Death of a Salesman (Miller)

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Willy Loman maintains a hard life to raise money for his and his wife's domestic economy. He is also deeply concerned about his adult sons' lives. In addition, Willy himself is about to lose his work and thus opportunities to support the simple life he has built up.

When his situation at times becomes heavy he falls back into exotic daydreaming about how his own father and brother once managed making their fortunes. Events that belong to a vanished mythical past, but are infiltrating and materializing Willy's everyday life; in an imagination his recently dead brother is telling him it's time to set off to the promised land.

The idea of the American dream becomes the straw of life Willy is clinging to, but it has not only managed to distort Willy's perspective on living, it also acts as a barrier to him understanding people and maintaining his own life. His naive faith that everyone can be successful simply taking advantage of one's inherent possibilities throttles Willy's ability to really see life as it is, resulting him not being able to listen nor understand his grown up sons' daily living. In his pride Willy cannot even accept job offers from a close neighbour due to the man's successful business - Willy is simply jealous of him - a solution that would help Willy get along with life.

The American Dream has imprisoned Willy from which he isn't able to wake up; he has to give up his life to free himself from the burden of it, to be able to live. In this paradoxical sense he is a true existentialist. Willy Loman has discovered the meaninglessness of living in a world without reason; God didn't define the american dream – man did. Willy do finally reveal that there isn't any focus in life, there is nothing; God is dead and man is continuously inventing himself – e.g. The American Dream - to endure the fact that there is no point go on living and that man is doomed to die.


ABANDONMENT

I realize Biff's situation with clarity the moment the young man is trying telling his father that he has stolen a pen from an employer at an interview that didn't take place.

Biff has grown up with a man who throughout his life has been somewhere else than at present in his son's life. When Biff is a child his father Willy Loman is travelling around in business. Back home, he is busy with his own dreams about the boy's future. He doesn't really see Biff. He is just talking about the world and looking at it from his own perspective. Willy Loman doesn't really listen to what the boy says.

Biff himself is desperately trying to get in touch with the imaginary character of himself his father continuously is creating. But the puppet becomes a ballast to him, causing him losing contact with himself. This exclusion leaves Biff rootless in the world and he fails in creating something permanent.

At an important turning point in Biff's tender age, when he really needs his father's support, in a most important matter concerning studies, Biff figures out his father's illusions. It makes Biff completely lose faith in himself and his future. The mistress Willy is hiding in the bathroom is a symbolic view of reality he ought to have show his sons, and in someway tried to explain, from the very start of their lives. However, his father has replaced those facts of existence with his own dreams that consume his son and disaffect the boy from life.

This loss of truth is the very circumstance through Willy Loman's sons are trying to find their way in life; Happy has found his path by balancing on lying, but Biff can't manage navigating at all, he want to do the right thing but the abandonment his father has cause him is a psychological weight he isn’t able to free himself from. We can just hope his father's death will give Biff time to find peace and strength to continue stand up for authenticity and Happy reasons to start minimize his double-dealing.


BETRAYAL

I just wonder how it's possible go on living under the weight of a continuous betrayal manners, as I think you mean Willy does, daily throughout his whole life.

The play is completely soaked with betrayals in your point of view, maybe that's why this rubber tube appear once a while as an enigma to everyone, actors and audience, Gods and fairies, as life itself is a closed book, a deep secret.

Or, are there any persons in life not doing wrong; would there be any life at all if errors didn’t exist? Doesn't life itself need this panorama of normally defected people; we all need to combat daily living with a little lie here and a nice betrayal over there, just to figure out the way of living, just to learn about ourselves and the one's next to us.

Well, if everything and everyone was clean, without spots of wrong, from the very beginning of life, I wouldn't have spending time doing this note, it would have been completely useless, without sense. Without themes of deep betrayals the play "Death of a salesman" never had been written.

We really need Willy Loman's (low man!) betrayals to perceive or mirror ourselves to get to know ourselves and one another the better; the moment we see and understand Willy we get in touch with ourselves and we become reborn. The author Arthur Miller has created the Jesus of the 20th century; finally we have a character who we entirely can identify us with.