Arthur Miller, an American playwrightBy David Walsh21 February 2005Death of a Salesman

By the time Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949 that particular illusion had surely been crushed, with the onset of the Cold War and the anticommunist crusade, and Miller’s new play no doubt reflects that reality.The political situation in the US had transformed itself within a matter of months in 1947-48. Whereas the prospects for third-party candidate and former vice president Henry Wallace, who received the support of the American Stalinists, seemed relatively propitious when he began considering running for president in 1947, his campaign had virtually collapsed by the following summer. The American political and media establishment’s anticommunist campaign had shifted into full gear.The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into “Communist influence” in Hollywood grabbed headlines day after day in the autumn of 1947; ultimately, the “Hollywood Ten” were convicted and sentenced in April 1948; throughout that year the Communist Party leadership in New York City faced prosecution under the Smith Act, which outlawed conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the government; in August 1948 congressional hearings (presided over by Richard Nixon) began into accusations that former State Department official Alger Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union; the following summer, indicating the general climate, a right-wing mob broke up a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York.Even while drawing fairly sharp conclusions about Death of a Salesman’s failings, one always has to bear in mind the conditions in the teeth of which Miller wrote the play; the unfavorable atmosphere goes a considerable distance toward explaining some of its more obvious weaknesses.The piece, Miller’s best-known work, treats the final hours in the life of an aging salesman, Willy Loman. In the course of one day Loman quarrels repeatedly with his older son, Biff, an idler, who has returned home after spending time out West; gets fired by his firm after more than 30 years of backbreaking effort on its behalf; continues to borrow money from an old friend to cover up the fact that he has not been earning anything from his sales work; conjures up the presence of his dead brother and other memories of a happier past; recalls as well the traumatic moment when Biff, a teenager, discovered him in a hotel room with another woman; and, finally, because he is worth more dead than alive (thanks to an insurance policy), kills himself at the wheel of his automobile. In an epilogue, his neighbor defends Willy’s memory, “Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”Death of a Salesman was an instant success, provoking rapturous praise from the New York press, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times being the most prominent at the time, and guaranteed Miller’s stature as an important American writer.Is this praise deserved?The play has achieved a reputation as a critique of American capitalist society or at least its moral and social standards, and audiences and readers have seen it in that light for decades. In one of his essays, the playwright notes that a right-wing periodical called the play “a time bomb expertly placed under the edifice of Americanism.” Nor has this merely been some fraud perpetrated on the public. Miller’s legitimate hostility to aspects of American life comes through in Death of a Salesman, in places quite eloquently.His antagonism in particular toward the get-rich-quick, glad-handing salesman’s dream of success, a valueless, pointless, soul-destroying dream, retains its validity. Echoing Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People, the salesman’s bible), Loman tells his sons, “Be liked and you’ll never want.”The play opens at a moment, however, when he is beset by misgivings. Willy senses he has been on the wrong path all his life, and searches throughout the play for the right one. Biff comes to the conclusion that the pursuit of success itself is the source of the problem. “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” he tells his father. “I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that?” Whether this is a satisfying alternative to delusions of grandeur remains an open question.In any event, some of the play’s most effective scenes, in my view, are those that take place outside the family, between Willy and Charley, his neighbor, for example, or Willy and his boss, Howard. (In the Dustin Hoffman-Volker Schlöndorff 1985 version, Charles Durning as Charley and Jon Polito as Howard turn in two of the strongest performances.)Here Miller seems on firm, objective ground. Particularly in the latter scene something of the cruelty of American business life comes across. As his boss casually dismisses his request to be relieved of going

