is portrayed both through Emad and the Old Man, and Linda is displayed by Rana and the Old Woman in Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016). Drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “meme”, the objective of this paper is to compare the characters of two masterpieces to discover how Farhadi adapts and creates them native to fit his local context. In order to fill the existing gap, examining the psychological development of the characters better illuminates the similarities and the differences between two different nations and unravels Farhadi’s creativity in adapting Miller’s play to the Iranian culture. By detaching himself from fidelity, Farhadi creates his own typical Iranian version of Miller’s characters in a new culture in lieu of an accurate duplication, a change which is repetition without replication, as if Miller’s characters were reborn with the same characteristics in another context.