Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is considered by many to be both the playwright's masterpiece and a cornerstone of contemporary American drama. Subtitled Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem, the play was first produced in 1949 and struck an immediate, emotional chord with audiences. The work garnered numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and enjoyed a lengthy run (742 performances) on Broadway. In the decades following its premiere, Death of a Salesman has become one of the most performed and adapted plays in American theatrical history. Much of this success is attributed to Miller's facility in portraying the universal hopes and fears of middle-class America. Through his main character, Willy Loman, Miller examines the myth of the American Dream and the shallow promise of happiness through material wealth. He uses Willy as an example of how undivided faith in such a dream can often yield tragic results, especially when it goes largely unfulfilled. Audiences have continued to respond to this theme because, in some incarnation, the American Dream has persisted; a viewer can watch Death of a Salesman and relate Willy's situation to their own compromised ideals and missed opportunities. More than a cautionary tale, however, Miller's work is also revered for its bold realism and riveting theatricality, a play that deals in weighty emotional issues without descending to melodrama.
The Life and Work of Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller was born October 17, 1915, in New York City, to Isadore and
Augusta Barnett Miller. He grew up with an older brother and a younger sister
and received his earliest schooling in Harlem in the 1920s. His middle-class
family fell upon difficult times when his father’s clothing business experienced
devastating economic damage, forcing the family to move to Brooklyn shortly
before the Depression.
At Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Miller was more an athlete than a scholar; an average student, he did not read much literature, preferring instead boys’ adventure stories. Because his parents could not afford to send him to college when he graduated high school in 1932 (in the middle of the Depression), he worked at several jobs, including one at an auto parts warehouse and one as a radio singer. He saved enough money during this time to enter school at the University of Michigan, where he had applied earlier but was rejected.
In college, his growing interest in literature led him to write a number of successful plays as an undergraduate. For two of them, No Villain (1936) and Honors at Dawn (1937), he received the University of Michigan’s prestigious Hopwood Award. After graduating from Michigan, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery in 1940, worked briefly for the Federal Theatre Project (the Depression-era government agency that paid young writers for their work), and wrote short radio scripts.
In 1944, during World War II, Miller traveled to several army bases in the U.S. as a researcher for the 1945 film Story of G.I. Joe. Miller published his observations in Situation Normal, describing one soldier’s feelings after returning from war. The account reveals Miller’s distrust of the easy and blind patriotism that he thought characterized popular literature and film in America. Miller’s desire to question the motives behind conventional sentimentality toward war comes through in Death of a Salesman as well, where the American dream seems to lose its innocent veneer.
Miller’s most successful Broadway plays have been Death of a Salesman (1949), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and The Crucible (1953). The Crucible – set during the seventeenth-century witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts – was a pointed criticism of the then-current “witch-hunt” that U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy led against American politicians and public figures thought to be associated with Communism. At that time (the 1950s), the U.S. was in the middle of the Cold War, an ideological battle with the Soviet Union. Historians have roundly condemned the frenzy with which McCarthy and others sought to attack, often with no foundation, Americans interested in communism, socialism, or significant socioeconomic change. Miller himself was called before the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and convicted of contempt of Congress when, stating he was not himself a Communist, he refused to name people he had met at a Communist writers meeting. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality.
Associated with politically left causes and
organizations throughout his career, Miller did not always reflect his political
concerns directly in his writings. Like Henrik Ibsen, the late
nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright whom he admired, Miller tended toward
realism in his style. Miller’s realism, though, was a social and psychological
realism that took advantage of time-shifts, memories, and innovative set design
to articulate characters’ complex relations to their social, economic,
religious, familial, and gender roles. In addition to Death of a Salesman and
The Crucible, Miller’s most notable plays included All My Sons
(1947), An Enemy of the People (1950, adapted from Ibsen), A View from
the Bridge (1956), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy
(1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business
(1972), The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977), and The American Clock
(1980). He also wrote Focus, a novel about anti-Semitism, a topic that greatly
occupied Miller and that informed both Incident at Vichy and his television
screenplay Playing for Time (1980). Miller’s autobiography, Timebends:
A Life (1987), and The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978) give
insight into his life and his theories on drama. His works have enjoyed several
new stage, film, and television productions over the years and are consistently
produced by small theaters around the country.
Miller and his wife Mary Grace Slattery divorced in 1955, and in 1956, Miller
married movie star Marilyn Monroe. Because of both Miller and Monroe’s fame at
that time, the marriage received enormous publicity. The two celebrities
divorced in 1961, and in 1962 Miller married photographer Ingeborg Morath, with
whom he continues to live in Connecticut.
1. Appearances
vs. Reality
What appears to be true to the characters in Death of a Salesman is often
a far cry from reality, and this is communicated numerous times throughout the
play. Willy's frequent flashbacks to past events—many of which are completely or
partly fabricated—demonstrate that he is having difficulty distinguishing
between what is real and what he wishes were real. Willy's imagined
conversations with his dead brother, Ben, also demonstrate his fragile grip on
reality. Willy's mind is full of delusions about his own abilities and
accomplishments and the abilities and accomplishments of his sons. Biff and
Happy share their father's tendency to concoct grand schemes for themselves and
think of themselves as superior to others without any real evidence that the
schemes will work or that they are, indeed, superior. At the end of the play,
each son responds differently to the reality of his father's suicide. Biff, it
appears, comes to the sad realization that his father "didn't know who he was,"
and how his father's unrealistic dreams led him away from the satisfaction he
could have found if he had pursued a goal that reflected his talents, such as a
career in carpentry. Happy, who had previously given the appearance of being
more well-grounded in reality but still hoping for something better, completely
falls into his father's thought pattern, pledging to achieve the dream that his
father failed to achieve.
