Question- What is the theme of the play "The Price" by Arthur Miller?

Answer -

In, "The Price", Miller combines the best features of after the fall and incident at the Vichy, one again, the issue of coming to others in Good Faith is paramount, as Esther realizes in characterising the surprise appearance of her husband Victor's brother, Walter. Walter returns to their boyhood apartment, where Victor is selling the family possessions because the building has been condemned. Walter has not seen his brother in sixteen years and wants to explain to him why he chose such an independent course, why he failed to support their father as Victor had done, to the retirement of his career. The immensely successful Walter feels stymied by the past and suggests that he and Victor took. "Seemingly different roads out of the same trap" created by their father's pose of helplessness after the failure of his business in the crash of 1929. While Victor chose to invent a life of self sacrifice Walter chose to adopt a career of self advancement. We are like two halves of the same guy, Walter insists. His points is well taken in terms of Miller's dramatic development, for Victor and Walter are also opposite sides of Quentin, whose family background is somewhat similar to theirs and who engages in similar debates with himself conorn the calls of self-denial and self preferment; indeed, like Quentin, Victor and Walter are having what is essentially an argument with themselves in front of auditors.

Because Walter and Victor can go over the same ground of the past, their recollections are both arguable and utterly convincing as parallel but divergent interpretations. Thus, the audience responds to one character's point of view in the context of the other and follows precisely the process by which these characters from their histories. Walter excuses himself by showing that in objective terms his father was not helpless; he had four thousand dollars he asked Walter to invest for him. Walter rejects the vision of family harmony that Victor worked so steadily to maintain; there was no longer love between their mother and father, only a business arrangement as Walter brutally reveals with vivid memories of how their mother failed to support their father in his terrible need. Victor dismisses Walter's narrowly conceived interpretation of his father and their family. "A system broke down", he reminds walter, referring to the crash, "did I invert that?" Victor fights against Walter's simplification of their father's psychology. Embedded in Vitor's words is an echo Miller's original title for death of a salesman. "What about the inside of his head? The man was ashamed to go into the street!"

In the dialogue between these "archetypal brothers", as Neil Carson calls them, the nature of individual psychology and social reality, which Miller explores in all of his plays, is debated and nowhere is that expiration more finely balanced, more convincingly concieved, than in "The Price, where the two brothers for all of their representativeness steadfastly remain individual and irreconcilable, moreover the other two characters, Esther and Solomon (a kibitzer who is Miller's funniest and wisest creation) are just as creadibly presented, as they mediate between the hard positions held by Victor and Walter. Esther is one of the Miller's most complex female characters, as her lyric memory at the end play demonstrates, for her wishful words richly embody all the wonderful promise of a life gone sour, just as Solomon's last actions he is listening to a "laughing records" from the 1920's, "sprawling in the chair, laughing with tears in his eyes, howing helplessly to the air", recall all the character's hilarious and painful memories, leaving the audience perfectly poised in this drama of life's alternative expressions.

At last the themes of Arthur Miller's play The Price' revolve around familial duty, regret and guilt.

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