out on the road any longer and transferred to the New York office, Loman bursts out, “You mustn’t tell me you’ve got people to see—I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” These are moments that have enduring value.In the end, however, wasn’t the American traveling salesman—shallow, crude and philistine—something of an easy target? (Weren’t many of Miller’s subjects somewhat undemanding targets?) After Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Main Street and Elmer Gantry—whose protagonist spends time on the road as a traveling salesman), Sherwood Anderson and others, was Miller breaking any terribly new ground in this general area?The genuinely telling moments in Death of a Salesman are all too infrequent. The spectator is meant to sympathize with Loman without looking too deeply at his life. Loman’s relationship to Biff is the play’s weakest feature, with Miller at his least convincing and most schematic. The notion that Biff’s adult life has been derailed by the discovery that his father had a girlfriend in Boston is simply puerile. How is this discovery connected to the play’s principal theme, that Loman has imbibed and made his own a false view of success and failure in life? This critical scene seems entirely to lack what Lukács called “dramatic necessity.”If, as the play suggests, Loman has deluded himself and his family about every aspect of life, including marital fidelity, then this one lesson in reality should have set Biff on the right course, not sent him off the deep end. His son should have thanked him for at least one honest experience! Something of Miller’s own rather conventional, petty bourgeois outlook comes across here.Despite the undeniable moments of truth, at the center of Death of a Salesman is a profound ambiguity, which must reflect, in the end, the playwright’s own ambiguous feelings about American society and the American dream. What precisely is the playwright’s attitude toward Loman and what should ours be? Tom Driver, writing in the Tulane Drama Review in 1957, argued that in the play “at one moment [Loman is] the pathetic object of our pity and the next is being defended as a hero of tragic dimensions.”Loman is a rather unpleasant figure throughout much of the play, a boastful blowhard, a bully, a coward. He gains our sympathy in his boss’s office and again when his sons desert him in a Manhattan restaurant, only to lose it once more by his foolish ranting in the play’s final moments. “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!”Miller wants it both ways. He makes Loman hateful, but he can’t resist having him touch the spectator’s heartstrings too. So we have his wife Linda famously declare, “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.” This is one of the play’s most oft-quoted speeches and taken to reflect one of its central themes.It is a speech, however, that needs to be criticized and rejected. Attention mustn’t be paid to Loman, in this sentimental fashion, but to the circumstances that made him into such a largely detestable, self-deluded figure. His tragedy is not that he can’t make money as a salesman any longer, or that his eldest son thinks he’s a fake, but that he has thoroughly accepted, even in his dreams, the ideology of a way of life that is killing him and the rest of his family. His tragedy is that he lies to himself until the end of his life. Why should we celebrate and honor him? We should remain angry at his behavior, not “forgiving.” The maudlin final scene, in the graveyard, the “Requiem,” is a capitulation by Miller, despite Biff’s half-hearted comments. What one takes away from the scene is Charley’s eulogizing the salesman as a quasi-heroic figure, a dreamer.In the end, Miller’s analysis of American society falls far short. Loman’s tragedy is that he listened to those who “inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices,” Miller wrote in one essay, and their “thundering command to succeed,” and within that framework considered himself “a failure.”But is that Loman’s tragedy, that he fails, or thinks he has? Miller, of course, stacks the deck. Loman no longer can make a living as a salesman and ultimately loses his position altogether, he alienates his eldest son, his mind and his body may be going. His defeats and deterioration sadden us, we confuse them with what ought to be the tragic essence of his life.How much more profound is Welles’ Citizen Kane, in which the protagonist succeeds brilliantly and, as his reward, endures only moral and mental anguish. More than that, Welles’ film exposes the spiritual emptiness in America, the waste of talent and energy and the essential meaninglessness of a life like Kane’s, devoted to the accumulation of wealth and celebrity. Hardly anything is more punishing than success in America, a social process Miller was to witness first-hand less than a decade later when he married the most famous film actress in the world.

The popularity of Miller’s drama with audiences was due in part to the fact that it did not demand that they look closely at the lives of the successful. Spectators could return home comforted to a certain extent by a life that was “tragic” in the light of abject failure. This helps make Death of a Salesman something of an ersatz tragedy. The drama was perhaps already an anachronism by the time it was written and staged. It refers to moods more bound up with the Depression, or Miller’s conception of it. America was about to “take off” in 1949, the American salesman was entering a golden age. The play hardly speaks to the “success story,” with all its devastating moral and social consequences, that was about to unfold in the economic boom.After all, if Willy Loman had simply hung on a few more years perhaps he could have made a bundle selling Chevrolets or kitchen appliances. Even within the framework of the play, one might reasonably ask: what if Loman’s sales figures remained as high as ever? What if he were a younger, healthier man? What if one of his sons struck it rich in some line of work or other? How much of the play’s tragic core would then remain?The playwright is simply not on to the more troubling undercurrents in American life; he remains largely on the surface. And, inevitably, half-attached to the world he depicts. Noel Coward, a creator of drawing room comedies for the most part, was unsurprisingly hostile to Death of a Salesman, but his remark that the play “is a glorification of mediocrity” was not entirely off the mark.This, it seems to me, provides a further and related hint as to Miller’s success in postwar America. On the one hand, he criticized certain tendencies in American society (selfishness, mediocrity, cowardice), sometimes sharply; on the other, he offered “understanding” that amounted, in the end, to a form of approval or at least acquiescence. With unerring instinct the critics and the cultural establishment responded with enthusiasm.There is a marked regression from Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (and perhaps Fitzgerald and Richard Wright in the first half of Native Son) to Death of a Salesman. The best American artistic work did not hold itself back from the terrible social reality. Dreiser would burst into tears walking down the street, looking at the faces of people he met. Where is that quality in Miller, of bottomless compassion and implacable, unanswerable analysis? Nowhere to be found.Again, this cannot be simply a personal failing. What was it in the social environment that precluded the element of “getting to the bottom of things”? One feels the lack of inspiration, the compromise with mediocrity. Miller writes about the “the heart and spirit of the average man,” but Henry Popkin argues persuasively that his characters, who “possess as little imagination” as any ever presented on stage, “inhabit the dead center of dullness as they sit and wait for the voice of doom.”By 1949 the general shape of the postwar world had begun to emerge. The pressures on left-wing writers were vast and intense, and Miller, it must be said, stood up to them far better than most. But he could not go unscathed. One always senses, even as he takes a principled stand, that the playwright is well aware of the ideological and social limits beyond which he cannot go. The right-wing, patriotic policies pursued by the American Stalinists without a doubt played a role in this.Only a relative handful of artists and intellectuals, probing beneath the surface of postwar life, recognized that the unresolved contradictions of capitalism would reemerge with explosive force.Arthur Miller did not belong, in any event, to that species. He was a much more moderate individual. The dreariness of postwar America did not frighten him, he had known dreariness. He accepted it with good grace.One might make the case that, in the final analysis, Miller’s special role was to become the registrar and chronicler of drab social and political prospects—all the while holding out for maintaining a good conscience, doing good works, not cheating on one’s wife, etc.The horror of Hiroshima, the Cold War, McCarthyism could not be treated fully within the left-liberal framework, it would have led to despair. The only way within this framework not to give in to despair was to hold back, to censor oneself.Of course the painters, the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, etc.), gave vent to their revulsion and horror, but as mutes, screaming on canvas. One cannot place pure pain and mental dissolution on a stage. What was a dramatist to do? This very difficult situation, a tightrope walk, called for someone with intelligence, but not overly penetrating; with left-wing views, but not too far to the left; with talent as a writer, but not gifted with genius; with sympathy for the “common man,” i.e., above all, the lower middle class, the more mediocre social layers. Arthur Miller found himself fulfilling these requirements.

Neeath of a Salesman Arthur MillerAmerican playwright, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, nonfiction writer, travel writer, children's writer, and autobiographer.The following entry presents criticism on Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) through 2002. For further information on his life and complete works, see CLC, Volumes 1, 2, 6, 10, and 26.

INTRODUCTIONWith its first production in 1949, Death of a Salesman firmly established Miller's reputation as one of the premiere American playwrights. Structured as a modern tragedy, the play depicts the last twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman, who for thirty-six years has sold his wares all over New England. Miller utilizes Loman's disillusionment with his life and career as a means to measure the enormous gap between the American Dream's promise of eventual success and the devastating reality of one's concrete failure. Both a critical and popular success, Death of a Salesman has received a Tony Award, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize as well as being adapted for film and television on several occasions. Death of a Salesman is widely recognized as Miller's masterpiece and is frequently listed along side Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night as one of the canonical works of American drama.

Plot and Major CharactersDeath of a Salesman opens with Willy Loman returning to his wife, Linda, at their home in Brooklyn, New York, after an unsuccessful sales trip. The play's structure subverts the traditional linear narrative by intermingling Willy's internal monologues and past recollections with the present action of the plot. After he arrives in Brooklyn, Willy is soon visited by his two grown sons, Biff and Happy (Hap). The eldest son, Biff, a former high school football star, has travelled the country holding a series of aimless jobs. Hap works in a dead-end job at a New York department store and spends most of his time chasing women and drinking. Willy is extremely critical of his sons' lack of direction and, in turn, Biff and Hap regard him as ineffectual and worry that he is becoming senile in his old age. After talking to Linda about Biff's failure to find a career, Willy recalls his son's success as a football star and is soon reminded of his own marital infidelities with a woman he met on the road. Willy eventually shifts focus to criticizing Hap's spending habits and becomes upset. His neighbor Charlie calms him down and the two men play a game of cards. After Charlie leaves, Willy reminisces about his brother Ben, who left for Africa to mine diamonds and became a great financial success. When Linda finds Willy ranting alone about the past, he leaves the house to take a walk. Concerned about his father's erratic behavior, Biff confronts his mother who accuses him of neglecting his father. When Hap joins the conversation, Linda accuses them both of being ungrateful and of turning their backs on their father. She then reveals that Willy has tried to kill himself on several occasions. When Willy returns, Hap tells him that Biff is going to approach his old boss, Bill Oliver, for a loan to open a sporting-goods store. Although Biff is against the idea, he goes along with the deception to make his father happy.The next day, Willy finds that he has been fired from his sales job after thirty-six years of service. Upset and on his way to Charlie's office to ask for a job, Willy runs into Charlie's son, Ben, who was a classmate of Biff's. Ben reveals that Biff was irrevocably changed by a surprise visit to Willy during his senior year in high school. Ben comments that, after his abrupt return, Biff became uninterested in college and lost his motivation to better himself. Meanwhile, Biff meets Hap at a restaurant to inform him that he was unable to get the loan from Bill Oliver. However, Biff does admit that he has come to the realization that he has to change his life. When Willy arrives at the restaurant, Biff attempts to tell him the truth about their deception and his failed meeting. Willy leaves his sons and has a flashback to the fateful sales trip when Biff's surprise visit revealed Willy's adulterous affair. Later, back at the family home, Biff confronts Willy about his suicide attempts and informs his father that he will leave in the morning, planning never to return. At that moment, Willy decides to commit suicide, convinced that the settlement on his life insurance policy will provide Biff with the wealth he needs to start a new life. The play concludes with Willy's funeral as the assembled characters reflect on Willy's life and legacy.

Major ThemesCritics have maintained that much of the enduring universal appeal of Death of a Salesman lies in its central theme of the failure of the American Dream. Willy's commitment to false social values—consumerism, ambition, social stature—keeps him from acknowledging the value of human experience—the comforts of personal relationships, family and friends, and love. When Willy realizes that his true value lies in being a good father, he chooses to sacrifice himself in order to give his sons the material wealth he has always desired. In a broader sense, some commentators perceive the play as an

indictment of American capitalism and a rejection of materialist values. Competition and responsibility are also prominent themes in Death of a Salesman. For example, Willy's tendency to evade responsibility for his behavior and his penchant for blaming others has been passed onto his sons and, as a result, all three men exhibit a poor work ethic and lack of integrity. Willy's inability to discern between reality and fantasy is another recurring motif, particularly as seen through the subjective reality of the play's structure. Miller creates an environment in Death of a Salesman where the real time of the play and the internal workings of Willy's mind are brought together. This refusal to separate subjective and objective truths is further reflected in Willy's inability to see his sons for who they really are, which becomes major source of conflict in the play.

