Death of a Salesman. A play by Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman – A play by Arthur Miller

 

 

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Death of a Salesman – A play by Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller is a leading American playwright who has written several plays that take place in the family and home setting and are especially noted for the modern-day moral and political statements that they make. “Death of a Salesman” is arguably the most widely read and praised of all of Arthur Millers’ works. Arthur Miller was born in New York City. His father was a Jew who moved from Poland to the United States. His mother was however born in New York, but her father came from the same town as Miller. The unexpected misfortunes in his family are what gave him the desire to change hence writing his best selling work that included “Death of a Salesman” and “Timebends: A Life”

In “Death of a Salesman”, Arthur Miller looks critically at the concept of the ‘American Dream’ of making it big simply through the idea that one is ‘well liked’ or through one’s ‘personal attractiveness’, as the major character in the play puts it as. Miller has also attempted to put his play across as a tragedy, but it does not quite fit in as a tragedy since the supposed ‘hero’ in the play is not quite a hero to anyone but quite the opposite, a failure in every sense of the word.

The play looks at the lives of the Loman family – Willy Loman, an elderly traveling salesman, who lives in a world of false hopes and dreams, who is living a life of illusions and delusions, and who eventually commits suicide in an attempt to redeem himself in his family’s eyes after failing miserably to achieve his American Dream of prosperity and riches; Biff Loman, Willy’s thirty four-year old son, who represents Willy’s tragic side. Biff tries hard to live up to his father’s hopes and dreams of living the American Dream but an event he witnessed involving his father’s marital infidelity makes him loose his trust and belief in his father and he becomes a drifter out West on a cattle ranch. In the end he is the only member of the family who snaps out of the false life that his father has been attempting to instill in the whole family as he comes to realize that he is just an ordinary man, a ‘dime a dozen’ and not a ‘great leader of men’ as his father wants him to think; Happy Loman, Willy’s thirty two-year old son, who stands for Willy’s ambitious side.

Happy has forever lived in his elder brother’s shadow and is always attempting to gain his father’s admiration and approval. Yet he is the only member of the family who is a success story of sorts. He is the assistant to an assistant buyer in a department store but deems himself a very important person because he owns a car and lives in his own apartment. Like his father he has low morals and sleeps with call girls. Unlike his brother, he fails to see reality and appears to be the one member of the family who will attempt to achieve his father’s desires and ambitions. He says of his father ”…He had a good dream, the only dream a man can have – to come out number one man. He fought it out here, and this where I’m gonna win it for him.”; and last but not least, Linda Loman, Willy’s loving and loyal wife who has stood by Willy for many years. She is aware of Willy’s delusions and illusions but she suffers through it all quietly and with great patience. She is the arbitrator in the family whenever Willy fights with Biff or Happy. She is fond of taking her husband’s side during these arguments and is always chiding her sons not to irk or desert their father. She knows that Willy wants to commit suicide but does not attempt to stop this from happening, probably because she is so tired herself and wants it all to end too.

In his play, Miller has brought out a number of themes. He talks about the American Dream which every American was trying to live in the 1930’s-1960’s. This is a dream to achieve prosperity via the fastest and easiest route possible. Miller’s view of the American Dream is that it is not achievable by the majority of ordinary Americans. Willy Loman has this dream for himself and for his sons also, yet he and his eldest son both do not succeed in living it. He tells his wife, “In the greatest country in the world a young man with such personal attractiveness, gets lost.” referring to the failure of his elder son Biff to become someone worthwhile as he himself had always wanted to be. Biff also sometimes feels the pressure of this dream, even though he is otherwise comfortable working as a farm hand on a ranch. He says to his brother, “[When spring comes out West] I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not getting anywhere! I’m thirty-four years old; I oughta be makin’ my future.” Perhaps Happy Loman is the only Loman who has reached somewhere on the road to the fulfillment of the American Dream. Nonetheless he does not appear satisfied with it. Biff asks Happy, “You’re a success, aren’t you? Are you content?” Happy replies, “Hell no! … But then, it’s what I’ve always wanted. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” It appears to me that the playwright is bringing out a point here, that the American Dream is not achievable by majority of the ordinary Americans (in this case two members of the Loman family).

When the dream is achieved, it appears not to make the achiever content (only one member of the Loman family). Putting this into context one realizes that playwright is expressing his communist views here against capitalism. One critic states, “Arthur Miller, who is one of the last unrepentant Marxists, obviously sees Willy as a victim of capitalism.” Miller’s view is that capitalism leads eventually to the downfall of individuals. In the play Willy eventually commits suicide for the sake of money and his last-ditch attempt to redeem himself in the eye’s of his eldest son is quite sad. His plan is that the insurance money coming from his death would be used by Biff to start a sporting goods business, and he justifies this to his dead brother Ben. Ben tells him “…it’s a cowardly thing.” Willy replies, “Why? Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?” Miller’s critic states in defense of capitalism, “One doesn’t really expect an intellectual to have any real understanding of economics (or much else for that matter) but Miller, in reducing capitalism to nothing more than a kind of cheap hucksterism, has followed in the footsteps of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the like, with equally obtuse results.”

Miller has also attempted to include the element of tragedy into his play. He portrays Willy’s suicide as a heroic ‘modern’ tragedy. Willy in Act II tells his brother Ben in reference to Biff benefiting from the insurance money, “Imagine, when the mail comes, he’ll be ahead of Bernard again!” This can be interpreted as Miller portraying his main character as a hero who is sacrificing himself for the benefit of another person. But does the play merit the title of a modern tragedy? The critic argues, “The problem with trying to imbue this play with the aura of tragedy is not that Willy Loman is a little man, it’s that he’s not a good man: he’s not much of a salesman; he cheats on his wife; he lives vicariously and unfairly through his eldest son, then makes excuses for that son’s pathological misbehavior; he virtually ignores his second son; he’s a real bastard to friends, neighbors and extended family; and so on.”

Conclusively, Miller tries to portray in his book that the American dream is hard to achieve. The main character Willy tries to live the American dream and when he fails he instills the same notion in his children so that they can follow in his footsteps. One can think they are living their American dream but in the end, they are still sad and they realize that it is not possible to get everything one dreams for. If one looks carefully and critically at this play one realizes it is not a tragedy. It is simply a story of a misguided and immoral individual, blinded by his dreams, having no clear direction of living them out, trying to force them onto his eldest son, but in the end failing miserably. As Biff said quite correctly, “He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.” Perhaps the American Dream is a wrong dream.

Works Cited:

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. London: Heinemann, 1994. Print.

Review of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. (Retrieved on 23rd September 2010) From:

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