Individual vs. Society
Willy is constantly striving to find the gimmick or the key to winning over
clients and becoming a true success. He worries incessantly about how he is
perceived by others, and blames his lack of success on a variety of superficial
personal traits, such as his weight, the fact that people "don't take him
seriously," his clothing, and the fact that he tends to talk too much. While all
of these concerns are shared by many people, for Willy they represent the
reasons for his failure. In reality, Willy's failure is a result of his
inability to see himself and the world as they really are: Willy's talents lie
in areas other than sales, and the business world no longer rewards
smooth-talking, charismatic salesmen, but instead looks for specially trained,
knowledgeable men to promote its products. Willy fails because he cannot stop
living in a reality that does not exist, and which dooms him to fail in the
reality that does exist.
Individual vs. Self
Willy's perception of what he should be is continually at odds with what he is:
A mediocre salesman with delusions of grandeur and an outdated perception of the
world around him. He truly believes that he can achieve greatness, and cannot
understand why he has not realized what he feels is his true destiny. He
completely denies his actual talent for carpentry, believing that pursuing such
a career would be beneath him somehow. Willy struggles with the image of his
ideal self his entire life, until he can no longer deny the fact that he will
never become this ideal self and he commits suicide.
American Dream
Willy's quest to realize what he views as the American Dream—the "self-made man"
who rises out of poverty and becomes rich and famous— is a dominant theme in
Death of a Salesman. Willy believed wholeheartedly in this treasured
national myth, which began during colonial times, and which was further
developed during the 19th century by such industry tycoons as Andrew Carnegie
and J.D. Rockefeller. In the 1920s, the American Dream was represented by Henry
Ford, whose great success in the automotive industry was achieved when he
developed the assembly line.
Also in the 1920s, a career in sales was being hailed as a way for a man without training or education to achieve financial success. Pamphlets, lectures, and correspondence courses promoting strategies for improving the skills of salesmen were widely distributed during this decade. These strategies focused on teaching salesmen how to effectively manipulate their clients. Willy would have begun his career as a salesman in the 1920s, when belief that salesmen adept at manipulation and "people skills" were destined for wealth and fame was widespread. However, by the late 1940s, when Death of a Salesman takes place, the job market and prevailing belief has changed, and salesmen (and other workers) required specialized knowledge and training in order to succeed. Because he lacks such knowledge or training, Willy is destined to fail in a business world that demands the ability to play a specific part in a large establishment. Willy, of course, does not realize how things have changed, and he continues to try to strike it rich using his powers of persuasion. 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 proof that he can indeed attain the success he is so desperate to achieve. According to Willy's version of the American Dream, he is a complete failure.
Death of a Salesman is a drama set in 1949, in New York City and Boston. The action of the play takes place largely inside the Loman home in Brooklyn, but other places in New York and Boston are used as well, including hotel rooms, Willy's office, a restaurant, and Willy's gravesite. The play is grounded in realism, which means that it depicts realistically what happens in the lives of its characters, but it also contains elements of expressionism, specifically when it depicts imaginary sequences and portrays for the audience the inner workings of the characters' minds and their emotions. The play is largely a representation of what takes place in the mind of Willy Loman during the last two days of his life.
Willy reminisces about past events and imagines situations, and the audience is able to see his thoughts played out on the stage. The reminiscences and imaginary sequences allow the audience to understand the characters' inner thoughts and provide insight into their behavior during the present-day scenes. For example, the audience learns, during one such reminiscence, that Biff has been tormented for since he was a young child by the discovery that his father had an extramarital affair. This insight helps the audience to better understand both Willy and Biff, explains some of Biff's anger toward his father, and indicates why he is so disillusioned. The instructions for setting in the play provide insight into how Arthur Miller wanted the play to be perceived by the audience. Miller includes instructions that the only substantial part of the set should be the Loman home, and all other locales should be merely hinted at by using changes in lighting or setting up a few chairs or a table. In this way, the audience can clearly see which events on stage are taking place in reality, and which are taking place inside of Willy's mind. Miller originally titled the play The Inside of His Head, which illustrates that he intended to show the audience what happens in a man's mind when his dreams are never realized, and when he lives in a world based on illusion. Miller's method of flashing back and forth between the past and the present, and between the imaginary and the realistic, allows the audience to witness how a lifetime of disappointment, delusion, and failure have led to the current situation, and shows facets of each character that would not have been revealed if only the present-day occurrences had been portrayed. Because of the way the play is constructed, the audience can see what the characters have become and what experiences, thoughts, and emotions led them to their present state.
Historical Background
Miller tells the reader at the outset of the play that Death of a Salesman
takes place “in the New York and Boston of today.” When the play opened, “today”
meant 1949, a moment in American history when many people – riding an economy
rescued from the Great Depression of the 1930s by the domestic industrial boom
of World War II (1939-45) – found a more prosperous life within reach. In the
late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, many pursued “the American dream” of hard
work rewarded by middle-class signs of success such as a house, a car, a college
education, and household appliances. The dream held the possibility for greater
personal wealth, even while African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans,
Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and new immigrants struggled to gain the civil rights that would give them equal opportunity to chase that dream. Death of a Salesman has frequently been understood as a commentary on the American dream and whether (1) the dream’s economic prosperity is truly available to anyone who works diligently, and (2) the importance the dream places on material wealth invites selfishness and social injustice.