Critical ReceptionAlthough Death of a Salesman is widely regarded as one of the greatest American plays of the twentieth century, there has been some critical debate over Miller's assertion that the play is, in fact, a modern tragedy. Some reviewers have argued that the work cannot be considered a tragedy in the traditional sense because Willy does not fit the Aristotelian definition of a tragic hero. Others have countered, asserting that Willy attains tragic dimensions by virtue of his intense passion to surpass his earthly limitations. In support of this claim, Robert A. Martin has commented that, “Is there more to the idea of tragedy than transcends the struggle between father and son for forgiveness and dignity?” In addition to these questions of classification, Death of a Salesman has also attracted critical notice for its sophisticated critique of the role of capitalism in American society. Commentators have noted that Willy's failure to understand and achieve the American Dream strongly resonates with modern audiences, contributing significantly to its enduring popularity. Death of a Salesman has remained critically and commercially popular since its first performance—a fiftieth-anniversary production in 1999 won a Tony Award for Best Play Revival.w

 Critical Analysis of "Death of a Salesman"    Uploaded by greggb324 on Jul 3, 2006

Critical Analysis of "Death of a Salesman"

A Greek tragedy is a story, which involves a character with a tragic flaw that leads to his or her downfall. In the American tragedy Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman displays many traits, which lead to his downfall. Willy Loman displays a great deal of stubbornness and a warped sense of success as well as a lack of parenting skills. Throughout the play, Willy reveals many bizarre and uncommon characteristics that in the end contribute to his suicide. Willy’s stubbornness and pride plays a major role throughout the play in major scenes.

The pride and stubbornness, which Willy possesses, hinders him throughout the play. One of the most prominent scenes in which Willy’s pride gets to him is when Charley offers him a job. Willy’s response to Charley’s first push to get Willy to take the job is, “I – I just can’t work for you, Charley.”(97) After Willy turns down the first offer, Charley again tries to get Willy to take the job and Willy responds by saying, “I can’t work for you, that’s all, don’t ask me why.”(98) Even though Willy lost his job and cannot afford anything, he still refuses a job offer from Charley. Willy has too much pride to accept anything from anyone. Another prominent example of Willy’s excessive stubbornness is when he sees Linda mending her stockings. When Willy sees her mending stockings, he tells her to throw them out with the idea that he will just buy new ones. Willy is too stubborn to realize that he cannot afford to buy new stockings and the only way to keep the stockings in wearable condition is to mend them. Linda realizes what their economic situation is but Willy cannot swallow his pride and accept the fact that he cannot afford anything. Willy also demonstrates excessive stubbornness and pride while talking to Bernard. When Bernard asks what Biff is involved in, Willy responds by telling him he is working on something very big. Willy will not admit that Biff is not really working on any thing at all and even though he is trying to get a business set up he will most likely never amount to anything big. Willy simply has too much pride to admit that his life is anything less than perfect. In addition to Willy’s excessive stubbornness and pride, he also displays a warped sense of success. One of Willy’s most prominent flaws is his warped sense of success. Willy’s view of success is one

that is not shared by many as seen through out the play. One of Willy’s warped views of success concerns Biff’s football career. Willy has so much excitement regarding Biff playing football that he completely disregards that fact that Biff is in danger of failing in school. Bernard comes to warn Biff to study for the Regents exam and Willy responds by saying, “Let’s box, Bernard!”(32) Willy shows complete disregard for the fact that his son could fail because he expects his son’s athletic talents to carry him through life. Another incident occurs when Willy is talking to Biff regarding Bernard. He tells Biff, “Be liked and you will never want.”(33) Willy believes that success revolves solely around the views that people have regarding a person. He does not realize that someone liking him will not put food on his table and money in his wallet. Willy also has a warped sense of success regarding Dave Singleman. Dave Singleman was a man who, at eighty-four, could make his living by calling clients from his room. Willy thinks that Dave Singleman is the definition of success. He does not realize that there are other ways to be successful in life. While Willy’s warped sense of success plays a major role throughout the play, his poor skills as a parent and role model are the most prominent of his traits.

Willy displays poor parenting and role model skills throughout the entire play. There are many scenes early in the play, which lead the reader to recognize the flaws in Willy’s parenting and role model skills. When Biff steals football from the locker room Willy first responds by saying, “I want you to return that.”(30) This is obviously the right thing to say to any child who takes something that is not rightfully theirs. However, three lines later Willy then contradicts himself by saying, “Sure, he’s gotta practice with a regulation size ball, doesn’t he? To Biff: Coach’ll probably congratulate you on your initiative!”(30) This is instilling the wrong moral ethics in Biff. Biff now believes that if he steals something his father will not get angry but will approve of the action. Many scenes throughout the play demonstrate Willy’s inability to act as a role model to his children. One of these scenes is when Biff discovers his father’s affair with “the woman”. Biff until this point had always looked up to Willy and thought of his father as almost invincible. This incident changes many of Biff’s views regarding Willy. It creates a dark side to Willy and questions Biff’s previous views of his father. At this point in the story Willy’s status as a role model to Biff is certainly lower than in previous scenes. Perhaps the biggest mistake that Willy makes as a parent and role model is his suicide. While Willy kills himself with the intentions that Biff will collect insurance money, this is not how other people will most likely see it. Willy’s family is left to believe that Willy kills himself out of depression. Willy tries to kill himself several times throughout the play out of depression so it is the only logical reason. It is only at the end that his motives change slightly. Willy believes that what he is doing will benefit his family when in fact his family is only saddened by his loss. Willy’s death is in part due to the array of traits he demonstrates throughout the play.

There are many character traits, which Willy Loman possesses. Willy’s excessive stubbornness and pride surface many times through out the play as a major flaw in Willy. The warped sense of success Willy displays not only contributes to his failures but his children’s as well. Willy demonstrates his poor parenting and role model skills in a variety of scenes. Willy Loman’s story is one of tragedy and regret. It is a story of man vs. himself, in which man was not able to overcome the power which lie inside of him.

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Willy Loman, An Idiot with A Dream in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

    A common idea presented in literature is the issue of the freedom of the individual in opposition to the controlling pressures of society. Willy Loman, the main character in Death of A Salesman by Arthur Miller,

epitomizes this type of person; one who looks to his peers and co-salesman as lesser individuals. Not only was he competitive and overbearing, but Willy Loman sought after an ideal that he could never become: the greatest salesman ever. Determined to make money, Willy became uncontrollable and somewhat insane. Through his dialogue and actions, Willy Loman portrays a character of insecurity, persistence, and unknown identity.

    From the very beginning of his life, Willy Loman experienced problems with his popularity and personality. His last name is a pun on a "low man." He is at the bottom of the business world as an unsuccessful salesman. In addition, his theories on life and society prove to be very degrading, not to mention influential to his mind set every day. Willy believes that being well-liked and having a personal attractiveness, together, can bring success, money, and many friends. Ironically, Willy does not have many friends and many people do not like him. With a beauty unlike others, Willy thinks that doors will open and problems will all disappear.

    As a salesman, Willy developed many hindrances that caused his mind to deteriorate. His life as a salesman was built on a dream that he witnessed as a child. At an early age, Willy heard of a salesman, Dave Singleman, who could make his living out of a hotel room. Singleman was very successful and when he died, people from all over the country came to his funeral. It was this ideal that Willy Loman sought after. All he ever wanted was fame, popularity, and a few friends. Unfortunately, when Willy died, not a single person went to his funeral. His life, one that was spent trying to become another person, namely Dave Singleman, was a waste as no-one even wanted to see him buried.

    In reflection of his career with the Wagner Company, many other problems arose that forced economic difficulties on him and his family. He was determined to live by ideals that placed him above everyone else. It was with these lies and illusions that Willy's life began to lose its' air of reality. He lost his identity, courage, and dignity throughout New England as a salesman. And as he explained often, "I have friends...They know me up and down New England." Realistically, though, Willy was not successful. He did not have friends and people did not like him in New England.

    "With his self-identity weakened and undermined, Willy

lost his grasp of things in general." (P.P Sharma, critical analysis) He spent hours on hours dreaming of the past. Thinking of himself and his son Biff who had potential, but did not take advantage of it. Biff was Willy's inspiration as a father. He had the determination to become a great football player, not to mention make something with his life and the Loman name. However, Biff flunked math and threw all of his opportunities away. It was with these circumstances that Biff and his father began to separate. Willy always promised his sons prosperity and good-fortune, but he could not give that to him and when he lost Biff, his life became an even larger failure.

    In other memories and illusions, Willy often replays the moments with his brother, Ben. Specifically, the time when Willy was offered a job in Alaska; the job which would have made him an enormous amount of money haunts Willy every time he tries to sell his Wagner stockings, only to have his sales come up lame. With low sales and age, Willy decided to ask for a job in New York. And it was at this time that his company decided to stop paying by salary, but solely on commission. And for a man who cannot sell well, the loss of a salary is very detrimental to his well-being. "Although Willy is aware, maybe dimly and imperfectly, that he is not cut out for success in the world of trade and commerce, he nevertheless nurses the dream of getting the better of everybody else. And this leads him into an alienation from himself, obscuring his real identity." (P. P. Sharma, critical analysis)

    Willy's life would have been more satisfying had he engaged himself in more physical work that would occupy his mind. His life was situated on a dream for success and prosperity. When it never arrived, Willy spent a lot of time, just brainstorming how to make his life what he wanted it to be. Putting his family aside, Willy committed a terrible sin. In Boston, during one of his business trips, Willy cheated on his wife. He met a woman who would be very cheap for an evening, and as a boost of confidence, Willy spent the night with this low-class woman. Unfortunately, his son Biff, who was surprising his father in Boston, walked in on the two, thus causing a situation that would forever haunt Biff. His thoughts of his father as an influential salesman in New England were all lost. What appeared, instead, was the belief that his father was a loser with no potential to ever support his family. It was at this time that they their lives spread apart.

    Using that situation as a downfall and the many others

that occurred in Willy Loman's life, it was not surprising when he killed himself. In search of happiness, Willy believed that he could give his family what they wanted if he only left the world. But, his dreams were wrong, as his family did not even care enough to go to his funeral. He died for things that he had lived for- his sons and illusions of prosperity. Ironically, though, his life was not worth the happiness of his son's. And his life was definitely not worth the sacrifice that he made for them his entire life.

    Willy Loman died still unsure of his status in the business world. He wanted success and money, but at the age of sixty-one, he realized that these goals would never be reached. His identity was lost and his presence on earth unknown. Willy Loman was influenced by society in that he could not overcome the pressures of selling and making money. His life long dream was happiness, but that never came either. The pressures of society killed a man who once had courage and determination. But, as his life moved further, Willy Loman lost his ability to see the world clearly. All his eyes could observe was despair and insecurity. It was through his beliefs that he decided to end his unhappiness, by ending his life. Willy Loman died a lost identity, but one that found himself for a brief period of time; long enough to end his life forever. How to Cite this PageMLA Citation:"Willy Loman, An Idiot with A Dream in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman." 123HelpMe.com. 12 Dec 2010     <http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=5116>. Terry Otten writes in Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller that Death of a Salesman, "probably more than any other dramatic play, provokes critical [arguments] about the viability of tragedy in the modern age and particularly in American culture"

Quote 1: "They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England." Act 1, Part 1, pg. 4Quote 2: "I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?" Act 1, Part 1, pg. 5Quote 3: "I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life." Act 1, Part 2, pg. 11Quote 4: "probably congratulate [Biff] on [his] initiative" Act 1, Part 3, pg. 18Quote 5: "the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates a personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want." Act 1, Part 3, pg. 21Quote 6: "I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me." Act 1, Part 3, pg. 23Quote 7: "when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich." Act 1, Part 7, pg. 33Quote 8: "Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way." Act 1, Part 7, pg. 34

Quote 9: "kind of temporary about [him]self." Act 1, Part 7, pg. 36Quote 10: "I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person." Act 1, Part 8, pg. 40Quote 11: "personality always wins the day." Act 1, Part 8, pg. 48Quote 12: "[a] star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!" Act 1, Part 8, pg. 51Quote 13: "didn't crack up again." Act 2, Part 2, pg. 59Quote 14: "[i]n those days there was personality in it . . . There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it. Today, it's all cut and dried, and there's no chance for bringing friendship to bear -- or personality . . . They don't know [him] any more." Act 2, Part 2, pg. 61Quote 15: "[y]ou can't eat the orange and throw the peel away -- a man is not a piece of fruit!" Act 2, Part 2, pg. 61-2Quote 16: "his life ended after that Ebbets Field game. . . [f]rom the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to him." Act 2, Part 4, pg. 71Quote 17: "I've often thought of how strange it was that I knew he'd given up his life." Act 2, Part 4, pg. 72Quote 18: "Willy, when're you gonna realize that them things don't mean anything. You named him Howard, but you can't sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that." Act 2, Part 4, pg. 75Quote 19: "After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive." Act 2, Part 4, pg. 76Quote 20: "We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years." Act 2, Part 5, pg. 81Quote 21: "practically" Act 2, Part 5, pg. 83Quote 22: "You've just seen a prince walk by. A fine, troubled prince. A hard-working, unappreciated prince. A pal, you understand? A good companion. Always for his boys." Act 2, Part 5, pg. 90Quote 23: "Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates -- that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized -- I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey -- I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all." Act 2, Part 7, pg. 100Quote 24: "Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing!" Act 2, Part 7, pg. 103Quote 25: "[w]e never told the truth for ten minutes in this house." Act 2, Part 7, pg. 104Quote 26: "Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!" Act 2, Part 7, pg. 105Quote 27: "there's more of [Willy] in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made." Requiem, pg. 110Bloom, Harold, ed. Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Dublin, Louis I. Suicide: A Sociological and Statistical Study. New York: Ronald Press, 1963.Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. 1979. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. 1949. Reprint. New York: Penguin, 1976.Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. London: Methuen, 1987.Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. 1950. Reprint. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961.

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Corruption of the 'American Dream' in Death of a Salesman

The American Dream' is based on the 'Declaration of Independence': 'We believe that all men are born with these inalienable rights - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' (Thomas Jefferson, 1776). This 'dream' consists of a genuine and determined belief that in America, all things are possible to all men, regardless of birth or wealth; if you work hard enough you will achieve anything. However, Miller believes that people have been 'ultimately misguided' and Miller's play, Death of a Salesman, is a moving destruction of the whole myth.

The origins of the American Dream seem to have been rooted in the pioneering mentality of the 18th and 19th century immigrants, most of whom came to America because of a promise of a new and better life. In particular, the opportunity to own one's land. But land 'ran out' and so cities developed and massive variations arose in wealth, which meant that this 'American Dream' changed from being a potential reality, into being a dream, like the name implies. Most of Miller's plays are directly or indirectly about the American Dream, because ultimately this dream wasn't going to succeed as lots of people wished. Death of a Salesman written in 1949, is a moving destruction of the whole myth.

To be hard working, honest and have ambition were the ways of the American Dream. This lead to success, wealth and in due time - power. But this dream for everyone developed, and encouraged greed, selfish behavior, pride and rivalry between one another.

Willy Loman was 'caught-up' in this American Dream. It causes business to develop in the world. Capitalism and also the profit motive and competitive instinct, makes Willy have a weakness in his personality. This weakness was caused by a combination of business pressures. Willy wants to prove himself through successes a salesman, but as he fails, his own life destroys him.

'I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.'

'Never leave a job until your sixty.'

Willy's quotes above shows that he is insecure, and is not the successful businessman he says he is.

Miller based Willy's character on his own uncle, Manny Newman. Miller said,

'That homely, ridiculous little man had after all never ceased to struggle for a certain victory, the only kind open to him in this society - selling to achieve his lost self as a man with his name and his sons' name on a business of his own.'

