With multiple stories ranging from mental abuse, physical abuse, betrayal and disloyalty, they all seem to overcome adversity one way or another. Whether they left their current situation, they just stayed and took the abuse, or they passed away. Day in and day out we see these types of things going on. Are we the type of people to help? Or are we the type of people that just sit there and let it happen. If we see it we should help, never know what could happen if nobody helps. “The Cask of Amontillado" we saw betrayal when Fortunato got killed by Montressor, when Montressor lead him down to the catacombs so he could kill him for betraying their friendship. With Montressor not telling us why or how Fortunato betrayed and hurt him. As a reader …show more content…
To Willy the “American Dream” is not hard work, dedication and innovation its being successful and well liked. If Willy wasn’t successful there was no going out and changing the way he approached things, its success or fail for him. Willy wants the success the easy way, where he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t try hard to dedicate himself to get better, he wants it handed to him. Willy’s sons Happy and Biff don’t have the same drive to be a salesman like Willy does. That’s one reason Willy’s life starts to go in a spiral, his sons do not want anything to do with being a salesman. The other reason as we all know is Willy not being a successful salesman. With all that and Willy having an affair behind his wife Linda’s back and her questioning him about it a lot it just takes a toll on him and he finally breaks down. Instead of Willy going out to try and seek help he seeks the worse possibility in a stressed and unhappy person’s life, suicide. Willy committing suicide he believes it was the best decision at the time, and his life insurance policy he left for his family he believes it will be a way out with the affair he had, and Linda would forgive …show more content…
Her condition in the world now is more than likely post-partum stress disorder or even anxiety. With her thinking it would be better for her if she had “less opposition and more society and stimulus”. She often expresses her urge to spend time with other people, but her husband is shooting down any and every opinion she has. At a certain point in the story her husband makes her believe he’s the doctor and that she should trust him. As she says, “he does not believe I am sick” and he tells her “no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” As we know he does love his wife and care for her he is ultimately making her condition worse. As she is getting treatment her husband isolates her in the mansion and keeps her from seeing her family. Even though she wants to see her family, her husband doesn’t think it’s the best thing for her. As a lot of us would like to see our family when we are not feeling well, I believe her husband should let her see the family. All in all, it might help her fell a little better and they might know what to do or might give her something to help with her
After seeing both his father and brother find success, Willy attempts to prove himself to his family by chasing after his own version of the American dream. Willy grows up in the “wild prosperity of the 1920’s” when rags-to-riches tales inspire everybody, making them believe that “achieving material success [is] God’s intention for humankind (Abbotson, Criticism by Bloom). Willy’s father, a “very great” and “wildhearted man,” made a living traveling and selling flutes, making “more in a week than a man like [Willy] could make in a lifetime” (Miller 34). Even though Willy barely knew his dad, he built him u...
An additional segment of his common human nature is Willy's self-centeredness. Although one might say that the American Dream is imposed upon him by the society, Willy himself creates his dream. Willy supports this claim when he praises Dave Singleman's career to Howard: "And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want" (Miller 81). His nostalgia for a non-existing future is also proven by the fact that no one else in his environment has a similar, impossible dream: "If he were not wearing the rose colored glasses of the myth of the American Dream, he would see that Charley and his son are successful because of lifelong hard work and not because of the illusions of social popularity and physical appearances" (Spark 11). Surely the false ego and pride predicted to come from his assured success are the bridges that prevents Willy from seeing through his fake dream, pushing him to persuade the rest of his family to worship it along with him.
There are a number of reasons why Willy committed suicide, but we are never given specifics. First, there's his job. He's no longer good, the younger men are passing him by, sales no longer rely on the game he was taught as a young man; Willy had been replaced by those with new ideas and techniques, while he refused to change with the times.
By the time Willy got to be an old man, his life was in shambles. *One son, Biff, was a hopeless dreamer who wasn’t able to hold on to a job. He could have been successful through an athletic scholarship, but he blew the chance he had to go to school. Happy, the other son, had a job, but was basically all talk, just like Willy. Now near the end of his career as a salesman, Willy realizes his whole life was just a joke, and the hopes he placed in the American Dream were misguided. At the end of the play, his only hope is to leave something for his family, especially for Biff, by taking his own life and leaving his family the insurance money. Through his death, Willy thinks he can achieve success and fulfill his dream.
If Willy had not got the wrong impression of the American dream he would have had the right dreams and would still be alive. Things could have turned out differently for him and his family. But unfortunately Willy died the death of salesman at least that is the one thing he could relate himself with Dave Singleman to.
During most father-son relationships, there are certain times where the father wants to become more of a "player" in his son’s life than his son believes is necessary. The reasons for this are numerous and can be demonstrated in different ways. Miller is able to give an example of this behavior through the actions of Willy Loman. When Biff comes home to recollect himself, Willy perceives it as failure. Since Willy desperately wants his oldest son, Biff, to succeed in every way possible, he tries to take matters into his own hands. "I’ll get him a job selling. He could be big in no time" (16). The reason that Biff came home is to find out what he wants in life. Because Willy gets in the way, matters become more complicated. Partly due to Willy’s persistence in Biff’s life, they have conflicting ideas as to what the American dream is. Willy believes that working on the road by selling is the greatest job a man could have (81). Biff, however, feels the most inspiring job a man could have is working outdoors (22).
Yet, Willy was already down, and society kept him there. He lost the job that he'd worked at faithfully for thirty-four years simply because the younger owner couldn't bear having an older, less successful salesman representing the company. Willy is sealed off from his family, especially from his sons, because of an unseen force that causes an inability to communicate. Finally, he can't fight the predicament that society placed him in because deep down, he can't accept the fact that he's not what he wanted to be in life. All of the actions that alienated Willy Loman validate the prejudice and bias of society.
Willy Loman equates success as a human being with success in the business world. When Willy was a young man, he heard of a salesman who could "pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, make his living." (81) This salesman is Willy's inspiration; someday to be so respected and so well known that he can still provide for his family, even at an old age. Of course, Willy is no good at being a salesman because his heart isn't in it. The only time Willy puts his heart into anything is when he works with his hands, and his son, Biff, comes to realize this. "There's more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made." (138) Willy never comes to the realization that it is not being a salesman that he cares about, but rather being well known and, perhaps more importan...
As a father, Willy only wants the best for his sons. He wants his sons to do better than what he has done with his life and achieve more success. Willy 's dreams for his sons are a source of tension and anxiety for Biff and Happy. Their desire to please their father clashes with what is deemed moral and the right way to act. Willy 's dreams for his sons are seen as added pressure for them to succeed within life. In order to fulfill their father 's wishes, they develop a mindset that they must do whatever it takes for them to succeed. Happy is trying to move up the ranks within the company he works for and in order to please Willy, he acts as if the only way to advance is by neglecting any sort of boundaries. When Happy is discussing his competitiveness
This shows the readers that Willy's mind has some control over his actions. Willy’s search for the American Dream leads to his lack of success
When the author has Willy state this it allows for everyone to know that Biff is in his eyes suppose to achieve great success. Due to Willy putting everything into his sons especially Biff he finds it unbearable that his sons are failures and he has a very hard time grasping this concept as he doesn’t want it to be true. This can be connected to Willy’s distorted reality as he doesn’t understand how the real world works today and that things don’t just rely on how someone looks for them to be successful. The author, Arthur Miller brings into play the idea of the American Dream which when we compare the overall idea of a typical American Dream to Willy’s you see a huge
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 is a salesman. Willy believes that success comes from being well liked and popular and has tried desperately to instill his notions to his two boys Happy and Biff, Willy's biggest aspirations in life. His wife Linda is extremely supportive and is Willy's only connection to reality. While raising his boys and trying to instill his "American Dream", he fails to teach them any sense of morality, leading them down to what he feels is the wrong path. At one point, he defended Biff for stealing just because he was an amazing football player.
(Miller 11). Willy’s personal representations of the American dream are his brother Ben and the salesman Dave Singleman and he views the success of these two men as a proof that he can indeed attain the success he is so desperate to achieve, so there are two versions of the American dream in Death of a SALESMAN AND Willy fail to achieve any of them as he misunderstood the basic concept of the American dream which is the hard work to achieve whatever you want, but
...y he is so obsessed with trying to attain it. He is the product of his own illusions and of a society that believe that with hard work everything is possible. The reader can understand that Willy’s skewed perspective of the “American Dream” is due to his distortion of his life and the dream that he thinks he lives in everyday.