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Symbols in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.Death of a Salesman as a Modern Tragedy.This past association of the car with family happiness and eager activity contrasts with the symbol of the car in the present, when its implications include mental and physical exhaustion, a means of committing suicide, and death.
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In the past, the car had been a status symbol and a centre of interest absorbing the activities of the male members of the family: Biff and Happy, under their father’s boyish eagerness, had cleaned and polished the car in a manner which took on the proportions of a Sunday ritual. In other words, by their repetition they give form to a play which has abandoned conventional formal arrangement. They are recurrent and thus help to structure the play. However, in Death of a Salesman, Miller uses symbols with great subtlety and effect.
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Miller’s earlier play, All My Sons, also used symbols, though these are, for the most part, much cruder and narrower in their implications than the symbols employed by Ibsen. An object was described or a metaphor introduced which had meanings and implications beyond its apparently “realistic” function in the action. Symbolism is a device that uses symbols to represent something beyond the literal meaning.