Who Suffers Most from Willy's Delusions?

Biff said when realizing the type of house he grew up in. Everyone in the Loman household was unsatisfied, the family left unstable. The top of the causes for the problems in the Loman household lead to Willy. Growing up Willy never had a true support system. His father left him at a early age. And his brother went to Africa. With all this abandonment in life, Willy learns to live on the dependency of being well approved of by others, and following a dream he saw as the “American Dream”. This dream led Willy into more failure than it did success. Willy never knew when to look at reality or chase a dream. When it came to a point in life when he realized he could no longer achieve this American Dream, he tried to live it through his sons. He never held his kids accountable for their faults because they were “well liked” Willy sees how much people like you as an equivalence to a human's success in life. Linda once said, “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.” Willy filled all his actual doings in life, with dreams and visions of a successful him or of anything to make the pain of his actual life

He also tells him he will soon be very well-liked and successful. Willy doesn’t want to disappoint the people who support him the most. Willy wants their life to be better than his own. During the play, Willy struggles to peak and to find out who he is.

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

Willy’s difficulty with change in his life can be seen when Linda tries to help him. Linda tells Willy outside their bedroom, “...life is a casting off. It’s always been that way.”. (Miller, p.15) She states the truth that life is about change and not knowing the future ahead. She attempts to get Willy to see that he needs to take chances to be successful but he does not want to accept that. Willy wants

An example of how Willy depends on popularity to help achieve the dream is seen when Willy is having a flashback in which he’s speaking to both Biff and Happy about having his own business. The boys ask their father if his business will be like their Uncle Charley’s.  Willy responds by saying that he’ll be, “Bigger than Uncle Charley!  Because Charley is not- liked.  He’s liked, but he’s not- well liked.”  From this example, it becomes evident that Willy thinks being “well liked” can make you successful.

Willy Loman's dream is an adaptation of the American Dream. Willy believes that the only things that are important in life are the successes that he achieved and the amount of friends that he made. This is easily illustrated when Willy says " It's who you know and the smile on your face! ... and that's the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!" (Movie). Success is an important part of the American dream, but Willy puts too much importance on the need to achieve success. He neglects the needs of his family and chooses to remain in the mindset that as long as he is well liked he will achieve success. Although he has lost his ability to sell, Willy continues to believe that as long as he works hard good things will happen to him and his family. Willy's wife Linda realizes this and conveys these thoughts to her sons when she says "He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him anymore… what goes through a man's mind, driving seven hundred miles home without earning a cent?" (Movie). Willy has delusional ideas about the American Dream. Even in the end Willy still believes that the only thing Biff needs to be successful is some

This is what Willy has been trying to emulate his entire life. Willy's need to feel well-liked is so strong that he often makes up lies about his popularity and success. At times, Willy even believes these lies himself. At one point in the play, Willy tells his family of how well-liked he is in all of his towns and how vital he is to New England. Later, however, he tells Linda that no one remembers him and that the people laugh at him behind his back. As this demonstrates, Willy's need to feel well-liked also causes him to become intensely paranoid. When his son, Biff, for example, is trying to explain why he cannot become successful, Willy believes that Biff is just trying to spite him. Unfortunately, Willy never realizes that his values are flawed. As Biff points out at the end of the play, "he had the wrong dreams."

Since Willy could not reach the dream himself, he bargained his identity for money, so his son could “live the dream” that he never could. Willy states to Happy, “ The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it! Walked into a jungle, and comes out, the age of twenty-one, and he’s rich!”(41) When Willy believed that he could amass fast money for his family, he thought about killing himself. All he could think about was the money that could be earned for his family; “Remember, it’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar proposition” (125). Willy became obsessed with the idea of quickly obtaining this dream, and thought the only fix was to make his son successful. Willy thought you could easily achieve this dream with just personality and popularity. He was clouded by this dream and became senile, which eventually led to the loss of his identity. The money itself stole Willy’s identity in which he became a “low-man” in the process of trying to achieve his

Willy Loman, the central character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, is a man whose fall from the top of the capitalistic totem pole results in a resounding crash, both literally and metaphorically. As a man immersed in the memories of the past and controlled by his fears of the future, Willy Loman views himself as a victim of bad luck, bearing little blame for his interminable pitfalls. However, it was not an ill-fated destiny that drove Willy to devastate his own life as well as the lives of those he loved; it was his distorted set of values.

In “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman is the well-developed protagonist of the story. Willy struggles throughout the story with daydreams and delusions that he confuses with reality. These delusions have a huge effect on the story and greatly impact Willy’s life. Willy has a difficult time keeping his bills paid with his job as a traveling salesman. He works long hours and drives long distances for very little success. His delusions cause him to believe that his work is successful when it is far from it. “Willy is self-deluded, believing wholeheartedly in the American Dream of success and wealth. When he fails to achieve this, he commits suicide—yet until the end he never stopped believing in this American Dream” (Sickels).

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

For instance, he has this dream of having a big, spectacular funeral. In the end when Willy dies, at his funeral, Linda says, "Why didn?t anybody come?Where are all the people he knew?" (137). All his life, he holds on to this fantasy, but he never faces the reality of how he could have made it come true. It is his vision of the people of the past that lead Willy to follow a particular path, leading to his demise in the end.

Because Willy wants this corrupt dream so much, he longs for his family to have the same dream. Happy does however,

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.

In the play once Willy realises he has failed he puts all his hope in