I’ve chosen to analyze the characters Willy Lowemen from Death of a salesmen, Oedipus from Oedipus the King, and Hamlet from Hamlet Prince of Demark. I will compare their character traits and how that applies to their mutual search for the truth.
Despite Willie Lowman’s desperate searching through his past, Willy does not achieve the self realization or self knowledge he searches for. The resolution that his suicide offers him represents only a partial discovery of the truth. While he achieves a professional understanding of himself, Willy fails to realize his personal failure and the betrayal of his family through the pretense of his life. I believe that the author chose the name Lowmen in order to convey to the reader Willy’s status in life. He cannot grasp the true personal, emotional, spiritual understanding of himself as a literal low man.Willy is too driven by his own willfulness to recognize the distorted reality that his diluted mind has forged. While focusing on Willy's obsession with a combination of lies, delusions, and self-deceptions, he is unable to recognize the accomplishment of his partial self-realization.
In Oedipus the King, Oedipus and Jocasta act as if the story of Lauis’s murder being committed by strangers is the only possible truth and that once a story has been told it is therefore irrefutable in history. And if the truth is left untold is it as though it has never happened. Neither Oedipus nor Jocasta wish to face the possibility of what it would mean if the story of the strangers murdering Lauis turns out to be untrue.
This is why Jocasta does not feel compelled to tell Oedipus of the prophecy that her son would kill his father, and also why Oedipus does not feel compelled to tell Jocasta about the similar prophecy given to him by the oracle.. Oedipus hears the story of Jocasta binding her Childs feet yet does not connect that to the fact that he himself suffers from swollen feet.