Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller was first presented in 1949 and has been studied and reproduced countless times since. The plot revolves around a salesman named Willy Loman and his family. Willy is 63 years old, and on the decline. His career as a traveling salesman is going badly, and during the play he is let go. Willy’s flashbacks to a better past take up much of the past, and are brought on by the return of Biff, Willy’s favorite son, who comes to visit from out west. Biff is 34 and Willy’s favorite son, but Willy’s high expectations him cause many issues for both of them. The overall tone of the play is sobering as we watch the family (especially Willy) fall apart because of various reasons, including the way they treat each other. One reason that this play is well known is because many of the characters are identifiable with ourselves. Willy is a burnt-out businessman with no special talents or qualities. Linda is a kind and dedicated housewife, but she has not accomplished anything noteworthy. Biff has a habit of theft and a number of pent-up frustrations. Happy tries to smooth out the tensions in the family, but he is also unsatisfied. The only “successful” major character in the play is Bernard, but even he was considered “liked, but not well-liked” by the Lomans when he was young. There are not any heroes or bad guys in the play. The characters are all very human, and very flawed. While the worse characteristics of these characters can be identified with, their actions are still difficult to accept. For example, there are many times throughout the play where I found myself very annoyed with Willy. I didn’t appreciate his attitude towards Linda (or toward Biff and Happy) in Act 1 where he doesn’t let... ... middle of paper ... ...h drove Willy to suicide, considering that money is a large part of what our culture’s world revolves around. I know that I care about wealth more than I should, and it’s a very easy trap to fall into. I know that I deal with questions regarding money daily, asking myself things like “Should I work extra hours this weekend?” “Do I have enough to buy that dress?” “Is this major going to get me a job that pays well?” and it can easily become an obsession. Instead of being generous and grateful, money can make someone hard and envious. This is what I think happened to the Loman’s, Willy in particular. His value of “personal attractiveness” was closely followed by success (meaning money,) and then that system blew up in his face. It’s an important lesson for the rest of us. Money isn’t everything, and it won’t (and can’t) always give you all you think you want.
Willy never accomplished his dream of becoming a first-rate salesmen. Even his funeral which he had hoped would be filled with people coming from far and wide was a handful away from being empty. The book is titled Death of a Salesman which is literal as well as a parallel to his career that died. Not only is the outcome the same in his career as in his life, but so is the method. Willy Loman killed himself, but he also killed his career. Throughout the story it is mentioned that Willy was a skilled builder, “He was so wonderful with his hands”(138) not only was he talented, but “he was a happy man with a batch of cement”(138). His family make it clear that Willy would have been more suited for a job in construction than sales. Willy chose the wrong career, and it is not society's fault that he chose a life he was not suited to
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.
Patterns and Themes: One of the more obscure themes I discovered was about nature. For example, in the beginning of the play, Willy's small apartment is being towered by many enormous apartment buildings. Because of this, the plants in his garden don't get enough sunlight to grow. Essentially, this represents how his artificial world is stopping his from growing into a better person. Also, Willy doesn't haven't enough courage to actually go out into nature, like his brother Ben did, and discover his true passions. Instead, he chooses to sell himself to the superficial urban world.
Willy Loman will bring his downfall upon himself as he entices his own disillusions and the bedrock of his values pertaining to success and how one can achieve it. His failure to recognize the fruitless outcome of his own idealism will seal his fated suicide and have a determining effect on the failures of his two sons that when adolescent, idolized their father as a guid...
A person’s attitude is mostly what everyone around him or her will view them as. From this they can tell many things. Whether it is if the person is funny or down to earth or even irresponsible. Many times people change personalities often and they would be classified as being a dynamic type of person. A person who is doesn’t change is classified as being a static character. Willy, from Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller, is a static character for his inability to grasp reality, his poor parenting and his constant lying to his wife.
Another poor character trait in Willy was the way he had such high hopes and dreams. Willy was taken captive by the American Dream. He was so consumed with the idea of it; he never took a moment to realize that he couldn’t capture that fantasy. He was so consumed that it caused him to suffer from crippling self-delusion. In the beginning of the play, Willy was in a delirium; he couldn’t even extinguish reality from his fantasy world. “Biff is a lazy bum…Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such-personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff--he’s not lazy.” From Wil...
... morals and personality towards his goals and at the same time trying to pass those values onto his sons, making him lose their respect, which is one of the many reasons that ended up taking his life. For the most part one can see that issues like Willys cannot only be seen or heard of in a play but also in the real world. Everybody in general wants to conform and be liked in today's competitive society, which is one of the reasons why many people don't get to accomplish the things they want to accomplish because they are either to scared or don't have the courage to step out of the social norms and achieve what they what to achieve. If anyone learns anything from this tragic character, one can say that truly knowing ones-self can really help in the long run because if one doesn't know who they are, they can end up leading a miserable life, in a miserable world.
“When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.” (Donald Miller). When unrealistic expectations are placed upon someone including one’s self, the pressure to find success and achievement becomes daunting to many. Certain people who have a negative opinion about themselves, are not able to see the potential which they hold inside of them. The mentality of always expecting the best from one’s self is sometimes a burden, which can control the lives of many. When applying an idea such as assuming impractical success based on the prosperity of others, it can give pressure to one’s self when expecting the best result. In the modern play Death of a Salesman, written by Arthur Miller, the character of Willy Loman struggles to
Willy, Linda, Biff and Happy are all characters that use self- deception as a way to mentally escape the terrible reality of their lives. As the play progresses, and ends Biff is truly the one and only character that becomes self- aware. At the end of the play Biff accepts the lies his family and him have been living in for years. Biff makes huge changes mentally at the end of the play, which cannot be said for the rest of the Loman family.
The most detrimental relationships in the play are that of Willy and his two sons, Biff and Happy. Not only does he confuse them by forcing his beliefs and half-truths on them, but he also spawns their lives into the same unhappiness that his own life has ended up in. Then by his own making, when their lives do not turn out as glamorous and wonderful as he has hoped, he blames and resents them for their failure. Biff seems to have lost the American dream when he caught his father in the Boston hotel room with his mistress. He has not given up on hard work anymore than Willy has given up on life. They are almost one in the same, they have both lost their dreams and illusions, just at different times in their lives. The three men have created a cycle of unhappiness and resentment, each of them failing the others. In contrast to this, the peak of success lives next door.
Cheating does not lead one to be successful, hard work with integrity does. Minor characters are essential to literature because they provide a comparison to the major characters. In the play Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller, Arthur Miller uses Charley and Bernard to represent the opposite character development from that of Biff and Willy. Although minor characters, both Charley and Bernard embody hard work and integrity, characteristics in which the Loman family does not possess. There successes contrast the failures of Biff and Willy, illustrating for the reader how Willy’s style of parenting was a failure.
Willy Loman is a 60 year old senile salesman who desperately wants to be a successful salesman; however, his ideas about the ways in which one goes about achieving this are very much misguided, just as his morals are. He believes that popularity and good looks are the key to achieving the American dream, rather than hard work and dedication. He not only lives his entire life by this code, but instills his delusional beliefs in his two sons Biff and Happy. As a result, his sons experience similar failures in their adult lives. Willy led a life of illusion, lies and regret which not only ruined his life, but gad a negative impact on the lives of family as well.
Willy Loman is one of the most tragic heroes in American drama today. He has a problem differentiating reality from fantasy. No one has a perfect life. Everyone has conflicts that they must face sooner or later. The ways in which people deal with these personal conflicts can differ as much as the people themselves. Some insist on ignoring the problem as long as possible, while some attack the problem to get it out of the way. In the case of Willy in Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, the way he deals with his life as a general failure leads to very severe consequences. Willy never really faced his problems in fact in stead of confronting them he just escapes into the past, whether intentionally or not, to those happier childhood times where problems were scarce. He uses this escape as if it were a narcotic, and as the play progresses, we learns that it can be as dangerous as a drug, because of its ability to addict Willy, and it’s deadliness.
These failures and faults are not only confined to him but they rub off on his family. The storyline shoots from present day to past throughout the play this does not affect the theme of Failure very much but helps us understand and realize how these failures came about. Willy's entire life is a succession of missed opportunities and chances, and he considers himself a failure because of it. At the beginning of Act 1 we see him failing to make the drive to his business appointment, so he's going to miss out on making a sale because of it. So our first impression of the man is him failing to deliver.
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 ...