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How is family portrayed in the death of a salesman
How is family portrayed in the death of a salesman
Analysis of Arthur Miller's death of a salesman
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Drama Analysis: Death of a Salesman Death of a Salesman is a dark and tragically sad story about a man’s last days of his life. On the surface the play is about “The American Dream”, however, the underlying tone of this play is the man's obsession with his last name. Arthur Miller said in an interview with Charle Rose said: “it's about a salesman and he dies, It’s about the United States, it's about a man and his economic state and it’s about family. ”. At the end of the day, the story is really about love and what a man is capable of doing for the love of family, however, misguided. Willy Loman, despite his futile search through his past, does not reach self-realization. The solution to all his problems is suicide, Willy fails to realize …show more content…
There are other important characters in this play; however, they are more supporting characters. The relationship between these two is the crux of the play, that is to say, they are the foundation on which the play is set. One might think that money or to leave an inheritance for Biff is what Willy really wants, in reality, Willy wants the family name to be famous and live on forever. The family is certainly having financial difficulty, never the less Willy finds the time and money for a young mistress. The most important memory is when Willy is at one of Biffs’ football games at Ebbets Field, a very famous field, for the championship and the people start chanting Loman, Loman, Loman. Willy does not remember the game per say, he just remembers the chant and he was the father of the boy that’s name was being chanted. This, to Willy, is like the height of achievement. It has nothing to do with wealth or money it is a form of honor or distinction. On a second read of the play, one would find on a very regular basis that Willy takes pleasure in the fact that everyone knows him. He could call up anyone and do business with them just because of knowing Willy Loman. This points to his dive to be known or to be famous. Willy thinks he is better at his job than he really is. When he realizes his son doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps, Willy becomes driven by his own “Willyness”. He starts talking to himself and slips into the past from time to time He also has an affair with another woman and becomes
Willy Loman is not the only victim of his tragic flaw. The rest of the Loman family is also affected by Willy's problem. Willy's wife, Linda, is the only one who supports and understands Willy's tragic flaw completely. Linda supports every far-fetched claim her husband makes. She is even described as having “infinite patience” whenever she is conversing with Willy (Miller 99). Willy's two sons, Biff and Happy, are also affected by his flaw. Happy, when in the company of two ladies, claims that Willy is not even his father, and “just a guy” (Miller 91). Later in the play, Biff decides that he does not want to be in his father's life anymore. Biff's problems are simply too much for Willy to handle with his current state of being, even though Willy needs Biff in his life. After both internal and external conflict, Biff reveals to Willy that Willy had been lied to for a number of years, and that the life he lives is essentially a lie (Miller 104).
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.
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
...s personal failure and betrayal of his soul and family through the meticulously constructed artifice of his life. He cannot grasp the true personal, emotional, spiritual understanding of himself as a literal “loman” or “low man.” Willy is too driven by his own “willy”-ness or perverse “willfulness” to recognize the slanted reality that his desperate mind has forged. Still, many critics, focusing on Willy’s entrenchment in a quagmire of lies, delusions, and self-deceptions, ignore the significant accomplishment of his partial self-realization. Willy’s failure to recognize the anguished love offered to him by his family is crucial to the climax of his torturous day, and the play presents this incapacity as the real tragedy. Despite this failure, Willy makes the extreme sacrifice in his attempt to leave an inheritance that will allow Biff to fulfill the American Dream.
Willy is a man who does not know how to make the most of what he has. He sets himself up for...
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 knows he has failed in life and he knows there is not much left
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.
Willy's search to find his mistakes of his life failed because, even though he found out what happened to Biff, he did not search for the right thing: his identity. Willy found out that his affair made Biff envision his father as a fake and phony, but he did not realize that a salesman was not the right job for him. When Willy died, no one came to his funeral (Act II. Scene I). This just showed that Willy was not the man he thought he was. He thought he was a great salesman with an unlimited amount of friends, but, when he died, no one was at his funeral but his family (Act II. Scene I). It showed that Willy was just a simple craftsman, who only needed attention and love from his family, and did not need fame or to be well-known ("Arthur Miller and Others," 311-314)
Ultimately, it is Willy’s denial of reality that eventually leads the way to his undoing. If he would have just looked a little closer at what he could’ve had, he would have realized that he had it made already: a wife who (more than) loves him and two growing sons out searching for who they really are. But Willy throws all this away by making his sons lie to him so he doesn’t have to face the truth. In the end, Willy chooses to escape from reality altogether by driving away from his problems and killing himself.
Willy believes that he is much more successful than he is in reality. The first sign of Willy’s illusion about his life occurs rather early in the play. He has the illusion that “[he’s] the New England man. [He’s] vital in New England” (14). In reality any person could have taken Willy’s position at work. This illusion leads to his downfall because as his life begins to fall apart, he lives in the illusion that he has enough money to support his family, so he does not recognize that he has to put the pieces of his reality back together. More towards the end of the play, in an outburst of anger Willy refuses to be called “a dime a dozen” and states “I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman” (132), as if the Loman family is a special figure in society. His unclear view of his place in society leads to his destruction; with only one view of his life, Willy believes that he is living his life to the fullest.
To do this, Willy resorted to lying to himself, his wife, his children and others. Of course, one unintended consequence of this was two delinquent sons, one a thief who flunked out of school and the other a philanderer, both with little hope for a prosperous future. Regardless, Willy refused to change with the times and consistently recalled his past to escape the world around him. There is no doubt, Willy Loman failed to recognize his shortcomings, and became a bitter, hopeless old man suffering from
Despite the difficult living of a travelling salesman, Willy longs for Biff to follow in his footsteps and carry on the family name through the business. From the beginning of the play, the reader finds out about this vital relationship. The reader finds out that before Willy returned from his business trip, he had a fight with Biff. Willy referred to his son as lazy and stubborn as he is a thirty year old man who performs manual labor as a living, and often hops from job to job. This argument is almost ironic in the sense that Biff is not holding a steady job, which Willy disapproves of, however it is Willy the reader knows is not holding a steady income himself.
Willy is a salesman. Willy believes that success comes from being well liked and popular and has tried desperately to instill his notions to his two boys Happy and Biff, Willy's biggest aspirations in life. His wife Linda is extremely supportive and is Willy's only connection to reality. While raising his boys and trying to instill his "American Dream", he fails to teach them any sense of morality, leading them down to what he feels is the wrong path. At one point, he defended Biff for stealing just because he was an amazing football player.
Death of A Salesman: Shifting of the American Dream Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman addresses loss of self-identity and a man's incapability to accept change with society in the 1950’s. The play involves memories, strange dreams, and confrontations with his family, which all make up the last hours of the protagonist’s life. Death of a Salesman captures all the dramatic and disparity that a family can gain during a downfall. The country at that time period was all about rebuilding itself and everyone achieving the “American Dream”. Therefore, American commercialism makes up of the play's idealistic themes and although ego and pride leads Willy Loman into committing suicide, he was driven by the harsh economic system of society making