From the time Arthur Miller began writing plays, till his recent death in 2005, he had never had such a well know play as Death of a Salesman. This play was first performed in the late 1940’s. It reveals the struggle of an old, worn out, salesman who is upset with the life that he has created. With the strain of his past mistakes lurking in the back of his mind, Willy cannot handle the stress and begins to have hallucinations of the past about the things he could have changed.
1.) Towards the end of Willy’s life he is beginning to realizing all the destruction not only of himself, but of his family, marriage, and job. Who is to blame for all this destruction? Society? His family? Or Willy himself? I believe the answer to that
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No one made that decision of cheating other than Willy; he can’t blame it on anyone but himself. Making that decision impacted Willy for the rest of his life. Every time he left he was so vulnerable for wrongful choices. Another big reason I believed that lead Willy to have destruction was that he relied too much on his children. He expected something more than they could give him. Both of his children knew they couldn’t give their dad what he wanted, which ruined their relationship.
2.) As the play ended the state of Willy and his mindset began to change. He started to relies the type of life he had lived and the type he wanted to live. Early in his life he imagined of becoming a successful business man. “Don’t say? Tell you a secret boy. Don’t breathe it to a soul. Someday I’ll have my own business and I’ll never have to leave home anymore” (23). One who would not have to travel, have his own office, and own a really nice suit. He foreseen all the connections he would have with others in the business world and how they would all remember him from the success he would have. But that idea was far from reality. No one remembered Willy in the business world he was just another travelling worker, no big shot, someone who was soon to retire. As Willy thought about this more all he could hope for was the success of the two good-looking boys he had raised, in hope that they would be the next big thing. But
Willy’s relationship with his wife is clearly a cause of his collapse. Willy neglected to demonstrate honesty in his relationship with
The play, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, takes issue with those in America who place too much stress upon material gain, at the expense of other, more admirable human values. Miller uses flashbacks to provide exposition, to foreshadow the upcoming tragedy, and most importantly to reveal character traits. An analysis of the main character, Willy Loman, illustrates the underlying theme that the concern over material success breaks down the bonds between men that form the basis of a smooth-functioning society.
Willy is now misleading his sons into thinking good looks will keep them alive in the corporate world and education won’t, yet Willy is a man with respectable looks and he isn’t surviving in the same world. Fifteen years later, Willy continues to preach the same theory, even after he has seen both his sons fail in the world, having been guided by his words. Prior to Biff’s proposal to Bill Oliver for ten thousand dollars , Willy is still stuffing his sons’ heads with the same misleading advise.
Apart from Willy’s delusion of his own success, he also sees his sons as great successes in the business world, and that they will amount to so much in their lives. These boys cannot be successful because they have been “[blown] so full of hot air [they] could never stand taking orders from anybody” (131). Willy’s illusions about his sons not only ruined Willy’s life, but it caused these boys to have a false sense of reality, which is the theme. This false sense of reality leads to their downfall in the business world because Willy had built them up so high that they believed they should be the one giving the orders, not taking them. When Willy tells his boys “together [you] could absolutely lick the civilized world” (64), this is an example of the way Willy falsely sees his boys and fills their
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
As a salesman, Willy shows he perceives himself highly when talking to Linda about his job: “I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England” (14). One can also see Willy’s inflated sense of self-worth when he talks to his children about his job: “They know me, boys, they know me up and down New England... I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own” (31). However, even though he is extremely confident about his value as a salesman to his family, the reality of Willy’s reputation at his job is almost completely opposite: “I’m fat. I’m very—foolish to look at... they do laugh at me” (37). Although he essentially brags to his family about his expertise in business, Willy acknowledges the reality that his career is much less successful than he expects it to be. In fact, the inner turmoil inside of Willy from his unrealistic expectation of himself of being a fantastic salesman leads Willy to become mentally unhealthy, and eventually results in Willy committing suicide when he believes that he doesn’t have any self-worth anymore. Willy’s previous inflated self-worth is demonstrated yet again at his funeral, when no one shows up even though Willy thought he had a lot of friends from his job: “Why didn’t anybody come...
The success attained by Willy?s role models, his father, Dave Singleman, and Ben, is what he envisions to be the American Dream. He only visualizes the end product, being successful, and not the process they may have gone through to achieve that success. Willy?s father sold flutes and made that his living. In an encounter with his thoughts of the past, Willy listens to Ben, his brother, who refers to their father by saying, "Great Inventor, Father. With one gadget he made more in a week than a man like you could make in a lifetime" (49). Willy assumes that by being a salesman, like his father was, he is automatically guaranteed success, and that it wasn?t something that he would have to work for. Material success, such as money, luxury, and wealth, and popularity are his goals and his definition of success. On the other hand, self-fulfillment and happiness through hard work is not. By only focusing on the outer appearance of the American Dream, Willy ignores the
Arthur Miller, A play writer in the twentieth century, wrote a play entitled Death of a salesman that won him the Pulitzer Price just a year after its release. In the play Miller expresses the life of a 60 year old salesman that undergoes through lack of success in his life and sees the same thing happening ,to his two grown sons now in their mid-thirties, as the American dream faded away being replaced by capitalism in the late 1940s. The play starts of by introducing Willy Loman, the protagonist, and tells the story of the final twenty four hours in Willy’s life all the way to his death and funeral. Between that time laps the audience is able to see Willies past thanks to his constant daydreams, along with his sons past and wife and
Willy is unable to accept reality. In his eyes he is living a horrible life with a dead-end job that is going nowhere. He perceives himself as a failure as a father because he cannot provide for his family and therefore he sees himself as a loser. Throughout the play, you can easily sense Willy’s unstable relationship with his family especially his eldest son, Biff. This constant tension with Biff is noticeable within the first act of the play and it is not until later on in a flashback, the audience learns that Willy once cheated on his wife and Biff found out about it. This family conflict, and Willy’s personal concepts on what makes a man successful, adds to his strive to be great and make up for his past. It is not his intentions that are weak, but the way he approaches
Willy stunts his sons’ development and distorts their self-image, but they still have their entire lives in front of them. Willy does not have time left to change his course and start fresh, and this fact makes the toll he puts on himself so heavy that he has no choice but to wipe his slate clean the only way he can, but committing suicide. Being faced with this kind of experience at this point in his life leaves him no more opportunities to set things straight for himself and put himself on a path to success. Additionally his own definition of success is so distorted and engrained in his mind that there is no hope for him. Willy’s inability to absorb all that is being thrown at him as well as the dismantling of his mental paradise leads to his decision to end his life and put to rest all the tension, mistakes, and lies that make up his life. Critic Winifred Dusenbury writes extensively on Willy’s personal failure along with his failure as a father and role model and notes that, “Willy had nothing solid under his feet, and no inner strength sustained him” (Dusenbury). The foundation and strength Dusenbury speaks of can be interpreted as representative of time. Time is always the support people have under them when their circumstance becomes too overwhelming and
One could belive that every time somethig bad would happen to him he blamed everyone else but himself. Willy felt so much pressure to pay off the house dept. Making the house dept play a huge role in this play. He put so much pressure on himself and with him not doing so well at work he became so frustrated and angry. He broke his wedding vows with the woman he promised to spend the rest of his life
While Willy was trying to cover up his lies he was consumed by the reality that he wasn’t good enough and it drove him crazy. Willy couldn’t accept the fact that he was not a good salesman. When Willy started out as a salesman he was successful but as he got older he lost many clients and began to fail. Willy and his wife pretty much brainwashed their kids into thinking they were the best. Just as Willy’s father failed his family, Willy is failing his but in a different
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman tells the story of a man trying and failing to obtain success for him and his family. Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, has been trying to ‘make it big’ for the majority of his life. Miller’s play explores the themes of abandonment and betrayal and their effects on life’s success. Willy sees himself as being abandoned by his older brother, Ben, and constantly views his sibling’s betrayal as one that changed his prospects forever. Willy, in turn, is guilty of a different type of abandonment and betrayal of his sons, especially Biff.
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’s brother Ben seems to symbolize all of Willy's dreams that have not borne fruit. Ben provides an example of the type of success that Willy desires. Ben went into the “jungle” with nothing and became extremely wealthy. Ben achieved in a few years what Willy has dreamed about his entire life. Ben also provides additional evidence on the foolish behavior and poor decisions made by Willy. Ben offers to take Willy with him and make him rich – an offer that Willy declines.