Linda's Enabling In Death Of A Salesman

Enabling someone is helping them do something that isn’t healthy. Sometimes, enablers don’t even know they’re doing it, but instead of helping, they are hurting. Enabling can be something as simple as rewarding someone for bad behaviors. The person thinks it’s okay, and keeps doing this behavior. In Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman is this classic enabler. She indirectly causes the dysfunction in the family, because she supports the bad decisions Willy and her boys make, instead of doing the right thing and not supporting them. Linda’s enabling is obvious when she helps Willy with suicidal thoughts. Willy tries to suck carbon monoxide through a tube, and instead of telling him to stop, Linda just lets him do it. She enables him because although she is not outright letting him do it, she is allowing him to continue to hurt himself and his family. For example, Linda states, “’Every day I go down and take away that little rubber pipe. But when he comes home, I put it back where it was. How can I insult him that way?’” (Miller 60). Linda is scared of insulting Willy rather than protecting him, which clearly shows that she enables him to be this terrible, sad person. Critic Gavin Cologne-Brooks adds to the proof of Linda’s enabling by saying, “Family and

She indirectly causes the dysfunction in the family because Biff and Happy see their father as someone that should be successful, but he only has dreams that he’ll never reach, and Linda just helps him along. Miller is trying to tell us that we should not enable people to be someone they’re not, and that we should tell them like it is. If we don’t, then dysfunction will happen. So, if you ever see someone enabling someone else, try to stop it. They might be trying to be nice but they’re just hurting the person they’re enabling, because everyone should be living in