Some people never change, their stubbornness gets the best of them, and they find it hard to adapt to what happens around them. Being stubborn can also lead you to get into some big trouble if you do not compromise sometimes. In all honesty, I am a stubborn person and hate to compromise, but I will if I have to. In Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is unbelievably stubborn and definitely delusional. Constantly, Willy is hallucinating about things that have already happened, or things that never even could have happened. Although, Biff, Willy’s son, changes by the end of the play, while everyone else stays in a delusional land with Willy.
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...
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...appy’s trying to live in a happy world all hold them back from making any real progress in life, it holds them back from actually being happy. Linda just ignores everything that is happening around her, or she goes along with it, until the end, she gets a little angry, but then goes back to living as she did before. Really, only Biff changed in this story, and it probably saved his life.
Works Cited
Foster, Richard J.Confusion and Tragedy: The Failure of Miller's `Salesman', in Two Modern American Tragedies: Reviews and Criticism of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar NamedDesire, Edited by John D. Hurrell, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961, Pp. 828.
Hadomi, Leah. Fantasy and Reality: Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman. Thesis. 1988. N.p.: N.p., N.d. Gale. Web. 6 May 2014.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. N.p.: Penguin Plays, n.d. Print.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 8th ed.Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford, 2008. 1908-1972. Print.
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
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...
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman,The Heath Introduction to Drama, Fifth Edition. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996, pp. 731-808.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Seventh Edition. X.J. Kennedy, and Dana Gioia. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999
Gioia, Dana, and X.J. Kennedy. "Death of a Salesman" Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Compact Edition, Interactive Edition. 5th ed. New York: Pearson; Longman Publishing, 2007. 1212-1280. Print.
Koon, Helene Wichkam, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983. Print.
Hadhomi, Leah. “Dramatic Rhythm in Death of a Salesman”. Willy Loman. New York: Chelsea House, 1991.
A major part of the reader's animosity towards Willy stems from his responsibility for the ruin of his sons. Willy's affair ends up being the reason that Biff ends up a high-school failure and a football has-been. This blunder both disheartens and destroys his eldest son. It becomes the reason Biff refuses to go to summer school; it becomes the reason that Biff leaves home. Yet, this is all a result of Willy's need to be likeable. He cheats on his doting wife simply because it makes him feel special, because it gives him proof that women other that Linda are interested in him, because it makes him feel well liked. A woman "picked [him]"; a woman laughs when he makes jokes about keeping pores open; a woman pays him some attention (38).
Eisinger, Chester E. "Critical Readings: Focus on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: The Wrong Dreams." Critical Insights: Death of a Salesman (2010): 93-105.
The only way to become a truly happy person is to surround yourself with the things that make you happy. Setting logical goals and pursuing dreams is going to lead to a successful life. In the play, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willy, Linda, Biff, and Happy use self-deception as a means to mentally escape the reality of their lives. Biff is the only character who becomes self-aware by the end of the play. He realizes that his whole life has been a lie and that Willy’s standards for Biff’s achievements in life are simply unreachable. Happy is too caught up in himself throughout the play to realize that his father is in need of an escape from his dysfunctional life. Willy has lived his whole life setting these goals for himself that he simply can’t attain. Happy makes it known at the end of the play that he is planning to follow in his father’s footsteps. This foreshadows the downfall of Happy’s life to come. Linda is constantly reassuring Willy that the decisions he has made are the right choices. She finds out about his possible suicide attempts and she refuses to seek help for him. She constantly tells his that he is doing great when in reality his career is going nowhere and his relationship with his sons gets worse as the days go on. Willy was a man who claimed to have a good sense of pride. He believes that he thrived in his times of struggle. He lost the battle for his life and ended his life due to the constant disappointments and failures that he had to live with every day. Willy refused to see the truth in his life and continued to feed off the lies. He got so caught up in his lies that he lost what the truth really was.
Miller, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman.” The Norton Introduction to Literature 10. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 495-506.
Murphy, Brenda and Susan C. W. Abbotson. Understanding Death of a Salesman: A Student Handbook to Cases, Issues and Historical Documents. The Greenwood Press "Literature in Context" series, Claudia Durst Johnson, series editor. Westwood, CT, London: 1999.
Miller, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman”: Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 1991: 280-317
Death of a salesman. : McGraw-Hill, 2007. Print. The. "