This explains exactly what he had in mind for Willy to be - as he was, 'trying to achieve his lost self'.

The things that are meant to happen in business are success, wealth and esteem. This is what Ben has achieved and done. Miller stressed his success and material reward in Ben. He does this by Ben repeating himself a lot, ' I walked into the jungle, and when I came out I was rich.' But Ben also has emptiness in spite of his success. In the eyes of the audience, he has no real happiness.

When Dave Singleman was mentioned, by Willy when he was trying to tell Howard what being a salesman used to be like, we only have Willy's evidence, as all we know, this man maybe maid up in Willy's head. But this man is a huge icon for Willy to look up to.

'He was eighty-four years old, and he'd drummed merchandise in thirty-one states'.

Also Willy desperately wants a funeral similar to Dave's,

'When he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral.'

This was because Dave was greatly valued, whereas Willy isn't, nor is he loved as much. I think that this marks Willy's failure as a businessman. He hasn't realised the demands of the business world. Rather than the old way of Dave Singleman's time. Howard isn't interested in the story of Dave. To have a successful business, it has to be efficient, sometimes having to be ruthless. Now people buy products, not for dreams or personalities.  Willy said, ' There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it. Today, it's all cut and dried, and there's no chance for bringing friendship to bear - or personality.' In my opinion, Howard Wagner treats Will harshly, because Willy has been very loyal to the business, and has had no reward for his length of service.

'They don't even know me anymore.'

He has the feeling of being used by the firm, and with no gratitude.

'I put thirty-four years into this firm...You can't eat the orange and throw away the peel - a man is not a piece of fruit!'

He needs to believe he is 'vital in New England', but knows he is not; he is just kidding himself.

Biff said about Willy, 'He had all the wrong dreams. All, all wrong, and he never knew who he was.' Being a salesman is very unpredictable, and precarious as a living.

'He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back - that's like an earthquake.' You would have to give a good impression.

Charley has realized that Willy's view of success is seriously flawed. Charley said, 'The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.'  And as Willy can't sell anything, his has got nothing. Willy has lost all self-respect. Eliza Kazan, director of the original Broadway production, said, 'Willy's fatal error is that he built his life and his sense of worth on something completely false. This is the error of our whole society.' Willy can't function as a salesman, also a human being, because he's not liked. 'Willy's liked, but he's not well liked', is the opinion of other people.

Will has been a failure in life. But he feels even more so because of the fact that success in the American Dream is supposed to be available to anyone. This figure has significantly effected his family - especially his sons. Biff is just as hopeless as Willy in a lot of ways.

The values of the city are power, brings money. Willy though has never liked the city, and prefers the country, because there is not so much pressure. He is attracted to the wild, free and open countryside. 'The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.' Willy finds the city very claustrophobic.

The American Dream has been centrally built around the idea of the family. This is the spiritual side. Biff sums it up,

 'We've never told the truth for ten minutes in this house. The man don't know who we are! The man is gonna know!'

It is Willy's fault the way Biff feels,  'And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That's whose fault it is!'

Willy's loneliness, unfaithfulness to Linda and his insecurity, leads to his affair in Boston with another women. Willy buys new stockings for this woman in Boston and makes Linda mend her own, old ones. But Linda cares for Willy a lot, and constantly tries to cover up for him and also tries to understand him.

Willy says, 'That's funny, I could have sworn I was driving that Chevy today.' He is forgetting things, but Linda covers this up by saying, 'Well, that's nothing. Something must have reminded you.' Should Linda have questioned his behaviour more?

Willy feels guilty for Biff, as he knows about Willy's affair, which would have had an incredibly traumatic effect on Biff's life. It would be devastating. Because of this, Biff went to prison for 'steeling a suit'. Biff went onto steeling to compensate his feelings inside.

Unfortunately, Happy is doomed to repeat his father's mistakes, with his attitude to women. He has casual relationships. He isn't as honest as Biff at the end of the day either.

I think that these values of society - the 'American Dream' aren't the only values in the play. The characters are not conditioned solely by the society they live in. They often have choices but often choose wrongly. I believe that there are three ways of viewing 'Death of a Salesman'.

Firstly, this play is a modern tragedy. Willy is a tragic figure. The whole of his life has been totally unpredictable,

'He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back, that's an earthquake.'

Any man could turn against Willy at ant time, if he makes the wrong impression.

Although Will is always 'falling', the audience sympathise with him. John Mason Brow said,

'Miller's play is a tragedy modern, and personal, not classic and heroic; its central figure is a little man sentenced to discover his smallness rather than a big man undone by his greatness.'

Arthur Miller once said,

'I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its higher sense as kings were.'

Secondly, Death of a Salesman is a play about relationships. With Willy and Linda: Willy doesn't look after, or care for Linda as much as he should, but Linda does. 'Linda has developed an iron repression of her expectations to Willy's behaviour - she more than loves him, she admires him, as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties.' Also I think that Willy and Biff, both failures, contrast totally to Charley's and Bernard's success. Biff 'flunked math', whereas Bernard got all the correct results he needed for college. Now Biff has no job. Bernard is a top lawyer. Bernard says, 'I've got a case in front of the Supreme Court.' But Willy can't understand why Biff isn't as good or powerful in life, as Bernard, 'What...what's the secret?' asked Willy, 'Why didn't he ever catch on?'... 'After the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to Biff.'

