Watching Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” for the first time at London Theatre was both entertaining and frustrating. The degree of bewilderment created by the protagonist Willy Loman resulted in the loss of my undivided attention, as experiences from the past and happenings from present time fused together in what seemed to be a cluster of random thoughts and phrases. I lost focus when I tried to grasp and comprehend what was happening and at the same time attempt to distinguish between reality and imagination. After finally regaining my consciousness from the mind-puzzling events featured on stage, the play seemed to utterly shift once more, introducing a vicious circle. The storyline is unpredictable due to the time switches, and flying from scene to scene will without a doubt give you a jetlag.
Willy Loman, a character thought-provoking enough to hold his own separate review, shows throughout the play his completely skewed view on the American Dream and how to be a successful business man. In turn, Willy brainwashes his family (especially Biff and Happy, Willy’s sons) into the misguided image of the American Dream he established. Willy, clearly not an ideal father, lectures Biff and Happy in a pool of lies in how to be successful. Willy is not an ideal father in a sense that he can’t distinguish between what’s right and what’s wrong, not even for his sons.
Seeing how Willy raised his sons gave me a migraine. It got to the point where my eyes started to burn and all I wanted to do was to pull my hair out. He accepted the matter of his sons stealing, which definitely had a substantial impact on me. Just ten minutes into the performance, there was one element which I knew would haunt me for the rest of the play; Willy’s pai...
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...ng favorites. Willy does not recognize that Happy is being neglected by his father the same way Willy was neglected by his. Little as Willy knows, he should understand that open differential parenting does not only affect the less favored child, but the family as a whole. Hearing Happy’s cries for his father’s attention almost brought me to tears of contempt.
The only interesting aspect of this theatre performance was how confusing the concept was. Skipping from one time frame to another was an experience by itself. It was Willy’s presence and the influence he had on his family that made the play what it was - baffling. If you like rollercoasters with an endless amount of loops and spins, this is the play for you. On the other hand, if you are like me who prefers to keep their head intact and functioning, don’t waste your time or your thinking capabilities here.
Throughout the play, Willy has hallucinations of his brother Ben, who left Willy when he was young, “Well, I was just a baby, of course, only three or four years old,” (Miller 47), and the man later offered to take Willy with him, but Willy had a dream “There’s a man eighty-four years old-” (Miller 86) and he felt that he was going to accomplish that dream. “Willy retreats into a dream world consisting of his roseate recollections of the past and of fantasies,” (Hadomi), he hallucinates often, and this is a better way of saying he’s delusional. He did not, he failed miserably, he had to borrow money from Charley “If you can manage it-- I need a hundred and ten dollars,” (Miller 96), then he pretended it was a loan from him “I’m keeping an account of everything, remember,” (Miller 96), that he would pay back “I’ll pay every penny back,” (Miller 96), but Linda and Charley knew he was not going to pay any of it back. Willy had a hard time accepting defeat, and he wanted his boys to succeed where he failed, but Biff was always better with physical labor “when all you really desi...
The overarching theme in Miller’s play is living the American dream. Willy believes he is the best salesman. That he is well known all over New England. Which would mean he was living the American dream. Willy tells the boys, “I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. ‘Willy Loman is here!’ That’s all they have to know, and I go right through” (Miller, 2121). Even though he does not make a lot of money and people do not show up at his funeral. Linda asked, “Why didn’t anyone come? But where are all the people he knew?” (Miller, 2174).
In brief, it is apparent that Willy’s own actions led to not only his own demise, but his children’s as well. The salesman tragically misinterpreted the American Dream for only the superficial qualities of beauty, likeability and prosperity. Perhaps if Willy had been more focused on the truth of a person’s character, rather than purely physical aspects, his family’s struggles and his own suicide could have been avoided. On the whole, Arthur Miller’s play is evidence that the search for any dream or goal is not as easy and the end result may seem. The only way to realize the objective without any despair is the opposite of Willy Loman’s methods: genuineness, perseverance and humility.
Patterns and Themes: One of the more obscure themes I discovered was about nature. For example, in the beginning of the play, Willy's small apartment is being towered by many enormous apartment buildings. Because of this, the plants in his garden don't get enough sunlight to grow. Essentially, this represents how his artificial world is stopping his from growing into a better person. Also, Willy doesn't haven't enough courage to actually go out into nature, like his brother Ben did, and discover his true passions. Instead, he chooses to sell himself to the superficial urban world.
Willy Loman is a 60 year old senile salesman who desperately wants to be a successful salesman; however, his ideas about the ways in which one goes about achieving this are very much misguided, just as his morals are. He believes that popularity and good looks are the key to achieving the American dream, rather than hard work and dedication. He not only lives his entire life by this code, but instills his delusional beliefs in his two sons Biff and Happy. As a result, his sons experience similar failures in their adult lives. Willy led a life of illusion, lies and regret which not only ruined his life, but gad a negative impact on the lives of family as well.
Like countless characters in a play, Willy struggles to find who he is. Willy’s expectations for his sons and The Woman become too high for him to handle. Under the pressure to succeed in business, the appearance of things is always more important than the reality, including Willy’s death. The internal and external conflicts aid in developing the character Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Since Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1949, Willy Loman has become one of the most iconic and over-analyzed characters in American literature. In the play, Willy is an aging New York salesman who is facing both personal and professional problems. In fact, Miller indicates in Act I that Willy is suicidal when he proclaims “I have such strange thoughts, I have such strange thoughts,” as he explains to his wife, Linda, that he –more than once- nearly ran his car off the road (964). On the surface, his suicidal tendencies are due to his failure to earn enough money to support his family in his old age. Yet, as the play progresses, the audience comes to understand that there are deep-seated issues in Willy’s past and in his psychological makeup that have contributed to his current station in life. Miller’s “Death of a Salesman" can
Throughout the play, Willy can be seen as a failure. When he looks back on all his past decisions, he can only blame himself for his failures as a father, provider, and as a salesman (Abbotson 43). Slowly, Willy unintentionally reveals to us his moral limitations that frustrates him which hold him back from achieving the good father figure and a successful business man, showing us a sense of failure (Moss 46). For instance, even though Willy wants so badly to be successful, he wants to bring back the love and respect that he has lost from his family, showing us that in the process of wanting to be successful he failed to keep his family in mind (Centola On-line). This can be shown when Willy is talking to Ben and he says, “He’ll call you a coward…and a damned fool” (Miller 100-101). Willy responds in a frightful manner because he doesn’t want his family, es...
Willy’s failures and lies have been a result in his constant faith and will to achieve his dreams, the dreams which society has implanted within him. His flaws have come from society, but also himself, and Miller has used this to create the conflict and tragedy in the play. It is then that writer then makes the impact of Willy’s failures greater, incorporating his death into the play, crushing his dreams and the dreams of the characters around him, creating his tragedy.
At the beginning of the play it is evident that he cannot determine the realities of life, and so he repeatedly contradicts himself to establish that his conclusion is correct and opinion accepted. These numerous contradictions demonstrate that Willy is perturbed of the possibility that negative judgements may come from others. Willy strongly believes that “personality always wins” and tells his sons that they should “be liked and (they) will never want”. In one of Willy’s flashbacks he recalls the time when his sons and him were outside cleaning their Chevy. Willy informs Biff and Happy the success of his business trips and how everyone residing in Boston adores him. He mentions that due to the admiration of people he does not even have to wait in lines. He ultimately teaches his sons that being liked by others is the way to fulfilling one’s life and removing your worries. These ideals, that one does not need to work for success, demonstrate Willy’s deluded belief of achieving a prosperous life from the admiration and acceptance of others. This ultimately proves to be a false ideology during his funeral, when an insufficient amount of people arrive. Willy constantly attempts to obtain other’s acceptance through his false tales that depict him as a strong, successful man. In the past, he attempts to lie to his wife, Linda, about the amount of wealth he has attained during his
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a tragic play about an aging and struggling salesman, Willy Loman, and his family’s misguided perception of success. In Willy’s mind, being well-liked is more important than anything else, and is the means to achieving success. He teaches this flawed idea to his sons, Biff and Happy, and is faithfully supported by his wife Linda. Linda sympathizes with Willy’s situation, knowing that his time as an important salesman has passed. Biff and Happy hold their father to impossibly high standards, and he tries his best to live up to them. This causes Willy to deny the painful reality that he has not achieved anything of real value. Willy’s obsession with a false dream results in his losing touch with reality and with himself.
The very first section of the first scene, already defines the basis of Willy’s character for the rest of the play. The stage directions on page 8 identify him as being an exhausted aging man, whose work seems to be wearing him down. “…lets his burden down…” (Miller, 8). Although this makes Willy appear uninteresting, he soon contrasts this characteristic when he shows an optimistic determination towards his own failures. “I’ll start out in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning.” (Miller, 9) Another aspect of Willy that makes him more interesting to the audience is his already visible complexity of layers: “I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.” (Miller, 9) This of course leads the audience on to wondering what exactly is taking place in a man’s head to make him say such a thing, evoking a mild fascination in Willy’s character. Another character that is developed almost immediately within the first two pages of the play is Linda. Again the stage directions on page 8 introdu...
By the time Willy got to be an old man, his life was in shambles. *One son, Biff, was a hopeless dreamer who wasn’t able to hold on to a job. He could have been successful through an athletic scholarship, but he blew the chance he had to go to school. Happy, the other son, had a job, but was basically all talk, just like Willy. Now near the end of his career as a salesman, Willy realizes his whole life was just a joke, and the hopes he placed in the American Dream were misguided. At the end of the play, his only hope is to leave something for his family, especially for Biff, by taking his own life and leaving his family the insurance money. Through his death, Willy thinks he can achieve success and fulfill his dream.
...but as Willy slowly slips farther into his illusions, the stage directions signal “The Woman’s laugh is heard” (40). Willy is completely immersed in this slight flashback of The Woman, but then is confused and yells at everyone around him. This chaos ensues directly as a result of Willy’s confusion between what is reality and what is his imagination. During the intense argument at the restaurant between Biff and Willy, the stage direction directs “The Woman laughs, off left” (113). Not only does this laugh symbolize turmoil and bad times in Willy’s life, but it also triggers Willy’s fall into another of his many occurring flashbacks. Without this theme of illusion and reality, the atmosphere of these flashbacks would not have such a withstanding effect on the play.
Willy's main flaw is his foolish pride, this it what makes him a tragic hero. Yet there are many facets to his personality that contribute to the state he and the family are in during the play. His upbringing of the boys is one major issue, he raised them with the notion that if one is well-liked, he need not worry about qualifications, he believed that if his boys were popular they would come out on top. Sadly, he doesn't realize that the only way an ordinary person can get rich is through work (represented by Bernard) or through luck and good timing (Ben), and Willy missed the boat when it came to ...