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Death of a Salesman as a social Tragedy
Death of a salesman modern society
Death of a Salesman as a social Tragedy
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In Arthur Miller’s play, “Death of a Salesman”, the audience gets to witness the decline of a man so washed up and warped by his society that he takes his own life in the hopes that his family will benefit from the insurance money. This man’s name was Willy Loman, and he was a salesman in the late 1940’s plagued by false ideas and realities. In an interview, Arthur Miller described the man who inspired Willy Loman as a “failure in the face of surrounding success. .He was the ultimate climber up the ladder who was constantly being stepped on. His fingers were being stepped on by those climbing past him...And I mean, how could he possibly have succeeded? There was no way.” (Lahr 10) The society Willy lived in, as well as his own heart and ideals are what inhibited and ultimately destroyed his chance for a prosperous, fulfilled life.
The company Willy worked for was his first major mistake. He devoted his entire life to the embodiment of capitalist America. In one of the most famous scenes from the play, Willy is getting fired from his job and in a fit of outrage and desperation he says to his boss, “You can't eat the orange and throw the peel
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away-- a man is not a piece of fruit!"(Miller 1486). But that is exactly what the company did. Willy was old and broken and tired after his many years of work and was no longer of any value to them, so they tossed away what was left. This is just the way his society functioned; with no morals or compassion, supported by the belief that a man’s worth is solely derived from the amount of money he earns. These materialistic faults did not only plague Willy at the workplace, it also affected nearly every aspect of his homelife as well.
The house itself reflected the plight of Willy Loman, it was in shambles around him. Prosperity in the shape of high-rise apartment buildings had them boxed in, to point where the sun no longer shone in his yard. Willy had worked for 25 years to pay off the mortgage but by the time it was his he no longer needed so much space. Even the refrigerator--that was bought because it was the most advertized-- broke before they could finish paying for it. His relationship with his sons and wife were in even in ruins, just like the material objects around them. Willy’s wife, Linda, realized he had suicidal tendencies and in order to get their son’s to show sympathy she had to remind them he was
human: “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be made.” (1473) Willy’s life was in disrepair as a direct result of life choice to follow someone else’s dream in order to be ‘well liked’ by people around him. He had the chance to stay true to himself and work with his brother, Ben, in Alaska but because he heard about a man with green velvet slippers who supposedly died with friends all over the country, he decided to trash his own ambitions and become someone he wasn’t. Willy never was a great salesman because that was never what he was meant to do. His goal in life was to be loved by everyone he met and to leave a lasting legacy, but in the end only his wife, sons and one friend showed up to his funeral. Success became eternally out of his reach. “He had all the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong...He never knew who he was.” (1516-1517)
The play, “Death of a Salesman” written by Arthur Miller, presents Willy Loman, as a salesman, who fails to earn a living and slowly loses his mind. Willy continuously seeks the past to find out where he went wrong. During his years in life, Willy wanted his two sons, Biff and Happy to become someone they’re not; Willy wanted them to become a salesman like him. However, because of his obsession in the American Dream of easy success and wealth, he created a life full of lies for himself and his sons. In the end because of “his misconception of himself as someone capable of greatness” leads to his downfall and the end of his life (Death of a Salesman).”
We are here today under unfortunate circumstances. My father, Willy Loman took his own life several days ago. We end up asking ourselves, why did you have to leave us? He was indeed an extremely stressed man between work, and family. Father had grown to be the age of 63. He was a hard working man and had accomplished many things in his life. I remember he always did everything he could for his family and we will forever be grateful. Unfortunately he could not see his accomplishments.
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.
Willy Loman longs for the success of his brother Ben, but refuses to accept the drudgery in the work of his friend, Charley. Essentially, Willy wants the freedom that Ben has – leaving for Alaska on a whim, ending up in the wrong place, and still succeeding on his own – without the responsibility and hard work that Charley puts in to be modestly and stolidly successful. The incongruity in Willy’s wishes – that Willy wants all the glory without any of the guts – leaves him in a place where, truly, he is still a child. And, like a child, Willy could never live like Ben because he needs the security of a job and life like the one Charley has. As the play winds on, Willy cannot wake up from his fantasized version of true American success and, ultimately, allows Miller to illustrate the shallowness of the American Dream.
...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.