Bernard replied, ' He never trained himself for anything.' Whereas Bernard did, he worked hard.

Willy has a worse life as a salesman, because of this 'American Dream'. Charley has a highly paid fore filling job.

Thirdly, this is a play of original structure. Miller was going to name this play 'Inside his head'. We can understand why because, regularly we see Willy's 'daydreams', within his mind. It is a very clever way to tell the audience, what happened in the past, and why things are how they are, now in the present day. An example of this is Biff having not got on with Willy. We understand why, when we see a 'daydream' in Willy's mind of what happened in Boston. Biff found out about Willy's affair. Miller wanted to make the transitions form scene to scene seamless.

Miller said,

'There are no flashbacks in the play but only a mobile concurrency of past and present... because in his desperation to justify his life, Willy Loman has destroyed the boundaries between now and then'.

The various lighting effects used in the play were to see how Willy felt, being in the city. He wants to be in the countryside - lighting of leaves and trees.

The music involved was clever, because some characters have different instrument and music, to help the audience to realise, in Willy's 'daydreams', who it is. Willy's was a flute. And Ben also has a distinct type of music.

The staging was clever too. No walls were in between the rooms. But when it was the present day, people walked through a doorway. But when it was in one of Willy's 'daydreams' they ignored the walls. Again to allow the audience to be aware of the characters being in real life or in Willy's 'daydreams'.

'Death of a Salesman' contains much that is critical of modern American society. But, this was not Arthur Miller's sole purpose in writing it.

Willy's misjudgement of his failure in life is demonstrated in 'Death of a Salesman'. He feels as though he has failed because he has no fortune to show for it, in either his or his son's names. What he has truly failed in is his family life, and his married life. That is the corruption of the true 'American Dream'. How to Cite this PageMLA Citation:"Free Death of a Salesman Essays: Corruption of the American Dream." 123HelpMe.com. 12 Dec 2010     <http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=7744>Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998, and reprinted in Where I've Been, And Where I'm GoingCopyright © by Joyce Carol Oates“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. and then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

—Death of a Salesman

Was it our comforting belief that Willy Loman was “only” a salesman? That Death of a Salesman was about—well, an American salesman? And not about all of us?When I first read this play at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I may have thought that Willy Loman was sufficiently “other”—”old.” He hardly resembled the men in my family, my father or grandfathers, for he was “in sales” and not a factory worker or small-time farmer, he wasn’t a manual laborer but a man of words, speech—what his son Biff bluntly calls “hot air.” His occupation, for all its adversities, was “white collar,” and his class not the one into which I’d been born; I could not recognize anyone I knew intimately in him, and certainly I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us. Or, rather, we are Willy Loman, particularly those of us who are writers, poets, dreamers; the yearning soul “way out there in the blue.” Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child’s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity—”God Almighty, [I’ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!”Except of course, it can.

* * *It would have been in the early 1950s that I first read Death of a Salesman, a few years after its Broadway premiere and enormous critical and popular success. I would have read it in an anthology of Best Plays of the Year. As a young teenager I’d begun avidly devouring drama; apart from Shakespeare, no plays were taught in the schools I attended in upstate New York (in the small city of Lockport and the Village of Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo), and so I read plays with no sense of

chronology, in no historic context, no doubt often without much comprehension. Reading late at night when the rest of the household was asleep was an intense activity for me, imbued with mystery, and reading drama was far more enigmatic than reading prose fiction. It seemed to me a challenge that so little was explained in the stage directions; there was no helpful narrative voice; you were obliged to visualize, to “see” the stage in your imagination, the play’s characters always in present tense, vividly alive. In drama, people presented themselves primarily in speech, as they do in life. Yet there was an eerie, dreamlike melding of past and present in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s “present-action” dialogue and his conversations with the ghosts of his past like his revered brother Ben; there was a melting of the barriers between inner and outer worlds that gave to the play its disturbing, poetic quality. (Years later I would learn that Arthur Miller had originally conceived of the play as a monodrama with the title The Inside of His Head).In the intervening years, Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our domestic Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace, his mad scene on the heath a frantic seed-planting episode by flashlight in the midst of which the once-proud, now disintegrating man confesses, “I’ve got nobody to talk to.” His salesmanship, his family relations, his very life—all have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric; yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to; nobody to listen. Perhaps the most memorable single remark in the play is the quiet observation that Willy Loman is “liked . . . but not well-liked.” In America, this is not enough.

* * *Nearly fifty years after its composition, Death of a Salesman strikes us as the most achingly contemporary of our classic American plays. It has proved to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the thirty-four-year-old playwright to temper his gifts for social realism with the Expressionistic techniques of experimental drama like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and The Hairy Ape, Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, work by Chekhov, the later Ibsen, Strindberg, and Pirandello, for by these methods Willy Loman is raised from the parameters of regionalism and ethnic specificity to the level of the more purely, symbolically “American.” Even the claustrophobia of his private familial and sexual obsessions has a universal quality, in the plaintive-poetic language Miller has chosen for him. As we near the twenty-first century, it seems evident that America has become an ever more frantic, self-mesmerized world of salesmanship, image without substance, empty advertising rhetoric, and that peculiar product of our consumer culture “public relations”—a synonym for hypocrisy, deceit, fraud. Where Willy Loman is a salesman, his son Biff is a thief. Yet these are fellow Americans to whom “attention must be paid.” Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success—which is to say, the dark side of us.