"Death" of a Salesman

Though we just had everyone read a portion of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, I had to read it over the weekend for another class of mine. We had to read it "along the grain" (or do a formalist reading) to find the meaning of the play, and then do an "against the grain" reading to find the aporia, or fissures within the play (deconstruct it) and construct a new way to read it.

The genre of this play is considered to be American Realism (which is really just a subgenre of drama (not drama in the sense we are studying, but drama as in it is classified as a DRAMATIC play)). Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams are the more famous playwrights that write this genre. Because the play is meant to be realistic, the meaning is fairly easy to determine. I found the meaning, the moral I guess, to be that happiness is a choice. If you don't like something about your life, then you should change it!

I came to this meaning through the characters. Willy is miserable with his life now that he is older. He feels that the American Dream has failed him, always talking about how he worked so hard to pay off the house and to give his family nice things when in the end he has no one around him. He has completely alienated his children. Willy insists on living in the past, as evidenced through various flashbacks throughout the play.

When we had to find an aporia in the play and describe how that would change the reading of the play, the first one I found was the omission of Willy's first car accident. Linda describes it to the audience and tells how dangerous it was, but because that action didn't happen within the actual plot of the play, it wasn't part of the sequence of events, we can't be sure it HOW it actually happened. I think that a poststructuralist could look at Death of a Salesman and argue that Willy is actually dead. He died in the car accident and everything he is experiencing in the play is really just a series of flashbacks and memories of his life. It could explain why the timeline is so chaotic. It could explain the guilt he feels from the affair. If Willy is actually dead, and everything that we see in the play is his memories, he is in some sort of purgatory. It isn't until he "kills himself" in the play that he has accepted everything and can move on to his final resting place.
What's more? I think I could actually DIRECT that version of the play onstage. And I think it could be really good! Now, doesn't that change the entire meaning of the play?