Double-Journal
Death of a Salesman
Act I-
The scene in the bedroom in which Happy and Biff are talking
From the perspective of Biff in this scene I can see him attempting to readjust to the situation of living at home. Nothing had changed, but it has. It is his father. There is something in the past that Biff reminisces of with his brother. In the background, he hears his father’s incessant rambling and it seems to frustrate him. He seems to highly respect his mother and somehow see his fathers rambling is hurtful towards her and wants him to stop.
From Happy’s perspective, I can just see him ‘happy’ (no pun intended) to be with his brother again. Although he tries to bring up the subject of how life’s going he seems distracted by Biff’s distraction. He is trying to get to know his brother again and his usual dealings with his father don’t seem to worry him as much. He just accepts things the way the are and does not seem to know why Biff can not do the same.
The scene in which Happy and Biff tell their father Biff is to meet with Mr. Oliver and about the Florida Plan.
From Willy’s perspective, I see him looking upon his too sons with the thought that his elder son might make something of himself yet. You can see throughout the play, that one of Willy’s dreams is for Biff to succeed. Although their constant bickering, you can almost see the look on his face when he is told the news. Willy might be slipping in his old age, but he delighted with their idea of them working together and finally some meaning pours into his otherwise boring lifestyle.
From Biff’s perspective, he believes that he might finally have a way to please his father. Although, through High School he was the one he father was proud of, ever since he flunked math, it seems that Willy’s constant perception of him is that he is a bum. When he sees the look of joy on his father’s face about this news, he carries on as well and loses all sense of reality whether or not it could actually happen.
Act II-
The scene where Willy goes to see Howard Wagner.
From Willy’s perspective, he is nervous beyond belief. He somehow resents the company for putting him in a position in which he has to work on commission after all these years.
Biff never kept a steady job during his young adult life, and did not possess a healthy relationship with anyone that was in his life. As the play progresses the reader sees how much Biff becomes more self- aware. An online source states, “Unlike the other members of his family, Biff grows to recognize that he and his family members consistently deceive themselves, and he fights to escape the vicious cycles of lies.” When Biff returns home it becomes a struggle to keep a healthy relationship with his parents. Once Willy and Biff decide together that Biff will go and ask Bill Oliver for a loan is when the differences between the two characters are truly seen. Biff accepts reality for the first time in his life, and realizes how ridiculous it is to ask Bill Oliver for a loan, when he barely knows the man and worked for him about ten years ago. When Biff meets up with Willy after the ‘meeting’ Biff is talking to his Father and says, “Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!” This quote reveals that Biff recently has just experienced an epiphany, and realizes that what he was doing was making no sense. Biff is escaping the self- deception he was caught in with the rest of his
The first aspect of Willy's character that affected his failure was his pride. Willy's pride caused him to in many situations make very poor and unethical decisions, that affected both himself and his family. An example of this is through the conversation between Willy and Charley “CHARLEY: ‘You want a job?’ WILLY: ‘I got a job, I told you that. [After a slight pause] What the hell are you offering me a job for?’ CHARLEY: ‘Don’t get insulted.’ WILLY: Don’t insult me.”(DOAS: pg x) Willy does not take the offer which is an obvious example of a poor decision. He makes this decision because he sees this generous whole hearted gesture as a kind of pitiful handout that his pride restricts him from taking. By not taking this handout willy puts his self pride infront of
Both sons live with the same concern for Willy as Linda, especially after she explains to them that Willy’s crashes were not accidents. Biff is particularly affected by Willy’s actions as Biff discovered Willy’s affair with one of his coworkers, an action which enraged Biff and caused Biff to refuse to fix his math grade and finish high school. Additionally, Willy’s affair also caused Biff to grow distant from his father, setting the two up for many future arguments such as one in which Willy tells Biff, “stops him with: May you rot in hell if you leave this house!” (129). Not to forget that Willy’s suicide was originally meant to spite Biff as Willy believed his funeral would be grand, claiming “He’ll see what I am, Ben! He’s in for a shock, that boy!” (126)--this being a tragic twist of dramatic irony. This trauma and strife brought upon Biff leads him into a great deal of hardship, never having had a job or settled down. Willy causes Biff to believe himself a failure, and Biff is dragged into Willy’s world of suffering where Biff cannot attain success in the face of his father’s high
The first part of Willie's world is his job. Willie is a salesman for a large company in New York. Willie's self-image and much of his self-worth are based in his job. In his own mind he is still as he used to be, well known and well respected among the clientele in the New England area. