Is Willy A Good Father

In Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman’s life seems to be slowly deteriorating. It is clear that Willy’s predicament is of his own doing, and that his own foolish pride and ignorance lead to his downfall. Willy’s self-destruction involved the uniting of several aspects of his life and his lack of grasping reality in each, consisting of, his relationship with his wife, his relationship and manner in which he brought up his children, Biff and Happy, and lastly his inability to productively earn a living and in doing so, failure to achieve his “American Dream”.

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman we see the negative effect of having an absent parent. The main character Willy Loman is a salesman who constantly struggles with trying to be what he considers “successful,” and “well liked.” He has two sons Biff and Happy and is married to Linda. Willy also struggles between illusion and reality; he has trouble defining and distinguishing the past from the present. Between his financial struggles and not feeling like he accomplished anything, he commits suicide. Throughout Willy’s life he was constantly abandoned, by both his father and his brother at very young age. Since Willy has no reference to look up to, he is somewhat left to figure things out on his own. In Willy’s mind, everything he

His excessive pursuit of idealism shatters Willy’s relationship with his son; this is something that he does not have the ability to repair.

As a father, Willy is raising his sons based solely on his own thoughts and beliefs. These are all original as he had no father to guide him when he was growing up. The only basis he has as to how he can become successful is his brother Ben who left for Alaska and managed to strike gold. Willy is open about his regrets in not following his brother to Alaska where he found success. Since his brother did not need an education to be “successful” Willy does not believe he, nor do his sons need one. His sons grow up being praised by their father for things like their stature and success with girls. Willy even references Greek mythology when referring to his sons, “That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises” (Act 1).

        Willy is like an impetuous youngster with high ideals and high hopes.  Children always have high hopes for their

After all, he had not managed to obtain it and neither had his sons. Yet if Willy had loved his sons unconditionally instead of doling out his love in accordance with his their successes, he might not have felt like such a failure himself, because if nothing else, he would have been a success as a father.

Willy foolishly pursues the wrong dream and constantly lives in an unreal world blinded from reality. Despite his dream Willy constantly attempts to live in an artificial world and claims “If old Wagner was alive I’d be in charge of New York by now” (Miller 14). As a result, Willy often ignores his troubles and denies any financial trouble when he says “business is bad, it’s murderous. But not for me of course” (Miller 51). Another false segment of Willy’s dream includes the success of his two sons Happy and Biff. Biff was a high school football star who never cared about academics and now that he needs a job says “screw the business world” (Miller 61). Ironically, Willy suggests that Biff go west an “be a carpenter, or a cowboy, enjoy yourself!”, an idea that perhaps Willy should have pursued. Constantly advising his boys of the importance of being well liked, Willy fails to stress academics as an important part of life (Miller 40). Furthermore, Willy dies an unexpected death that reveals important causes of the failure to achieve the American dream. At the funeral Linda cries “I made the last payment on the house today... and there’ll be nobody home” to say that she misses Willy but in essence his death freed the Lomans from debt and the hopes and expectations Willy placed on his family (Miller 139). Very few people attend

Even with the knowledge that he was destined to kill his father and wed his mother, his ignorance of his birth is his undoing. Willy’s ignorance is less tangible: he doesn’t understand what it takes to become successful, nor does seem to have a flexible definition of what success is. His narrow view precludes him from finding work he enjoys, robs him of time with his family, and leave him alienated from his adult children. This leaves him doubly bitter at the end, as he has emerged a failure, and he hasn’t even enjoyed life along the way. While neither man is truly blameless in his troubles, it is difficult to suppress empathy for those who are ruined by ignorance. Neither man could know that he did not know.

A major theme and source of conflict throughout Miller's play, Death of a Salesman, is the Loman family's inability to distinguish between reality and illusion.  This is particularly evident in the father, Willy Loman.  Willy has created a fantasy world for himself and his family.  In this world, he and his sons are men of greatness that "have what it takes" to make it in the business environment.  In reality, none of them can achieve greatness until they confront and deal with this illusion.

In Willy's mind if he cannot become a success, at the very least his children could. However, one of Willy's flaws causes damage to his position in society and his position in his

My first thought when I read this was the realization of where Willy’s stress and frustration stems from. The successes of his father and brother in difficult environments emasculates Willy. Although he has a great superiority complex when it comes to others, such as Charley when he comes to visit, when Willy speaks to his brother in a hallucination-like state, he acts completely submissive. His brother and father continue to have a strong, dominating hold over him postmortem. My second thought was the realization that this is why Willy is so hard on his children, especially Biff. Although he believes he failed in emulating his father and brother, he views his boys as still

Willy has failed in his life, both a good father and as a successful salesman

Willy Loman has the ups and downs of someone suffering from bipolar disorder: one minute he is happy and proud- the next he is angry and swearing at his sons. Their relationships are obviously not easy ones. Willy always has the deeper devotion, adoration, and near-hero worship for his son Biff; the boy, likewise, has a great love for his father. Each brags on the other incessantly, thereby ignoring the other son- Happy- who constantly tries to brag on himself in order to make up the lack of anyone to do it for him. This turns sour however, after Biff discovers the father he idolizes was not all he had thought him to be. Afterward, familial dynamics are never the same, as Willy continues to hope that Biff will succeed, ignorant- perhaps

Willy’s obsession with success leads to the start of him living in his own fantasy world. He lives in the past, for there was hope for him then, but now he is completely subject to failure. Willy’s demise could have been avoided had he changed his dream, and had he not conformed to society. In the end his dream did not pay off, and he ultimately fell victim to the American Dream, and the deceitful ideals of freedom that factored into the

Willy also focuses on getting his sons to follow his ideas, he raises them to believe that they will be very successful and that school isn’t important, it’s important to be liked by everyone. Before Willy dies he talks about all the people that are going to visit his funeral and everyone will see how liked he was. Ironically no one shows up at his funeral but his family and the neighbors, hence vividly showing how much he actually achieved chasing his dream of being well liked.