[The] consideration of Death of a Salesman [has been cluttered] with false analogies. The contradictory rules of capitalism were represented as the modern, humanistic equivalent to the conflicting laws of the ancient gods; while the gradual stripping-off of layers of illusion, the 'facing of facts about oneself', was compared to Oedipus's journey from Thebes to Colonus.

There is certainly a formal debt to the Greeks in Death of a Salesman, in the way in which the play is laid out; and the same could be said for almost any other serious play of the period. But … to stress the form at the expense of Miller's observation and almost intuitive moral insights is to trivialise the play. There is no analysis of capitalism in Death of a Salesman…. Willy is not so much a victim of inexorable economic forces as he is of what Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman...