The Loman’s complicated views of success make it hard to achieve happiness: Willy and Happy are focused on Willy’s dream of money and popularity, while Biff is willing to tell the truth, and admit that being a salesman is not the right job for any of them. Willy’s idea that success comes from popularity and wealth is something he just can’t achieve, and he has been lying to himself for so long that he has become delusional. Willy’s dreams of success are inspired by the life of his deceased brother Ben who quickly became a very wealthy man in life. Ben being his hero, bringing Willy to build his own twisted definition to success that is closely related to the classic “American dream”. To Willy, success means wealth, a happy family, big house, popularity, and to be praised. For example, Willy tells his sons “Be liked and you will never want.”-pg 33. It shows that Willy has an obsession with popularity and being considered superior. This shows up in his perception of success. Though despite his best efforts, Willy’s dream has not brought him any good nor happiness, in fact it has made him a monster. He no longer has any sense of reality, and essentially lies his ways through life. In the scene where Happy and Biff take Willy out to dinner, Willy tells them “I was fired, and I’m looking for a little good news to tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the woman has suffered. The gist of it is that I haven’t got a story left in my head Biff. So don’t give me a lecture about facts and aspects. I am not interested. Now what’ve you got to say to me?”-pg 107. This clearly shows that Willy is not only lying to his wife, but also to himself. It seems that despite all the bad experiences he has while trying to chase his dreams,... ... middle of paper ... ... Even with a tragic ending, the boys learned something. Willy was a good man, but his dreams took him away from himself and his family. But the “American dream” is different for everybody, though Willy only saw one. The boys learned that there is so much more to life than being a salesman, and although their father was wrong to take away their options, he was a good man and he loved his sons very much. As Charley says, “Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”
support is a pathetic effort to protect his identity. Linda will never admit to herself,
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
Willy Loman had the, “wrong dreams,” for his sons to become well-liked salesmen. Due to his own lack of popularity and success as a salesman, Willy forced Biff to try and become the salesman that he never was. However, Biff was an independent thinker unlike Happy and knew that he wanted nothing to do with corporate America. Still, Biff had more than just one reason why he did not want to be like his father which the reader discovers in the flashbacks throughout the story. In the story, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s unique use of flashbacks illustrates how Willy and his torn relationship with his sons was affected by his past failures as a parent.
Out of all of Willy's simplistic ideals, one major pattern we can notice is how Willy truly believes that popularity and physical appearance are what make people wealthy. We are first introduced to this idea when Willy is speaking to his wife, Linda, about their son Biff. "Biff Loman is lost," says Willy. "In the greatest country in the world, a young man with such personal attractiveness gets lost." In this quote, not only is Willy confused about how Biff's good looks can't help him get a job, but also because his son can't get a job in a country like Ame...
No one’s life can be classified as “normal”. Everyone has conflicts that they have to eventually deal with. People do in fact deal with these personal conflicts in different ways; some take it easy some take it hard. Some ignore the problem as long as possible and some deal with it right away to get it out of the way. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Lowman’s technique to his problem solving leads to severe consequences. Willy never does anything to help the situation; he just escapes into the past to happier times when there were few problems. He uses this escape as if it was a drug, and as the play goes on, this drug becomes dangerous, leading him to his death.
Willy Loman becomes incredibly involved in work-related matters, instead of the happiness surrounding his family life. He discourages Biff to take his own path, and instead, nearly forces him to become a salesman, in hopes that Biff will be more successful than he turned out to be. Willy tells Biff that his dreams will “cut down (his) life…!” Willy cannot simply hope for Biff and Happy to attain satisfaction in life, which is the element that Willy misses. He is so consumed by the idea of success that he had not once stopped to reflect on being a good father or loving his wife. Having an affair was one of his main problems-he could not put enough love into his family, so he put it anywhere else he could. He visited his mistress on business ventures, which is the only aspect of his life he truly appreciated. Therefore, his home life became full of lies, Biff saying that they “never told the truth for ten minutes.” Miller is, again, critiquing American households, since their typical values revolve more around money and presentation than a loving, kind, and caring home. Willy had a family who loved him, but he neglected to notice this, which lead to his unhappiness. Never placing any type of value of love and kindness can cause a person to become cold and bitter, which is exactly what Willy became. He may have avoided suicide if he had realized the love and care he could have been surrounded
BANG! Your father is dead. Within a few seconds, although he attempted many times, your father dies. He gave up. All the fights, all the disrespect, and all the struggles are behind you. However, all the hope, all the passion, and all the love is still there. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the main conflict is between Willy Lowman and his son Biff. Most of their struggles are based on disrespect; however, much of the tension throughout the play is also caused by the act of giving up.
Most of the story takes place in flashbacks that Willy experiences. Willy believed that he would’ve been able to achieve the American dream, which to him was to become a salesman, specifically similar to Dave Singleman, that could easily sell anything to anybody, if he worked hard enough for it. In the end this proved to not be a successful endeavor, and he dwells on the idea that if in the past he went with his brother to Alaska, he may have come out as successful and rich as he supposedly had. As stated in Cardullo’s reproduction of an essay written by David Mamet, some of Willy’s flashbacks may be inaccurate accounts of the past, as Willy seems to contradict himself, even immediately following something that he says, "I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, people don't seem to take to me" (Cardullo). This demonstrates that perhaps Willy had no chance of ever reaching the American dream, as he may not have ever had the opportunity to go with his brother, he just thinks that he did.
Happy Loman has grown up to be a well-adjusted man of society. He has developed from a follower to a potentially successful businessman. Throughout his childhood, Happy always had to settle for second fiddle. Willy, his father, always seems to focus all his attention on Happy's older brother Biff. The household conversation would constantly be about how Biff is going to be a phenomenal football star, how Biff will be attending the University of Virginia and be the big man on campus, how Biff is so adulated among his friends and peers, and so on. Young Happy was always in Biff's shadow, always competing for his father's attention but failing each time. Happy would resort to such antics as laying on his back and pedaling his feet backwards to capture his father's attention but to no avail. Willy would continue to not take notice of his younger son and maintain his attention on other matters that he thought were of greater importance. Growing up under these conditions is what motivated Happy to be the man he is today.
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.
Perhaps it is due to the abandonment by his father that Willy Loman experienced at a very young age, or the subsequent abandonment, a few years later of his older brother Ben, that underlies the reason Willy so desperately seeks to be loved and accepted. He continually makes reference to being “well liked” as being of the utmost importance. Physical appearance, worldly admiration, and the opinion of others are more important to Willy than the relationship he has with his own family. These and several other references throughout “Death of a Salesman” portray the troubled relationship between Willy and his two sons, Biff and Happy.
The Characters of Biff and Happy in Death of a Salesman No one has a perfect life; everyone has conflicts that they must face sooner or later. The ways in which people deal with these personal conflicts can differ as much as the people themselves. Some insist on ignoring the problem for as long as possible, while others face up to the problem immediately to get it out of the way. Biff and Happy Loman are good examples of this, although both start from the same point, they end up going in different directions with Happy still living in his world of lies and Biff, being set free by the truth. Happy Loman is Willy's youngest son and is often over shadowed by his older brother Biff and ignored
During their quest to reach the top of the totem pole, Willy Loman and his two sons slip and are left behind. Deluded and troubled traveling salesmen like Willy Loman do not come around every day. His belief that the American Dream consists of simple success and wealth is extremely sincere. Nevertheless, he never manages to achieve it. Instead, Willy is stuck with the hope that his sons will succeed where he has failed. One of his sons, Biff, experiences a dazzling life in high school with almost everything going his way. However, Biff fails math and as a result he is not able ...
In Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s warped view of the American Dream caused tragedy in his family because he stressed the importance of popularity over hard work and risk-taking over perserverence. *Willy grew up believing that being "well-liked" was important to becoming a success. He believed that being well-liked could help you charm teachers and open doors in business. *He is proud that the neighborhood boys flock around Biff and respond to Biff’s athletic abilities, and in the same breath scoffs at the nerdy Bernard, who is too focused on school and his studies to be popular. Even though Biff turns out to be a failure as an adult, Willy holds on to the hopes that a business man who Biff met years ago will offer him a terrific job if Biff can be his old likeable self and recapture the confidence and grace he had as a teenager.
Willy Loman equates success as a human being with success in the business world. When Willy was a young man, he heard of a salesman who could "pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, make his living." (81) This salesman is Willy's inspiration; someday to be so respected and so well known that he can still provide for his family, even at an old age. Of course, Willy is no good at being a salesman because his heart isn't in it. The only time Willy puts his heart into anything is when he works with his hands, and his son, Biff, comes to realize this. "There's more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made." (138) Willy never comes to the realization that it is not being a salesman that he cares about, but rather being well known and, perhaps more importan...