Discuss what problems are presented in the plays and in what ways the playwrights attempted to compel the audiences to think for themselves about the problems.

        The audience also is encouraged to think for themselves when Williams and Miller make frequent use of ambiguity.  At several key points in both plays, the audience is left to “fill in the gaps” in A Streetcar Named Desire, the audience never sees Stanley’s revelation to Mitch concerning Blanche’s “true” character.  It is never revealed whether Stella’s child is a male or not, which is significant as the audience can surmise that this child’s gender would affect Stanley’s treatment of Stella.  In Death of a Salesman, the extent of Linda’s knowledge about Willy’s affair is left vague.  The details of Biff’s life after high school are left vague as well.  This ambiguity forces the audience to justify actions of the characters and to examine potential interpretations of each character’s version of “the truth” onstage.  This ambiguity extends to the final lines of each play.  Linda’s stabbing words, “We’re free, we’re free...” don’t resolve anything; there is still a conflict of interest between Biff and Happy, and Linda’s emotional state suggests she is anything but “free.”  Likewise, in A Streetcar Named Desire, the line “the game is seven card stud” suggests the perpetuation of life as it was at Elysian Fields before Blanche’s arrival.  However the tension of the final scene suggests this perpetuation will be rather difficult.  Thus nothing is truly resolved and the audience must think for themselves in order to give meaning to the seemingly confusing final lines of each play, just as they are required to do several times over the course of both plays.

        In order to bring the audience to a new awareness (thinking for themselves) it is necessary for them to recognize times where they have not been thinking for themselves.  Williams and Miller both recognize this and attempt to lure the audience into their play by producing frequent mood shifts at key plot points.  In Death of a Salesman, for example, the audience may feel a sense of relief purged through the air escaping through Willy’s lips as he mutters “oh boy oh boy oh boy” at his first entrance.  The relief and exhaustion is shattered as Willy’s memory scene in Boston with Biff (the climax of the play) relay a mood of panic, fear, and confusion.  The resolution of the requiem (the falling action and “resolution”) conveys a feeling of pity usually aroused in a tragedy.  By these transitions to such sharply contrasted moods at key plot points the audience is aroused to a higher consciousness by these precise contrasts.  A Streetcar Named Desire also uses a deceptively free and easy mood at the plot’s beginning; the climax deepens into one of ultimate fear and violation through the rape, and the resolution is tragic as Blanche is removed and pity is evoked.  Her line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” has such a childlike, but empty quality to it that the immediate reaction is to equate it to the overly simplistic and empty nature of “I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!”  Lines like these help create the predominant moods that occur at key plot points.  Through the violent emotional turbulence over the course of the play, audience members are likely to understand the contrasting shifts, or at least to be aroused to a point of new consciousness by the primal nature of the moods themselves.  The audience members thus must think for themselves in order to find logic or theme in the turbulent changes in atmosphere.

        Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams both saw beyond the empty value in using a play to preach a specific moral lesson, instead they both manage to present them problems of their characters through a means which allowed them to arouse their audiences to thinking for themselves.