Seeing Inside Willy's Head in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Seeing Inside Willy's Head in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller chose to write, in the contemporary tragedy Death of A

Salesman, about the story of an ordinary man driven by his own

interpretation of the American dream. What characterizes this play is

the way he does this : Miller breaks the boundaries of classical

conventions of playwriting by allowing the audience to enter, visually

as well as emotionally, Willy's mind in order to permit a better

comprehension of the latter's inevitable tragic fate. Hence, the

mingling of past and present in the play, essential in this role, and

the way it affects Willy's view of the world and life in general, will

be analysed.

From the start of Act One, as the setting of the play is announced, an

analogy between Willy's interior and his exterior, his environment, is

made : "An air of dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of

reality". It seems that the house embodies the essence of Willy's

character : his dreams and the illusions they bring about. Miller

warns us : "the entire setting is […] in some places, partially

transparent", this is representative of the gaps, the holes, in

Willy's mind allowing past and present to merge in the play and

eventually bring him down. Present is shown as being limited by

fragile imaginary boundaries, breaking down as soon as the past

emerges, bringing to light the frail presence, if not the absence, of

a clear separation between past and present in the character's mind

from the start of the play. Miller's aim is to erase any gap between a

remembered past that would be evoked through words and a present that

would be performed on stag...

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...his garden, as Willy discusses with

Ben's ghost, and one realizes that the ghost is very much a figment of

Willy's distorted mind ("The boat. We'll be late.") : he is in fact

talking to himself.

One also encounters at one point a "mise en abime" of the past : a

memory within a memory. It occurs with the symbolic appearance of the

stockings, mended by Linda, which Willy then offers to the Woman.

Thus, as Willy sees his wife mending her stockings, the laughter of

the Woman echoes through his mind ("The Woman's laughter is heard

distantly"), therefore contributing to increase Willy's sense of

guilt. The stocking is the object which brings together the two women

in Willy's life, contrasting the life which he has dedicated to his

family with the life he has dedicated to the American dream and its

hypocritical leisure.