Exam Quotes

Death of a Salesman
- Willy: “The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the backyard”
- Willy: “Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.”
- Willy: “Walked into the jungle and comes out, the age of twenty one, and he’s rich”
- Willy: “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell”
- Willy: “Nothings planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground.”
- Happy: “All right, boy. I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die
in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream to have—to come out number-one man. He
fought it out here, and this where I’m gonna win it for him.”
- Happy: “Our whole lives.”
Biff: “Yeah. Lotta dreams and plans.”
- Willy to the woman: “I get the feeling that I’ll never sell anything again, that I won’t make a
living for you, or a business, a business for the boys.”
- Ben: “Great inventor, Father. With one gadget he made more in a week than a man like you
could make in a lifetime.”
- Willy to Linda: “When did I lose my temper? I simply asked him if he was making any money.
Is that a criticism?”
- Willy to Ben: “A man can’t go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to
something. You can’t, you can’t—Ben moves toward him as though to interrupt. You gotta
consider now. Don’t answer so quick. Remember, it’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar
proposition. Now look, Ben, I want you to go through the ins and outs of this thing with me.
I’ve got nobody to talk to, Ben, and the woman has suffered, you hear me?”
- Willy to Linda: “I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being
contradicted?”
- Linda: “Willy, darling, you’re the handsomest man in the world –
Willy: Oh, no, Linda.
Linda: To me you are. The handsomest.
- Linda: “isn’t that wonderful?”
Willy: Don’t interrupt”
- Willy: “Just wanna be careful with those girls. Biff, that’s all. Don’t make any promises. No
promises of any kind. Because a girl, y’know, they always believe what you tell’em”

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

- “The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married.”
- “There had never been a death more foretold”
- Pura Vicario: “Any man will be happy with them because they've been raised to suffer.”
- “On the other hand, the fact that Angela Vicario dared put on the veil and the orange blossoms
without being a virgin would be interpreted afterwards as a profanation of the symbols of purity.”
- Clotide Armenta: "I realized just how alone we women are in the world!"
- Pura: “Love can be learned too”
- “On the other hand, she never forgave herself for having mixed up the magnificent augury of
trees with the unlucky one of birds”
- “They didn't hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its own crime.”
- “She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people's dreams, provided
they were told her before eating, but she hadn't noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams
of her son's, or in the other dreams of trees he'd described to her on the mornings preceding his
death.”
 - “He had a deep stab in the right hand. The report says: "It looked like a stigma of the crucified
Christ."
- “The friends of Angela Vicario who had been her accomplices in the deception went on saying
for a long time that she had shared her secret with them before the wedding, but that she hadn't
revealed any name.”
- "You always have to take the side of the dead,"
- Angela: "because I'd made up my mind to die."
- "I didn't warn him because I thought it was drunkards' talk," she told me. Nevertheless, Divina
Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, that the latter hadn't said
anything to Santiago Nasar because in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him.”
- “No one would have thought, nor did anyone say, that Angela Vicario wasn't a virgin. She
hadn't known any previous fiancé and she'd grown up along with her sisters under the rigor of
a mother of iron.”
- “What we discovered inside seemed to be a woman's natural items for hygiene and beauty, and
I only learned their real use when Angela Vicario told me many years later which things were
the old wives' artifices she had been instructed in so as to deceive her husband.”
- “At that moment they were comforted by the honor of having done their duty, and the only
thing that worried them was the persistence of the smell.”
- “Bayardo San Roman hadn't even tried to court her, but had bewitched the family with his
charm.”
- "I wasn't crying because of the blows or anything that had happened," she told me. "I was crying
because of him."

Symbolism plays a significant role in both Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman and Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Whilst it is represented differently in both
texts, it helps to shape the storyline and foreshadow certain aspects of what will unravel.

Intro
 Name both titles
 Name the author
 Name the playwright
 Text types are identified
 Topic of the essay (global sentence - opening sentence)
 Contextual information
o CDF, set in Sucre Columbia in 1952
o DOAS, set in New York in 1949
 Main points (topic sentences)
Society
In both of the texts, Chronicle of A Death Foretold, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Death of a
Salesman, with playwright, Arthur Miller, the stories of two main characters are told while considering
the circumstances surrounding their deaths. The first is set in a small Colombian town, in 1952, while
the other takes place in New York in 1949. Although the contexts of their deaths differ, both are heavily
subjected to the influence of the communities in which they lived. Santiago Nasar (Chronicle of A
Death Foretold) was killed based on the community upholding of a Latino cultural code of honour,
while Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) falls under the spell of the American Dream which in turn
leads him suicide.

In comparing these two stories: both of these characters were sentenced to death by society in one form
or another. In Nasar’s death the society he lived in set the stage it. He was thought to have broken the
laws of society and the Vicario brothers, bred by this society, had to live up to its standards for his
punishment; in essence, Santiago Nasar’s death was a by-product of his society’s teachings. Willy’s
death on the other hand, was a result of his inability to cope in a society that was rapidly changing
before his eyes.

Gender