By 1949, World War II was over, Harry Truman was president of the United States, and the U.S. had not yet begun its involvement in the Korean War (1950-53). The Cold War with the Soviet Union brought a nuclear arms race as the U.S., a victor of World War II, asserted its role as not only a political and military world power but as an overwhelming international cultural force. American movies and manufactured goods were exported along with the American dream and American capitalism. By the end of the 1940s, Americans earned an average of 15 times the yearly wage of the rest of the world, a fact that reveals the overall wealth of the U.S., albeit a wealth that was extracted from but not shared with the working-class people in the U.S. and foreign countries. Despite the looming possibility of nuclear war and, for many, the often elusive “better life,” Americans’ optimism dominated public discourse with, as Miller’s play suggests, a buoyancy comparable to loyalty to one’s favorite sports team.
Although television had been invented before the end of the 1940s, it did not fully surpass radio in prominence and audience size until several years later. And while traveling salesmen are rare in the 1990s, they were common in the 1940s, selling items such as brushes and vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Social relations were also different from today. Linda Loman’s role as a loyal and often shy housewife and mother does not necessarily represent all women’s lives in the 1940s, nor does Miller necessarily approve of the role. However, her behavior does suggest the cultural notions, common in that period, of restrained, even timid, femininity; and, as the play bears out, masculinity of the time was overly identified with the virile figures of the athlete, businessman, and soldier.
Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949 and ran for more than two years, tallying 742 performances. Its initial success has been reinforced by several regional, repertory, and touring productions over the years. One of its most famous productions was in Beijing, China, during a time (1983) when the U.S. and China were staunch ideological opponents. The play’s most recent notable revival starred Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in 1984. While reading Death of a Salesman, the reader should remember that it is not a novel, but a play meant for the stage. As such, the play asks the audience to notice not just what is being said by characters, but what music, costumes, set design, and unheard actions contribute to the overall effect.
The general public has continually come out to see Death of a Salesman in significant numbers, drawn to the pathos of its central character, Willy Loman, whom audiences tend to regard as a symbol of the ordinary American. Although the play appears to pose as one of its central questions how much sympathy Willy deserves, Miller himself has endorsed the idea that the play is a tragedy in the true dramatic sense of the word – a tragedy of the common man, the “low man.” As this historical background sketch has shown, Death of a Salesman owes much to its historical moment; nevertheless, the idea of a tragedy of the common man imbues the play with a sense of timelessness – even if that quality might eventually be linked to a particularly American, post-World War II way of thinking.
Some critics and academics have not liked Death of a Salesman and dispute its status as a viable tragedy. They argue that Willy is not a compelling protagonist but merely a pitiful man, a loud-mouth and cheat. Compared with the other two most prominent mid-twentieth-century American playwrights – Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams – Miller’s plays in the tradition of socially and politically conscious realism usually do not achieve the formal, Expressionist innovation of his predecessor O’Neill or the poetic writing of his contemporary Williams. Nonetheless, Death of a Salesman possesses enough of both styles to have earned praise for its innovative stage orchestration of space and memory, as well as its several captivating speeches, at once earnest and self-deceiving.
Arthur Miller's classic American play, Death of a Salesman, exposes the relationship between gender relationships and dysfunctional family behaviors. In this play, the themes of guilt and innocence and of truth and falsehood are considered through the lens of family roles. Willy Loman, the salesman whose death culminates the play, is an anti-hero, indeed the most classic of anti-heroes. According to an article on the play in Modern World Drama, Willy is "a rounded and psychologically motivated individual" who "embodies the stupidity, immorality, self-delusion, and failure of middle-class values." While his self-delusion is his primary flaw, this characteristic is not necessarily tragic since Willy neither fights against it nor attempts to turn it toward good. Dennis Welland in his book, Miller: The Playwright summarized this view, critiquing critics who believe that "Willy Loman's sense of personal dignity was too precariously based to give him heroic stature." Although he is ordinary and his life in some ways tragic, he also chooses his fate. The article in Modern World Drama confirmed that "considerable disputation has centered on the play's qualification as genuine tragedy, as opposed to social drama."
Although Willy is dead by the end of the play, that is, not all deaths are truly tragic. The other characters respond to Willy's situation in the ways they do because they have different levels of access to knowledge about Willy and hence about themselves. An analysis of the relationships among these characters' insights and their responses will reveal the nature of their flawed family structure.
According to conventional standards, Biff, the older son of Willy and Linda, is the clearest failure. Despite the fact that he had been viewed as a gifted athlete and a boy with a potentially great future, Biff has been unable as an adult to succeed or even persevere at any professional challenge. Before the play opens, he had been living out west, drifting from one low-paying cowboy job to another, experiencing neither financial nor social stability. Back in New York, he is staying with his parents but seems particularly aimless, although he does gesture toward re-establishing some business contacts. Although one could speculate that the Loman family dynamics in general have influenced Biff toward ineffectuality, as the play progresses readers understand that one specific biographical moment (and his willingness to keep this moment secret) provides the key to his puzzling failure.
Near the end of the play, Bernard, Willy's nephew, asks Willy about this crucial incident. Although Biff had already accepted an athletic scholarship to the University of Virginia, he failed math his last semester in high school; his best option was to make the course up during summer school. Before he makes this decision, Biff visits Willy, who is in Boston on business. According to Bernard, Biff "came back after that month and took his sneakers—remember those sneakers with 'University of Virginia' printed on them? He was so proud of those, wore them every day. And he took them down in the cellar, and burned them up in the furnace. We had a fist fight. It lasted at least half an hour. Just the two of us, punching each other down the cellar, and crying right through it. I've often thought of how strange it was that I knew he'd given up his life. What happened in Boston, Willy?" Willy responds defensively: "What are you trying to do, blame it on me?"
What had happened, of course, as Willy subsequently remembers and as he has probably remembered frequently during the intervening years, was that Biff had discovered Willy in the midst of an extramarital affair. In contrast to Linda, who frequently appears with stockings that need mending, this other woman receives gifts of expensive stockings from Willy. The existence of this woman (and perhaps others like her) is one factor contributing to the financial strain of the Loman family. Biff understands this instantly, and he also understands the depth of Willy's betrayal of Linda—and the family as a whole. The trust Biff had given Willy now seems misplaced. Indeed, according to the flashbacks within the play, the young Biff and Happy had nearly idolized Willy, so this betrayal while Biff is yet an adolescent is particularly poignant. As Biff is about to make a momentous life decision, in other words, he is confronted with duplicity from the man he had looked to as a role model. Yet Biff shares this knowledge with no one; instead this secret becomes the controlling element of his own life.
When Biff does attempt to tell the truth, not about Willy's affair but about his own life, Willy and Happy both resist him. "Let's hold on to the facts tonight, Pop," Biff says, indicating that "the facts" are slippery in their hands. The outright lies members of the Loman family tell, that is, come more easily because they also exaggerate some facts and minimize others. Although many of their stories may be eventually founded in truth, that truth is so covered with their euphemistic interpretations that it is barely recognizable. The stories the family has told have become nearly indistinguishable from the real circumstances of their lives. Trying to separate reality from fantasy, Biff says, "facts about my life came back to me. Who was it, Pop? Who ever said I was a salesman with Oliver?" But Willy refuses to acknowledge the substance of the question: "Well, you were." Biff contradicts him, as determined to acknowledge the truth as Willy is to deny it: "No, Dad, I was a shipping clerk." Willy still declines to accept this fact without the gloss of embellishment: "you were practically" a salesman.
Later, the conversation among the three men reveals that similar embellishments continue to characterize their lives. "We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!" Biff proclaims. When Happy protests that they "always told the truth," Biff cites a current family lie: "You big blow, are you the assistant buyer? You're one of the two assistants to the assistant, aren't you?" But Happy continues the family habit: "Well, I'm practically..."
This inability to acknowledge the truth affects the family on many levels but most particularly in terms of their intimacy with one another and their intimate relationships with others. Biff hasn't dated anyone seriously, and Happy is most comfortable with prostitutes. While waiting for Willy at a restaurant, Happy assures Biff that a woman at another table is "on call" and urges her to join them, especially if she "can get a friend." Although Happy is clearly a participant in this encounter, he says, "Isn't that a shame now? A beautiful girl like that? That's why I can't get married. There's not a good woman in a thousand." Although Happy and Biff would probably classify their mother as a "good woman," they follow their father's example in seeking out women they won't marry to gratify their egos and then in treating those women as disposable.
Linda eventually responds to her sons with scathing disrespect in part because of the way they respond to other women, but primarily because she assumes they chose to accompany prostitutes rather than to fulfill their dinner plans with their father. "You and your lousy rotten whores!" she says. "Pick up this stuff, I'm not your maid any more," she continues, and then asserts, "You're a pair of animals!" Linda, of course, doesn't realize that Willy, too, whom she accuses her sons of deserting, is guilty of infidelity. Willy's emotional stability is threatened, she believes, in part because of the way his sons respond to him. She fails to consider the possibility that Biff's instability and the immaturity of both Biff and Happy has been affected by Willy's model.
The most profound secret of the play, however, is of course Willy's apparent obsession with suicide. He has been involved in several inexplicable automobile accidents, and he has perhaps planned to asphyxiate himself by attaching a rubber tube to their gas water heater. Linda has discovered this tube and has revealed her discovery to her sons, but she forbids them from addressing the subject directly with Willy, for she believes such a confrontation will make him feel ashamed. This secret is hence ironically acknowledged by everyone except the one whose secret it is—Willy. When he does finally succeed in killing himself, his act can be interpreted as a culmination of secrets, secrets which are compounded through lies because they have been created through lies. Welland suggested that Willy's suicide results from his affair—-"To argue that in these days of relaxed social morals one minor marital infidelity hardly constitutes grounds for suicide is, paradoxically, to add weight to the theme in the context of this play: for Willy Loman it is enough." His affair is certainly one factor in his decision, but it is a factor because he had been found out by his son, and because others are now starting to question him. So although these secrets include his affair(s) and Biffs knowledge of this aspect of his life, they also include his failure as a salesman and the subsequent failures of his sons.
1. The following essay examines the function of the character of Ben in Death of a Salesman, arguing that Ben is an extension of Willy's own consciousness, and that "through [Ben] Miller provides for the audience a considerable amount of the tragic insight which, though never quite reaching Willy, manifests itself to them in the dramatic presentation of the workings of his mind."
In the thirteen years since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman had its spontaneous Broadway success, critics have often cited as a deficiency in it the lack of tragic insight in its hero, Willy Loman. "He never knew who he was," says his son Biff at Willy's grave; and by a like judgment critics can substantially discount the play's tragic claims.
But Biff's choric commentary on his father, like many other very quotable remarks in the scene of Willy's "requiem," is not quite true. Willy did struggle against self-knowledge—trying not to know "what" he was; but he had always a superb consciousness of his own individual strength as a "who." "I am not a dime a dozen!" he shouts in the play's crisis; "I am Willy Loman...!" And it is this very sense of his personal force and high regard for it which qualify him as a hero.
What turns this self-esteem into something tragic and self-destructive is his contrasting awareness that, in spite of his powers, he is not what he wants to be. Himself partially unaware that he actually desires simple fulfillment as a father, Willy dreams of being an important businessman, greatly admired by his two sons. He has misconstrued the ideal of fatherhood, confusing it with the ability to confer wealth and prestige. Because of this misplaced idealism—and his related commitment to the economic delusion known as "the American dream" —he seems not to have the stature of the traditional tragic hero.
That, as his son Biff says, Willy has "the wrong dreams" is certainly true. What criticism has to decide, in the light of the play's dramatic structure, is whether this common human defect does not increase rather than weaken his effectiveness as tragic hero.
Because playwright Miller has buttressed the basic realism of Salesman with strongly expressionistic elements, analysis of his play has to be made carefully. Willy's stage presence does not equal his characterization, as it would in a more conventional play. Instead of simply appearing in the events on stage, he himself—or rather, his confused mind— is the scene of much of the dramatic action.
Consideration of tragic insight in Willy, then, leads one to notice an expressionist device which reappears with the regularity of a motif in episodes taking place in Willy's consciousness. This is the stylized characterization of Willy's rich brother Ben who, when closely observed, takes shape less as a person external to Willy than as a projection of his personality. Ben personifies his brother's dream of easy wealth.
Ben is the only important character not physically present during Willy's last day. He is on stage only as he exists in Willy's mind. But he is the first person whom Willy asks in his present distress, "What's the answer?"; and in the end it is Ben's answer which Willy accepts. As one critic summarizes it:
Ben "walked into the jungle and three years later came out with a million"; Ben shot off to Alaska to "get in on the ground floor"; Ben was never afraid of new territories, new faces, no smiles. In the end, Ben's last territory—Death—earns Willy Loman's family $20,000 insurance money, and a chance for them finally to accomplish his dream: a dream of which they have never been capable, in which they also can only be buried, the old "million" dream [Kappo Phelan, "Death of a Salesman," Commonweal XLN, 1949, p 520]
Although Ben is dead before the play begins, the force which he symbolizes draws Willy to suicide.
Ben also stands out as the play's only predominantly formalized characterization. That in him Miller combines realism with expressionism in a ratio inverse to that of the rest of the play seems another indication of his distinctive symbolic function.
The audience first sees him when memories of a visit paid by him some twenty years before push themselves into Willy's consciousness. "William," he boasts, "when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!'' This is the first insinuation of what may be called Ben's theme—the going into a strange country and emerging with its wealth. Willy, who in this scene is a young father, triumphantly concurs: ".. .was rich! That's just the spirit I want to imbue them with! To walk into a jungle! I was right!" Ben, whom he has presented to his sons as "a great man," has confirmed his ambitions for them.
At his second appearance in Willy's memory, Ben again exults over his wealth, but this time he puts his brother on the defensive. He is now making money in Alaska and wants Willy to come into his business. Willy does find the offer attractive, and he hesitates before deciding that, after all, he is' 'building something" here in the States. "And that's the wonder, the wonder of this country," he goes on to exclaim, "that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!" Ben repeats, "There's a new continent at your doorstep, William. You could walk out rich. Rich!" But Willy insists, "We'll do it here, Ben! You hear me? We're gonna do it here.'' He is still calling this when Ben, for the second time, abruptly disappears into darkness.
Willy next sees his brother after he has finally admitted to himself that he is a business failure. And from this point in the play Ben functions as a symbol of Willy's dream. He no longer is a memory; instead he has become a force working in the present.
Willy has lost his job, is thoroughly defeated, and wants to talk over with his brother a "proposition" of suicide. At first seeming to dissuade Willy, making reluctant appeals to his pride, Ben gradually comes to admit that Willy's insurance indemnity is worth suicide: "And twenty thousand—that is something one can feel with the hand, it is there." Willy becomes lyrical: "Oh, Ben, that's the whole beauty of it! I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand." Ben's motif, riches waiting in darkness, is working in Willy's mind. He no longer believes he can make money in another way.
The play's crisis ensues and Willy comes to see that his son Biff loves and forgives him. More than before he yearns to give his son something, and Ben immediately reappears to recall the suicide plan. The idyllic leitmotif which accompanies Ben starts up in accents of dread. "The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.... One must go in to fetch a diamond out." Slowly he moves into the offstage darkness. "Ben! Ben, where do I...?" Willy pleads. "Ben, how do I...?" Finally he rushes off after him; seconds later he is dead.
Ben's one-dimensional character becomes a facet of the intimate psychological portrayal of Willy just as expressionism fuses with realism in Salesman a whole. Miller uses Ben—along with the more conspicuous devices of skeletal setting, non-realistic lighting, free movement in space and time, and musical leitmotifs—to provide a deeper realism than conventional dramatic form would have allowed.
Traditional drama implements audience-insight into the hero's problem by his own voluble awareness of it; tragic figures are more or less poetically articulate about their destinies, desires, and mistakes. Death of a Salesman, however, forces a question as to whether insight in the hero is a dramatic end in itself or only insofar as it heightens audience-consciousness. For, in spite of its hero's foolish commitment to something so hollow that he will not even admit it to himself, the play' s structure permits its audience to follow in the very action on stage the inexorable working of his mind. Thus Willy emerges as more than a pathetic victim of American society. Miller employs expressionism precisely to show Willy's struggle against self-knowledge, thereby pointing up his personal responsibility for refusing to estimate himself sincerely.
What Miller believes to be the basic impetus of any tragic hero—the supreme importance of his self-respect, even when he must lie to himself to preserve it—is, structurally and otherwise, the main concern of his play. Salesman studies the break-up of an ideal rather than of a man. But Willy's collapse will follow inevitably that of his self-image. His existence has come to depend upon belief in his ideal. Symbolically speaking, he has become his delusion.
Functioning in Willy's consciousness as a personification of this dream, Ben is a most important "minor" character, a projection of his brother's personality rather than an individual human force. Through him Miller provides for the audience a considerable amount of the tragic insight which, though never quite reaching Willy, manifests itself to them in the dramatic presentation of the workings of his mind.
In one way Willy's commitment to his dream typifies a necessary breaking of the laws of reality by all men: their construction of the tenuous ideals of themselves which truth by its very nature has to destroy. Willy, who will give up his life rather than his chosen image of himself, represents the fool in each of us. By that very fact, he must go the way of the tragic hero.
Source: Sister M Bettina, "Willy Loman's Brother Ben: Tragic Insight m Death of a Salesman" in Modern Drama, Vol. 4, no. 4, February, 1962, pp. 409-12.
In the following excerpt from his review of Death of a Salesman, which originally appeared in the New York Times on February 11, 1949, Atkinson declares that the play, which he calls "a superb drama," "has the flow and spontaneity of a suburban epic that may not be intended as poetry but becomes poetry in spite of itself because Mr. Miller has drawn it out of so many intangible sources."
Arthur Miller has written a superb drama. From every point of view Death of a Salesman, which was acted at the Morosco last evening, is rich and memorable drama. It is so simple in style and so inevitable in theme that it scarcely seems like a thing that has been written and acted. For Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the hearts of some ordinary Americans and quietly transferred their hope and anguish to the theatre. Under Elia Kazan's masterly direction, Lee J. Cobb gives a heroic performance, and every member of the cast plays like a person inspired.
Two seasons ago Mr. Miller's All My Sons looked like the work of an honest and able playwright. In comparison with the new drama, that seems like a contrived play now. For Death of a Salesman has the flow and spontaneity of a suburban epic that may not be intended as poetry but becomes poetry in spite of itself because Mr. Miller has drawn it out of so many intangible sources.
It is the story of an aging salesman who has reached the end of his usefulness on the road. There has always been something unsubstantial about his work. But suddenly the unsubstantial aspects of it overwhelm him completely. When he was young, he looked dashing; he enjoyed the comradeship of other people—the humor, the kidding, the business.
In his early sixties he knows his business as well as he ever did. But the unsubstantial things have become decisive; the spring has gone from his step, the smile from his face and the heartiness from his personality. He is through. The phantom of his life has caught up with him. As literally as Mr. Miller can say it, dust returns to dust. Suddenly there is nothing.
This is only a little of what Mr. Miller is saying. For he conveys this elusive tragedy in terms of simple things—the loyalty and understanding of his wife, the careless selfishness of his two sons, the sympathetic devotion of a neighbor, the coldness of his former boss' son—the bills, the car, the tinkering around the house. And most of all: the illusions by which he has lived—opportunities missed, wrong formulas for success, fatal misconceptions about his place in the scheme of things.
Writing like a man who understands people, Mr. Miller has no moral precepts to offer and no solutions of the salesman's problems He is full of pity, but he brings no piety to it. Chronicler of one frowsy corner of the American scene, he evokes a wraithlike tragedy out of it that spins through the many scenes of his play and gradually envelops the audience....
Source: Brooks Atkinson, in a review of Death of a Salesman (1949) in On Stage: Selected Theater Reviews from The New York Times, 1920-1970, edited by Bernard Beckerman and Howard Siegman, Arno Press, 1973, pp. 298-99.
Master List of Characters
Willy Loman – The “salesman” of the play’s title.
Linda Loman – Wife of Willy, mother of Biff and Happy.
Biff Loman – Elder son of Willy and Linda.
Happy Loman – Younger son of Willy and Linda, often simply called Hap.
Ben Loman – Willy’s older brother (Biff and Happy’s uncle). He made his fortune in African diamonds as a very young man.
Charley – Neighbor of the Lomans. He is called Uncle Charley by Biff and Happy, even though he is not their actual uncle.
Bernard – Charley’s son, who helps Biff with his homework and whom Willy, Biff, and Happy tease for being an unmanly bookworm.
Howard Wagner – Willy’s boss, who is younger than Willy. Howard’s father had been Willy’s boss until his death.
The Woman – The woman with whom Willy has an extramarital affair during his sales trips to Boston.
Miss Forsythe – A woman whom Biff and Happy meet in the restaurant. (She is referred to as simply “Girl” in the play before her name is given.)
Letta – Miss Forsythe’s friend. She eventually joins Miss Forsythe, Willy, Biff, and Happy at the restaurant.
Stanley – A young waiter at the restaurant where Biff, Happy, and Willy meet in Act II.
Jenny – Charley’s secretary.
Assignment 1: Staging Illustration (In-class)
The staging of Death of a Salesman is extremely important. It is highly symbolic, and it presents a visual and auditory representation of Miller’s themes and characters; it is the audience’s initial introduction to the power of the play.
At the very beginning, Miller provides with a very detailed description of the set (in italics). With a partner, illustrate what you read in detail. You may present any view you wish (from the top down, etc.), but it is easiest to illustrate the stage from the perspective of the audience. Label stage left and right (from the audience’s perspective), up (furthest from the audience) and down (closest to the audience and the edge of the stage) stage. Use colors to indicate the color of lighting.
Assignment 2- Journal Assignment
Write a brief description of what you think the American Dream is.
Assignment 3- Log Assignment: In at least one page for each, address all of the following log questions. Please type your responses (MLA format), save the assignment as a Microsoft Word document, and e-mail it to me by class time on the date due. If for some reason you are incapable of submitting your assignment in this manner, please be sure to bring a typed hard copy to class on the date due. PLEASE NOTE: IT IS PREFERRED THAT YOU SUBMIT YOUR ASSIGNMENT VIA EMAIL.
1. Analyze the theme of self-deception in the play. Specifically, how is this theme present in the characters of Linda, Biff, Hap and Willy. Which of these characters has moments of clarity in which they see truth? To what extent does this happen?
Act I, Part 1
2. In this opening section we meet Willy Loman. Examine his personality
and character. What influences have shaped his view of his job, his family, and
the world in general? What is responsible for his tendency to change temperament
quickly? What contradictions in behavior does he exhibit?
Act I, Part 2
3. Examine how Biff and Hap’s adult lives show the influence of their
childhood as seen in the flashback.
4. How does Willy equate “success” and conventional notions of masculinity? Has that equation proved valid for Biff and Hap?
Act I, Part 3
5. Describe how Willy has taken Ben’s life and his philosophy of the
“jungle” as models for success. How has Willy shaped that philosophy to
encompass life as a salesman?
Act I, Part 4
6. In this section of the play we have learned a lot about Linda Loman.
Describe the way Linda sometimes shares Willy’s wishful thinking but also
exhibits independence and an awareness of Willy’s shortcomings. Describe how
Linda balances these different tendencies.
Act II, Part 1
7. Discuss the way Miller seems to pair characters or to see one character
in another. For example, describe how Willy reminds us of Biff when asking for a
new job; how Howard is a successful version of Willy and Biff; or Dave
Singleman and Willy’s view of himself.
Act II, Part 2
8. Contrast Willy with Ben. Willy seems to think that he leads a life somehow
like Ben’s. Besides the fact that Ben is rich and Willy is not, what separates
them? You might begin by comparing Ben’s willingness to travel to remote places
such as Alaska and Africa with Willy’s reluctance to disrupt his own rather
ordinary life.
Act II, Part 3
9. Examine the way Willy continually says what he will do but never actually
does it. Look again at Willy’s conversations with Bernard and Charley in this
section and try to decide whether Willy lies when he boasts or if he actually
believes what he says, or both.
Act II, Part 4
10. Contrast Happy and Biff. You might begin by showing how Hap never really
feels guilty about his own behavior in the way that Biff feels about his.
Act II, Part 5
11. Discuss why Biff considers Willy a “fake.”
Act II, Part 6
12. Analyze to what extent Willy is responsible for Biff’s difficulties in life.
What does Biff mean when he says, “I never got anywhere because you blew me so
full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!”
Requiem
13. Explore the difference between Biff and Hap’s reactions to Willy’s death.
Has Willy’s death changed the way they viewed him before he committed suicide?
Does Hap seem more upset in the “Requiem” section than he was in Act II? Does
Biff not share Hap’s anger over Willy’s suicide or does he express it
differently?
14. Compare the outcome of Willy’s death with the various ways Willy envisioned it earlier in the play. How does Willy’s funeral compare with Dave Singleman’s? Is Willy “worth more dead than alive,” as he said to Charley? Has Willy’s suicide turned out to be a “great proposition all around,” as Ben thought?
Assignment 4- Study Questions: Address the following questions. Please type your responses (MLA format).
1. How is selling contrasted with other kinds of work? What does Willy sell? What would Willy rather do? What does Biff want to do? How does Willy feel about it?
2. What in particular seem to be Willy's most pressing needs? Are those needs only material and financial or also psychological and affective? What does Willy want?
3. How is his last name expressive of his lacks and needs? What is the origin of his needs and desires?
4. How does Willy expect to have his desires satisfied by the sales profession? Is he correct in his expectation of material and psychological reward in his line of work?
5. What does he misunderstand concerning the sales profession and the business world in general? What about his perception that there used to be "respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it" (81)? Is he right about that or is he idealizing the past?
6. How is Willy treated by the company he works for? What are his expectations?
7. How is his boss, Howard Wagner, characterized? Is Howard's name significant? Who named him? How does he feel about Willy?
8. What is the significance of the scene in which Howard is playing with a recorder while Willy is trying to talk to him? What do we learn about Howard's family life through the voices heard from the recorder?
9. Willy Loman was preoccupied with being well liked. How is being liked related to having friends? How many friends did Willy have? Generally speaking, how does "business" mix with loyalty and friendship? Recall Howard’s observation "’Cause you gotta admit, business is business" (80) and consider Willy’s speech on p. 81 about the loss of personality, respect, comradeship, and gratitude in the world of sales.
10. What is the difference between having a nice personality and being a good person? (What is a "personality" anyway?) Relatedly, what is the difference between having a nice lifestyle and living well?
11. What is the significance of the figure of Willy's brother Ben? What role does Ben play in the story? Is Ben dead or alive? How is he manifested in the action of the play? What were his business activities? Where was he active? What is the meaning of the imagery of the jungle, Africa, Alaska, gold, and diamond mines?
12. Why does Ben say that he "never kept books" (47)? What is his attitude toward the other members of the family? What story does he offer about himself?
13. What is the meaning of the mock fight between Ben and Biff? What does it reveal? What is the lesson Ben intends to teach Biff?
14. What is the meaning of the flute music heard at various points throughout the play? What/who is this music associated with? Why is it significant that Willy's father was supposedly a flute maker and salesman?
15. What is the overall significance of the meat, chopping, and butchering imagery (“Frank’s Chop House,” J.P. Morgan looking like a “butcher" when without his rich clothing) and its relations to business and businessmen?
16. Is Willy Loman a tragic figure or is he pathetic? Charley repeatedly tells Willy to "grow up." What is he getting at, and is he right to think that Willy never did "grow up"?
17. Is Linda a loving wife or a self-deceiving "enabler" of family pathologies? Is she aware of Willy’s infidelity?
18. Why does Miller conceive of Happy as an even more desperate character than Biff? Is his name ironic?
19. The Lomans were not only habitually dishonest; they were dishonest with themselves about their dishonesty. How do you suppose they got into such a habit? How is selling related to honesty?
20. What leads characters like Tom and Biff to become thieves?
21. Why does Willy habitually lie about his business deals and other matters? What happens eventually to his understanding of his own lies? How is this related to Willy's increasing loss of touch with reality throughout the action of the play?
22. How is Willy's infidelity to his wife related to the other issues in the play? Was that infidelity to blame for Biff’s aimlessness?
23. What is the nature of the relations between business and sports? What does Charley think of sports? Is it significant that Charley succeeds and Willy fails in business? What is Charley's explanation of his own success? How about Charley's son, Bernard? What role does he play? What is his profession? Is he successful? Why? How is his story significant or revealing in reference to the concerns of the play?
24. What is the significance and role of the farm and farming imagery? How does it relate to business and urban life? What does Willy miss about the old days? What has changed?
25. What do you make of the many references to how the Loman house has been closed in by other buildings and, generally, to the contrasts between life out in the open and city life that come up frequently in the play?
26. How do "planned obsolescence," insurance, and "buying on time" (credit) figure into the play? What are Willy's attitudes toward the products (cars, refrigerator, home, etc.) that he buys and uses?
27. What commentary on modern commerce do you think that Arthur Miller means to make with his play? What is the "business world" like?
28. Ultimately, what forces entrapWilly and drive him to self-destruction? Where are those forces to be located? How can they be identified?
29. What is the meaning of Happy's comments at Willy's funeral? How about Linda's final words, "We're free ... We're free ..." Why is the flute music the last sound to be heard?
Assignment 5- Essay: Choose one of the following prompts on which to complete a formal, MLA- formatted analytical essay. Your essay must be saved as a Microsoft Word document and attached to an e-mail sent to me. The e-mail must be received by class time on the date due. If for some reason you do not have access to either Microsoft Word or the internet, you must submit a hard copy of the essay at the beginning of class on the day due. PLEASE NOTE: IT IS PREFERRED THAT YOUR ASSIGNMENT BE SUBMITTED VIA E-MAIL.
1. Avoid generalizations that are unexplained or unsupported. Any statement of analysis you make must be focused on the novel, of significance, and EXPLAINED. Be sure you are referencing the thesis statement.
3. The titles of novels are underlined or in italics
4. Proofread and revise as much as possible for an in-class essay
5. Avoid the following "dead words":
like, sort of, kind of, basically
a lot
you, your, we, us, me, I, we
6. ALWAYS write about the action of a work of fiction in the present tense (as if it is taking place right now)
7. NEVER "float" the quote (a quote should never stand alone as its own sentence. The speaker, significance and occasion must always accompany the quote)
8. This is a formal essay. Take it seriously and avoid slang/ casual expressions
9. Do your own work!
10. Avoid the expressions "attention- getter" or "hook." Instead, consider the first sentence of your essay to be a topic sentence for the paragraph containing your thesis. This means your topic sentence should reference not just the work but present an indication of the direction of your analysis.
11. Your thesis MUST reference the prompt. If you do not, your thesis statement will not satisfy the requirements for this assignment, and, therefore, neither will the essay as a whole.
12. Your thesis statement should be one of analysis. In other words, you are explaining what the work of literature means and not just explaining what happens in it.