How Does John Proctor Change Throughout The Play

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The Crucible is a play written by Arthur Miller based on real events, but Miller adds to the play for good reason. Miller adds love, hatred and revenge into a factor of why the trails happened. To show love can move someone to do anything, to show hatred can ruin a good mans name, and to show even if a person did nothing wrong, revenge could be reason to accuse and change their life. In real life, John Proctor is known as a successful farmer, but known as a mean man. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller portrays Proctor as a “Good and righteous man” (Miller 221). His one and only flaw is that he had an affair with a former servant girl, Abigail Williams. He is also a very honorable and noble man. John finally came clean and gave “ his goodness” to God before ripping his untrue confession (Miller 240). He spent the whole play trying to protect his wife, Elizabeth, from the horrors of the trials even though he was one of the causes they were in the situations. The affair effected mostly everything throughout the play, with mostly Abigail trying to sabotage the Proctors marriage. In the play, John also only has three kids with …show more content…

One of those being that John has actually around 60 years of age, but in the play he was around 30. Miller also added Abigail to be in Johns life instead of being just another Townes girl. Miller might of added these two very strategic pieces of the play to show Abigails “ motivation for lying” (Barry). If in the play John was actually 60 and Abigail was irrelevant to John, then there wouldn’t be meaning behind her lying. Another change Miller did was that in the play Proctor only had one wife ,Elizabeth, but in real life John really had 3 wives. Miller could have only had Proctor have one wife to show his commitment to Elizabeth and to prove to the town that even though he had an affair with Abigail, that he wasn’t a