Arthur Miller's Presentation Of Willy Loman

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the author conveys the reader about how a person lives his life when he or she cannot live the “American Dream.” Willy Loman, the main character in the play is a confused and tragic character. He is a man who is struggling to hold onto what morality he has left in a changing society that no longer values the ideals he grew up to believe in. Even though the society he lives in can be blamed for much of his misfortune, he must also be the blame for his bad judgment, disloyalty and his foolish pride.

He is a salesman. His importance is derived from that designation. Thus, his self-dignity is directly related to his occupational success. According to Willy, some weeks he averaged two hundred dollars, in actuality it was closer to seventy. However, he still found solace in that he was doing what was expected of him.  One example of his incessant need to be successful  as a salesman is, that he misses many opportunities which life affords him. He could have gone to Africa and become a rich man, but he stayed in New York simply because he is a salesman. Here is merely another example of his identity being associated with his vocation.

He is so terrified of not being what and who he thinks he is in society, that he cannot let go of his illusions and clings to them until his death.  However, this is not because he is a common man.  It is because he is a man who lacks the courage, conviction and strength to move past his illusions, grasp the truth and prevent himself from stifling his, or his sons, full flowering and whole development.  This is because his fears and insecurities, not to mention failures, have arisen from his adopting unquestioningly a set of values that have been irreconcilable with the natural outpouring of his love and creativity.  There is a "wrong" or an "evil" in Willy's environment that has prevented this because he has based his career choice, his method of parenting, and his lifestyle on a value system that is based on "appearances" not truth.  When he discovers these values are illusions he stubbornly refuses to admit his mistakes, and, instead, becomes pathetic instead of tragically heroic because he clings all the more to his illusions and imposes them on anyone around him-or becomes irate with those who point out the errors of his actions and/or logic.  The truth of modern society is that it represents one that thwarts man in his effort to achieve his "rightful dignity", but Willy never accepts the discovery of the moral law (which to Miller is the illumination of tragedy) which supports a man's right to achieve such dignity.  Instead, he tries to live by the

"Death of A Salesman," by Arthur Miller, is a play that tells the story of a traveling salesman, Willy Loman, who encounters frustration and failure as he reflects on and experiences his own life. Willy's quest for the American Dream leads to his failure because throughout his life, he pursues the illusion of the American Dream and not the reality of it. His mindset on perfection, his obsession with success, and his constant reminiscence of the past and foretelling of the future, all contribute to his defeat in the end.

Through this, Miller demonstrates that self-deception can lead to even more problems. In accordance with Arthur Miller’s definition of a tragic hero, Willy is unwilling to remain passive when his dignity is challenged. When his neighbor Charley offers Willy a steady paying job, Willy refuses. By taking the job from Charley, Willy feels as though it would hurt his pride. Willy’s inability to see past his pride blinds him to the basic rationality of taking a steady paying job. Miller shows that one must differentiate between an appropriate time to protect one’s honor, and an appropriate time to be pragmatic in order to make ends meet. Willy’s unwillingness to remain passive is seen when he pleads with his boss to allow him to work closer to home. He says, “Forty dollars a week, that’s all I’d need... I put thirty four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat an orange and then throw the peel away! A man is not a piece of fruit!” (82). Miller has Willy fired from the job altogether after this meeting in order to show that people that have become useless will often be rejected by society. Willy’s expectations that he would continue to live a dignified life are thwarted, and Miller thrusts Willy even deeper into despair, proving that unfulfilled expectations can potentially ruin one’s life.

Willy spends more time then not contradicting his words. The advice he gives his sons, he hardly lives by. The example he strives to set for his boys appalls a hard-working laborer. Yet after

In the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willy is both sympathized with and looked down upon throughout the story. Willy is a very complex character with problems and faults that gain both sympathy and also turn the reader off to him. Willy Loman is both the protagonist and the antagonist, gaining sympathy from the reader only to lose it moments later.

Death of a Salesman is a play that was written to take place in New York City in the late 1940’s. Willy Loman is the main character of the play who is the father of his family. The play focuses on Willy, his wife Linda, and two sons. The family lives in an apartment that is now surrounded with many buildings, which starts to make Willy feel closed in. The play focuses on Willy and the struggles he has with his family, work, and life. Willy has come to the point that he is so unhappy, he seems to lie about everything in his life. He feels the need to make his family believe that he is very successful, well-liked, and makes a lot of money. When in reality, he isn’t successful at all. His lies start to overcome his life and especially the guilt he feels from his past mistakes.

In Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, readers are taken on a journey showing the last twenty-four hours in the life of failing salesman, Willy Loman. Willy’s failed ambitions of being the quintessential American salesman cause him to fall on hard times and lose all will to live. Willy Loman allows his pride to cloud his judgment, and manipulate all sense of rational thinking; his death along with many of his other actions became selfish in nature because they affect more than just himself and cause the downfall of many other characters. When Willy loses his job, he, in essence, loses himself. Willy’s life is centered around the sales firm and it’s the only life he’s ever known.

To begin, Miller warns against simply viewing success as wealth through the way Willy perceives his job. From the very beginning of the play, Willy does not have a very healthy view of his job. He has let himself take on a responsibility that is not right

Willy’s life teeters between these petty concrete objects and his grandiose verbal projections.  In past, present, and fantasy, Willy expresses himself through clichés and repetitions in a formulaic chant.  However, he achieves neither popularity nor success as a salesman, and he fails as a gardener, mechanic, husband, father. (Martin 67)

Arthur Miller, the author of the play Death of as salesman and many others, was born in New York in the year 1915. He later attended the University of Michigan which is where he started writing plays. He wrote many plays such as The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass. Miller died in the year 2005. The play Death of a salesman was written in 1949, the year of American largest economic expansion. This play is about a salesman named Willy Loman who seems to have a mental illness who has a wife, Linda Loman, and two sons, Biff and Happy Loman. Willy has a distorted sense of moral values and passes them on to his sons. He teaches his sons that to be successful you have to be a well-liked person. Throughout the play the reader can see that being a salesman is not the job Willy is qualified for which does not help his family’s financial deficit. In the play, Death of a Salesmen, Arthur Miller uses the characters, symbolism, and the structure of the play represents the theme of lacking awareness of reality.

Sadly, his overzealous attempts serve only to reinforce his son's inadequacy and lack of identity. Willy realizes toward the end of the play that he doesn't need to sell himself to his family, who loves him despite his failings. His suicide, an act of defiance of the system, which until now has defeated him, is also a tragic attempt to salvage something of his dream. Willys readiness to lay down his life to secure his dream that makes Willy a tragic yet heroic figure and one to whom in Linda's words, "attention must be paid finally." According to Miller, "the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready t put his life aside, if necessary, to secure one thing, his sense of personal dignity" (Para 3, Miller). He is saying in this quotation that even the common man can even be tragic because occasionally the one thing that he prizes the most, his sense of self dignity can be so jaded that he would rather die than except his failure. "I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life" (Para 4, Miller). Perhaps Miller is correct, the reader sympathisizes with Willy because he is so passionate about his self preservation and pride. Willy was ready to throw his life away to be a well -liked man and successful being. He did not want to accept the fact that he failed in his occupation, so he refused to ever acknowledge his dying career. In the end his fate was that

As Willy grew older he lost his ability to travel to any place and sell anything. Willy began to see the loss of his beloved lifestyle and the onset of bills and debt just to survive. Slowly this change from the ideal to the real took its toll on Willy. This toll showed itself in Willy’s struggle to remain in his dreams and to maintain hope for things that were never to be. Willy’s increasing difficulty in dealing with machines, his irrational focus on a garden, which will never grow, and his constant Hallucinations all serve to illustrate Willy’s steady desperation to fulfill his dreams and his refusal to deal with reality.

The play presents the conflict between an individual’s capability and limitations to grip a place in the world of trade, and the requirements of a capitalistic society. It shows the disillusionment of Willy Loman resulted from misinterpreted notions of success. Willy Loman, an ordinary, sensitive individual is trying to ascertain his identity in a world where rapid urbanization and crumbling human values corrode his soul continuously. Amidst growing materialism human spirit incessantly craves for a fine and beautiful dream. Willy has found himself in a society where beautiful dream means the dream of having success at hand. It is fully reluctant to embrace the ill-fated people. Moreover the success oriented society undermines its unproductive inhabitants: “Willy, but there is just no spot here for you. If I had a spot I’d slam you right in, but I just don’t have a single solitary spot” (Miller,