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Death of A Salesman In the play Death of A Salesman, Arthur Miller displays the successes and failures in the pursuit of the American Dream. Although obviously a victim of the capitalist system, Willy is still an ardent supporter and believer in the American Dream, and in this he is solidly supported by his faithful wife Linda (Fletcher 9). Along with the American Dream and its failure comes a tragic hero, and with that a tragic flaw. Although it is a drama dealing with death and suffering, Death of a Salesman is also about a common man rather then nobility. Willy Loman, the sixty-year-old protagonist, has spent his life in search of happiness and the American Dream. He is a husband, a father, a salesman, and a man desperate to find meaning in his life and pride in himself before it is too late.
He has worked hard for the same company for his entire career, dreaming of being well-liked and of being someone. For Willy, being well-liked equates with success: Be popular and you will not want is his interpretation of the American Dream. He encouraged his sons to be confident and popular and now is attempting to live his life again through his sons. He and his wife are about to make the last payment on their mortgage.
Yet nothing has turned out quite the way he thought it would. Obviously, Death of a Salesman is a criticism of the moral and social standards of contemporary America, not merely a record of the particular plight of one man. And, also obviously, it presents Wily as a victim of the deterioration of the American Dream: , the belief in untrammeled individualism. The word dream is a key word, recurring frequently in the play; and the deterioration of American individualism is traced through the Loman generations in a descending scale, from the Whitman-like exuberance of Willys father, through Ben, through Willy himself, top the empty predatoriness of Happy, who is he admits, compulsively competitive in sex and business for no reason at all (Parker 17).
As one of his neighbors says, Willy is a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back- thats an earthquake. In Death of a Salesman, Miller condemns the American ideal of prosperity, seeing it as something that few can pursue without making dangerous moral compromises. It takes someone with the caliber of a hero to succeed. According to the University of Toronto Quarterly, January, 1966, the tragic hero must be a character neither all good nor all bad whose reversal in fortune is brought on by an error in judgement, a miscalculation which results in his downfall- in effect, a tragic flaw (Parker 21).
Willy has spent his life wandering between illusion and reality. As he now seeks to find out how and why he failed to achieve happiness and success, he takes us through a series of tragic, soul-searching revelations about the life he has lived. Willy Loman, exhausted salesman, does not go back to the past. The past, as in hallucination, comes back to him; not chronologically as in flashback, but dynamically wit inner logic of his erupting volcanic unconscious. In psychiatry we call this the return of the repressed, when a mind breaks under the invasion of primitive impulses no longer capable of compromise with reality (Schneider 52). In the process of his own self-discovery, Willy becomes an archetypal example of the human capacity for self-deception and, through his family quarrels, of the ways in which the flaws of one generation are passed on to the next.
The play itself is a poignant examination of personal and family values struggling against the pull of society's expectations. In the words of G. L. Horton, who reviewed a production starring Hal Holbrook as Willy, audiences dissolve in pity and terror in the Loman family's fall: pity to see so much of hope and good intentions squandered; terror because it is so clear that we are all in the grip of this same fallen world, where loving relationships wither from lies, and fear, and ambition, and enforced silence (Horton 17). Millers view of tragedy, while similar in many respects to Aristotle's, is expressed most clearly in his essay Tragedy and the Common Man. To Miller the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings (Miller 23).
He felt tragedy results from the consequence of a mans total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, from the thrust to learn and to secure a sense of personal dignity, from questioning what has previously been unquestioned. His tragic heroes are those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action, everything is shaken and examined, resulting in the terror and pity of tragedy. Willy Loman's flaw has been variously interpreted as a pitiable blindness to the realities of the American Dream, as the unrealistic hope of a doting father, and the bad luck of a salesman working a tough territory (Perkins 710). The trouble with Willy Loman is that he has tremendously powerful ideals. For instance, if he had not had a very profound sense that his life as lived had left him hollow, he would have died contentedly polishing his car on some Sunday afternoon at a ripe old age. The fact is, he has values.
The fact that they cant be realized is whats driving him mad. Willy lives his life as a contradiction. He suffers from flashbacks and has mental problems in which he is constantly contradicting himself. There is one point in the play where Willy is telling a story about looking at the scenery and opening the windshield and then later in the conversation he says that windshields dont open in the new cars. In another case, Willy is telling Linda how Biff is lazy because he isnt even making $ 35 a week yet; but in the next sentence he says one thing about Biff- he aint lazy. And one last instance is when Willy tells Biff that he better study for regents and then two minutes later he says its okay not to study because he has three scholarships already.
From looking at these three scenarios, it can be seen that Willy is mentally confused and sometimes he does not know whether he is coming or going. He tries his hardest top act sane but even he himself knows that he is not really competent anymore. It is this contradiction, among other things that leads to his downfall in life. The particulars concerning Willys situation also has universal significance. Willy has lived passionately for values to which he is committed, and he comes to find that they are false and inadequate. He has loved his sons with a passion which wanted for them that which would destroy them.
So Willy wreaks havoc on his own life and on that of his sons. The blight of his own confusion is visited upon them. Unaware of what warped his mind and behavior, he commits suicide in a conviction that a legacy of $ 20, 000 is all that is needed to save his beloved but almost equally damaged offspring. Not only is this tragic, but such distorted thinking mimics a very great number of folk in the world today (Clurman 39). He has grown old and will soon vanish without a trace, and he discovers really the vanity of all human endeavors, save perhaps love. A pension would not help him, nor had he come to be famous would it have helped.
Linda says a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man and she cries out Attention must be paid. Inevitably, no matter what heights a man succeeds to, his life is brief and his comprehension finite, while the universe remains infinite and incomprehensible. Willy comes to face the absurdity of life, and it is for this reason that Attention must be paid. Death of a Salesman is a tragedy. It also includes the pursuit of the American Dream.
Willy is one big contradiction, and this contradiction is his downfall. He is a nicer guy then Charley. He is so nice that hes got to end up poor. This makes Charley untroubled and a success, and Willy contradictory, a neurotic, full of love and longing need for admiration and affection, full of a sense of worthlessness and inadequacy and dislocation and a failure. Willy shoots for the moon, but isnt even successful enough to fall among the stars.
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Research essay sample on Death Of A Salesman Pursuit Of The American Dream
