A Comparison Of Willy Loman In The Life Of A Salesman

Willy trances for recognition as a being in the society, an individual who has his own home and business and thereby respected and loved! “Someday I’ll have my own business and I’ll never have to leave home any more” (Miller 62). Willy presumes that Ben has attained the ultimate goal in life and he strives to follow Ben in the dream to be successful salesman. Ben says: “William, when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!” (Miller, 40-41), yet Willy never finds the diamonds and adopts a ‘low man’s’ life. Willy is disgruntled in his professional life where “Ben’s promise is the promise of all the self-help prophets of the nineteenth century” (Porter, 144). In comparison with Ben,

He is cocksure that a person can scale glorious heights by means of personal attractiveness, initiative, poise and contacts. His hubris is that he possesses these qualities made for success. He applies this view to himself as well as to his sons. When he talks with Biff, he says, “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal attractiveness, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want (Miller, 1961: 25). He speaks of himself in almost eloquent epithets when he remarks that he is ‘vital’ to the Wagner Company as its salesman in the New England territory. He runs into rhapsodies when he uses such expressions as ‘knocked them dead’, and ‘slaughtered them’ to convey his conquest of the territory, New England. He brags that he is so popular that the cops in his territory would look after his car no matter in which street of a town in New England he chooses to park

Emphasizing on Singleman’s ‘personality’ and being ‘well liked’, Willy pleads to die a death as memorable as that of Dave Singleman. “When he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral” (Miller, 63). Dave Singleman’s death becomes memorable because he may prove some exemplary traits in his service and that’s why all were remain present even in his funeral. But Willy is an incomplete as an orator, a key facet of salesmanship through which he can impress the buyers to buy the goods. Apart from this, it was really a toilsome job for Willy at this age to carry out samples in different cities and persuade the buyers to buy his products. Willy belongs to a time when “people quickly lost their optimism about the future. They stopped buying things that they could not afford” (Crothers, 201). Thus the buyers become unfamiliar to him. Willy loses the touch and contact with those people who once knew and liked him and were ready to help him in his bad time. The hopeless cry of Linda: “But where are all the people he knew?” (Miller, 110) affirms that the dream of Willy Loman to be a Dave Singleman, is only an illusion. If he paid least heed to the philosophical ideal of Socrates – “Know thyself”; he would never wish to be a salesman rebuffing his talent in