Analyzing The American Dream In Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman

"We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years,” (Arthur Miller). Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller is a play about a man named Willy Loman, Arthur Miller, who explores the American dream and what happens to a family when the dream is not fulfilled. In the late 1940s, after World War II, things don’t turn out the way people want it to be. Most men were unemployed, economical and financial issues regarding lack of payments for workers and families.

Willy Loman dreamed to be a successful salesman like Dave Singleman who has both material success and freedom. His way to achieve success is to be well-liked, which is also the way he teaches his sons. His dream cannot be achieved in that way, and such that society becomes the reason to pushing

him to death.
Biff then shakes between going home to try to fulfill Willy's dream for him as a businessman or ignoring his father by going out West to be a farmhand where he is happiest. As days past minute by minute, Willy Loman has grown as an old man which means he can no longer drive competently, pay his bills, or sell anything.
Willy has been going through a lot in his life and cannot handle anymore failure which leads to a suicidal event.

There are a number of reasons why Willy committed suicide, but we are never given specifics. First, there's his job. He's no longer good, the younger men are passing him by, sales no longer rely on the game he was taught as a young man; Willy had been replaced by those with new ideas and techniques, while he refused to change with the times.

Secondly, he was in debt over his head. His desire to acquire the American Dream left him with a lot of things he couldn't afford and not enough money to pay for them. Without a job, all of these things became a pit he couldn't crawl out of, and in his own words,"you end up worth more dead than alive."

Though the summary of the Death of a Salesman didn’t turn out the way readers were expecting, I recommend this to students going on to the high school because in order to understand this better, you’ll need to know the major idea in reading drama plays like an American Dream. Expectation is a vital factor of tragedy. Sure, when we watch a tragedy, we fully expect death, destruction, and sadness by the play’s end. But how will the death occur? What will bring about the destruction of the leading character in a

drama?