The dissertation in hand is an attempt to investigate the transition of culture, text, and identity from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) to Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2015). This interdisciplinary reading employs several concepts and theories of literature and cinema, including intertextuality, adaptation, and cinematic metaphor; a brief elaboration of Raymond Williams’ culture and its reflection in identity construction, along with chaos theory, the butterfly effect; and psychology and identity, including Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne, Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger, Self-Perception theory by Daryl Bem, and Stanislavski’s Emotional Memory. Williams defines culture as the product of struggle for making social and political change. Chaos – TA – Dissonance – Stanislavski. Chaos implies that a void is a space of creation of something out of nothing, and the Butterfly Effect notes that a small fraction could result in a catastrophe. Raymond Williams’ defines culture as a product of struggle to make social and political change, and divides communities to Solidarity and Service. Transactional Analysis illustrates that human behavior is rooted in three ego states of Child, Parent, and Adult, and the shifts between them represents human identity. Death of a Salesman is dominated by a culture of chaos and dissidence, commodity, dehumanization, and service, while The Salesman, affected by butterfly effects, is shifting from a culture of morals and solidarity to a culture similar to the former text. Death of a Salesman is a world of Parent and Child ego states, and cognitive dissonance, while The Salesman is one of transition from Adult to Child and Parent, and Self-Perception. The Salesman’s world is embracing the cultural elements of Death of a Salesman world through adaptation, intertextuality, and emotional theory; consequently, the result is a cracked world. It was concluded that the transition process of identity, text, and culture from Miller’s Death of a Salesman to Farhadi’s The Salesman is a continuous circle of one affecting the other, on the way to create a fundamentally deformed and new culture, text, and identity, or in better terms, an intertextual and intercultural multiple identity.
