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Analysis of American Dream (150 words)
Analysis of American Dream (150 words)
Analysis of American Dream (150 words)
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The Midlife Crises in Death of a Salesman, Alfred J. Prufrock, and American Beauty
Disillusioned and disenchanted, both Arthur Miller's Willy Loman and American Beauty's Lester Burnham share sexual frustrations and a dissatisfied longing for their respective pasts, but Willy, like T.S. Eliot's equivocating Prufrock, is unable to move beyond the failures inherent in his mediocrity and instead retreats into his delusions.
On the surface, Willy and Lester have all the elements of settled, prosaic lives shaped from the pattern of the "American Dream": large homes in middle- or upper-class neighborhoods, successful children, loving wives. But under this facade, both share a need that has devastated men and engendered distrust in their families for generations: the extra-marital affair.
Willy's affair with The Woman is a crucial turning point in his relationship with Biff, his oldest son. When Biff catches Willy and his mistress, Willy first attempts to distract his son and then be rid of him. However, his attempted cover-up fails and forever shatters the idolatrous relationship between father and son.
Willy: She's nothing to me Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.
Biff: You... you gave her Mama's stockings!
Willy: I gave you an order!...
Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake! (Miller 1850)
Biff's discovery of his father's indiscretions shatter the Loman family's fragile facade of middle-class happiness. Although Willy is genuinely remorseful for his conduct, neither his repeated refrains of "stop crying, I gave you an order!" (1850) nor his apologies can mend the rift between him and Biff. Yet even as Biff loses his football scholarship and wanders, not unlike hi...
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...the passive salesman and the aggressive quitter. Where Willy Loman quickly makes society's ideals his own and then falls victim to his own dissatisfaction, Lester achieves happiness because he rejects the standards that society sets for a middle-aged man.
Works Cited
American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes. Writ. Alan Ball. With Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening. Dreamworks SKG, 1999.
Eliot, T.S.. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1996. 2459-2463.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking, 1965.
Millar, Jeff. "The Rise and Fall of Everyman: `American Beauty' Proves Potent Family Portrayal." Houston Chronicle 24 Sept. 1999, Star ed.: 1. Academic Universe. LEXISNEXIS. Madden Lib., Fresno, CA. 13 Apr. 2000 <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/>.
Willy Loman which may sound Low Man- man, writers often select the names for a reason, has two personalities one strong and one weak dreamer. The dreamer is optimistic, enterprising, including content and happy and the other is inconsistent, insecure, hypocritical, and unconscious. Both appear in all the advice he gives to his children. He is very contradictory, he is a person with excellent manual dexterity that insists on getting into sales business. He does contrary to what he wants. He is a country man, likes nature but lives in the city.
Sometimes all you need to get stuck in a rut is to interact with one simple person. Occasionally, someone’s sly words and convincing argument is all that is needed to keep a person’s mind on a one way track. One such person is Ben Loman, who despite only appearing within a few sections of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, has a presence that completely defines the Loman family’s goals. With Ben’s influence in Willy Loman’s life, he and his family are pressured into following a pointless dream that ultimately keeps them stuck on a fixed path.
He then faces some tragedy of failing his family by not giving them what they wanted at the time he was working as a salesmen then he committed suicide by killing himself in a car, so that his family will get an insurance cover so that his wife Linda will get money to help her and his two sons to open big businesses and they would never become hungry anymore. I think by doing this Willy was feeling guilt that he did not accomplish what he needed in life while he was working and his money was spent in the hotels with that mistress that Biff caught him with and forgot to fulfill his American dream.
Willy Loman becomes incredibly involved in work-related matters, instead of the happiness surrounding his family life. He discourages Biff to take his own path, and instead, nearly forces him to become a salesman, in hopes that Biff will be more successful than he turned out to be. Willy tells Biff that his dreams will “cut down (his) life…!” Willy cannot simply hope for Biff and Happy to attain satisfaction in life, which is the element that Willy misses. He is so consumed by the idea of success that he had not once stopped to reflect on being a good father or loving his wife. Having an affair was one of his main problems-he could not put enough love into his family, so he put it anywhere else he could. He visited his mistress on business ventures, which is the only aspect of his life he truly appreciated. Therefore, his home life became full of lies, Biff saying that they “never told the truth for ten minutes.” Miller is, again, critiquing American households, since their typical values revolve more around money and presentation than a loving, kind, and caring home. Willy had a family who loved him, but he neglected to notice this, which lead to his unhappiness. Never placing any type of value of love and kindness can cause a person to become cold and bitter, which is exactly what Willy became. He may have avoided suicide if he had realized the love and care he could have been surrounded
Willy Loman’s false pride leads him to believe that he has been successful as a father. He remembers how he was once looked up by his children, especially by his son Biff. However, Willy fails to realize that the relationship he once had with his son Biff has been broken, due to the fact that Biff caught Willy in an affair he was having with another girl; Biff was heartbroken to fin...
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 receives a deserving punishment for many reasons, but the lesson he leaves behind to his sons is one of the most everlasting to his family. Field in his article claims “what he has taught them does not look to him like what he had wanted them to learn” (21), but Willy’s failure is that Biff and Happy have learned exactly what he has taught them their whole lives. Much of the conflict stems from their similarities rather than their differences. Much of the contradictory nature of Willy’s own thoughts are the same as that of Biff’s. For instance when Biff catches Willy with another woman, he is furious with his father shouting, “You fake! You phony little fake!”(2. 745), but even though Biff is angry with his father h...
When delving into Willy Loman’s character it is obvious that he has an obsession with the past, but like most humans he tends to idealize that life he once knew and rarely thinks in terms of the present in the play but when he does he is aware of how his life has fallen apart and it shows through his feud with Biff. Thinking in terms of what ruined Willy’s old life, you have to look to when Willy had cheated on Linda and how he “gave [the woman of the evening] Mama’s stockings!” With this betrayal Biff never forgives Willy for what he had done, which begins to spiral Willy’s life out of control and as a guilt mechanism he alludes himself into thinking of a time before Biff had resented him for his wrongdoings. Willy’s own worst enemy is himself, and he alone drives himself to his demise. The previously mentioned betrayal between Biff and Willy is the first in the timeframe of the play that you see Biff really question what his father is about. After the realization of what had happened Willy’s reply is subpar at best when he states “ She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly
Biff discovers his father with another woman in a hotel room and after that moment the relationship between the two was never the same. This loss of respect for the father that Biff had cherished in the passed could be part of the reason that Biff has struggled financially and no longer has a competitive edge in the business world. Also, after Willy’s mental deterioration had become undeniably apparent, Biff realizes that his father’s delusions are no longer something that he needs to be concerned with. The tragic
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.
A major part of the reader's animosity towards Willy stems from his responsibility for the ruin of his sons. Willy's affair ends up being the reason that Biff ends up a high-school failure and a football has-been. This blunder both disheartens and destroys his eldest son. It becomes the reason Biff refuses to go to summer school; it becomes the reason that Biff leaves home. Yet, this is all a result of Willy's need to be likeable. He cheats on his doting wife simply because it makes him feel special, because it gives him proof that women other that Linda are interested in him, because it makes him feel well liked. A woman "picked [him]"; a woman laughs when he makes jokes about keeping pores open; a woman pays him some attention (38).
The texts states, “Willy is driven to commit his greatest wrong by feelings of shame that arise out of his sense of inadequacy as a man. His adulterous affair with “The Woman” in Boston, which haunts both him and his son Biff, is a desperate attempt to confirm and maintain his self-esteem” (7). When Willy has an affair with the women it ruins the relationship with the whole family. No one understands it and especially Biff, he feels trapped. Of courses Willy does not really see this as affecting them because he lives in a world of illusions, he does not want to face the reality of what actually
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 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...
Willy Loman’s tragic flow leads him to purse the idea that reputation in society has more relevancies in life than knowledge and education to survive in the business. His grand error of wanting recognition drove him crazy and insane and lead to his tragic death. Willy’s hubris makes him feel extremely proud of what he has, when in reality he has no satisfaction with anything in his life. Willy Loman’s sons did not reach his expectations, as a father but he still continued to brag about Biff and Happy in front of Bernard. Willy Loman caused the reader to empathize with him because before his tragic death he did everything he could for his family. Empathy, Hubris , and Willy Loman’s tragic flow all lead him to his death that distend for him the beginning.