Who Is to Be Blamed for Willy Loman's Death?

Willy´s suicide is more or less the result of the dishonesty of his family and the pressure of the American Dream that he even increases through old traditions he wants to go on with.

Throughout his life, Willy has been telling other people and himself lies about his success at his job and about his and his son´s achievements. He tells everyone that he is well liked and that all his customers would recognize him when he came into a store but in fact he is not earning any money at all and he even has to borrow it from a friend. Linda knows that her husband is not earning any money and that he is borrowing 50 $ from a friend so that it at least seems like he had success in the past week. In my opinion this is the case because Willy always tries to achieve things which are unreachable for him and as said at the end of the tragedy he has different skills but none of them had anything to do with selling. Even when biff tells him that their life is a failure and that he has no success at all and when the truth is really immense, he lies, claiming that he is wrong.

Of course it´s already too late when Biff tries to show his father the truth, because Linda and Happy had always been lying and pretending to agree with Willy in his opinions. This is becoming evident at the end when Biff wants to tell Willy the plain truth about how his life has really been. Willy however does not want to hear what he tries to say and always avoids his accusations. Even worse than Willy´s reaction is that of Happy. Happy even contradicts his brother when Biff claims that neither his mother and father nor the two brothers have ever fully told the truth. Besides that he does not seem to have understood anything of what Biff had told his family, ´cause right after Biff heads for his bedroom Happy again tells his father that he is going to get married and that he´ll be running the apartment he is working at, which shows that he is even more lost in the dreams of his father than any other character in the play.

The most important reason for his suicide is that Biff pulls him back into reality when Willy is again about to drift off into his dreamworld.