Biff and Happy discuss their restless disillusionment with their present lives, but also touch on their father’s increasingly irresponsible night-driving.Several minor scenes make up the rising action part of the play, but briefly:
📚 Death of a Salesman: Rise, or rising action If we visualize the introduction as the moment the snowball takes form, the rise is the real snowball effect: the growing, spiralling acceleration towards a climax. The stakes, tension, and hope manifest as suspense, anxiety, or character development. The events kickstarted by the inciting incident now pick up momentum, as Act 2 reveals what’s at stake for the characters, while also offering a false promise of hope: a light at the end of the tunnel. The second act of Freytag’s pyramid is an in-between period of rising tension and escalating plot complexity. The inciting incident arrives when Linda suggests that Willy speaks to his boss about his difficulties, to secure a local job that won’t require him to drive far anymore. Their adult sons, Happy and Biff, are asleep, and the audience witnesses their parents’ anxieties about Biff’s unstable lifestyle. In a conversation with Linda, his wife, it emerges that his once-promising career is now failing. The play begins on an evening in 1949 when aged salesman Willy Loman returns to his Brooklyn home.
📚 Death of a Salesman: Introduction Natey Jones, Wendell Pierce, Sharon D Clarke, and Sope Dirisu in the Young Vic production of Miller's play. The inciting incident is the first point of deviation from the norm - an event, discovery, or new idea that triggers change.
The exposition provides information about the characters and the relationships between them, the setting of the story, and provides any backstory required to understand the stakes of the plot. Some writers subdivide the first act into the ‘exposition’ and the ‘inciting incident’ these correspond to the first and second questions above. As the reader (or audience), you are brought into a new environment - so the first act needs to establish the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. It asks and answers the question “where am I?” followed by “what is happening?”. This act is designed to orient the reader and set the story in motion. If you aren’t familiar with this classic play, consider this your spoiler warning (and your trigger warning for mention of suicide)! Act 1: Introduction To demonstrate how every act applies to an actual story, we’ve followed them with a Death of a Salesman example. Let’s break down what each of Freytag’s acts entails. Want to know what kind of characters populate Freytag's Pyramid? Check out our post on tragic heroes to find out. Like the hero’s journey, the three-act structure, and newer models like Dan Harmon’s story circle, Freytag’s five-act framework is simply one of many approaches that writers can use to create a complete and satisfying story.Ī note before we dive in: despite the fact that the pyramid was originally based on drama, Freytag’s ideas are ultimately about storytelling, so they can also apply to novels, memoirs, and short stories alike. As a result, the pyramid is less applicable to non-tragic narratives in which the protagonist usually wins out in some way. It identifies story elements that are common to classical and Shakespearean tragedies, including a revelation or plot twist that changes everything - resulting in catastrophe for the hero. Make no mistake: Freytag’s pyramid is not a one-size-fits-all structure. Though you may encounter explanations of the pyramid that identify 7 elements, Freytag’s original narrative arc only refers to 5 key acts: Freytag was interested in classical Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama, and devised his pyramid by observing their structural patterns. What is Freytag’s Pyramid?įreytag’s pyramid is a dramatic structure introduced by German 19th-century writer Gustav Freytag. Read on to discover the acts that make up Freytag’s pyramid, and pay close attention as we apply each to Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. The pyramid, also known as "Freytag’s triangle", is a straightforward way of organizing narrative. Conjuring up notions of dark, ancient tombs, this intimidating-sounding theory is actually very easy to understand. "Freytag’s pyramid" is a term that any writer obsessed with story structure will inevitably encounter.
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