Although, his narcissism exhibits the common issue with American capitalism-it leads to greediness, unhappiness, and anger. This yearning for success can also cause an obsession with appearance and the self, which is a main focus in Willy Loman’s life. He says that to get somewhere, it is good to be “built like (an) Adonis,” which he tells his sons. At one point in his life, he felt he never had to ask for anything, and that when he walked in a room, he got what he wanted because “‘Willy Loman is here!’” Eventually, Willy ages and lacks the flair that he once had, and is left with unimpressive salesman skills. Due to America’s obsession with appearance, old-age is a plague to American society. The superficiality causes those to enjoy charisma over passion. This leads to arrogance, a common American worker to be. Willy Loman is a mirror being held up to the faces of American worker-bees. He avoided risks, and continued living a monotonous, easy life. Miller is attempting to say, monotony is a dangerous habit America has. This play intends to steer readers into a direction of following their own path, rather than following the norm; the norm is nothing new, and fails to reach anything
The play “Death of the Salesman” by Arthur Miller, introduced the dramatic story of Willy Loman, a salesman who has reached the end of the road. Willy Loman is a washed-up salesman who is facing hard times. In “Death of a Salesmen,” Willy Loman has been deluding himself over the years to the point he cannot understand what is wrong with him. This leads to the problems with is sons, wife, and career; it ultimately is what ends his life. I believed that the character of Willy 's delusion caused him to fall. While there were many contributing factors to Willy 's demise, his failure to cope with such circumstances and to become trapped in his own delusion is what tears Willy apart from himself and his family. Rather than facing the reality, Willy
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...
Arthur Miller's, "Death of a Salesman," shows the development and structure that leads up to the suicide of a tragic hero, Willy Loman. The author describes how an American dreamer can lose his self-worth by many negative situations that occur throughout his life. The structure and complications are essential because it describes how a man can lose his way when depression takes over.
He desires recognition in the play and when he’s conversing with Howard and talks about his admiration toward Dave Singleman, he states “And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?.” (SparkNotes) He thought a salesman could get him the greatest job in the world because Dave Singleman at the age of eighty-four had died and hundreds of salesmen and buyers attended his funeral and Willy wanted that, he wanted the recognition and wanted everyone to well like him as much as they did to Dave Singleman and so many people would come to his funeral.... ...
In brief, it is apparent that Willy’s own actions led to not only his own demise, but his children’s as well. The salesman tragically misinterpreted the American Dream for only the superficial qualities of beauty, likeability and prosperity. Perhaps if Willy had been more focused on the truth of a person’s character, rather than purely physical aspects, his family’s struggles and his own suicide could have been avoided. On the whole, Arthur Miller’s play is evidence that the search for any dream or goal is not as easy and the end result may seem. The only way to realize the objective without any despair is the opposite of Willy Loman’s methods: genuineness, perseverance and humility.
Willy’s lack of self-worth translates into the deep state of depression that eventually causes him to attempt to take his own life. His wife, Linda has become aware of this, even warning her own children. She discusses with her sons about Willy’s attempted suicide, showing them a rubber hose she found behind the fuse box in the basement; she believes it was used by Mr. Loman in an effort to try and asphyxiate himself. Also, there is evidence that Willy’s car accidents are inevitably not “accidents” at
Willy Loman stands in, so to speak, for every American male who defined himself as a man, husband and father with respect to his success in the workplace and his capacity for grabbing a share of the material American dream. Willy Loman is a man who has deluded himself and has judged himself more harshly than his wife or his son. His tragedy is that he comes to an understanding of this delusion too late to make any changes in his life. Whether or not we as readers or as members of the audience agree with his judgment is irrelevant. It is Willy's own failure that is important in this play.
Willy has two sons, Biff and Happy but he seems to focus more on Biff. He seemed angry that Biff didn’t do more with his life. Willy Loman, the aging salesman, is worn out to the point of breakdown by his many years on the road. But he remains a firm believer in capitalist values and has transfer...
Willy's main flaw is his foolish pride, this it what makes him a tragic hero. Yet there are many facets to his personality that contribute to the state he and the family are in during the play. His upbringing of the boys is one major issue, he raised them with the notion that if one is well-liked, he need not worry about qualifications, he believed that if his boys were popular they would come out on top. Sadly, he doesn't realize that the only way an ordinary person can get rich is through work (represented by Bernard) or through luck and good timing (Ben), and Willy missed the boat when it came to ...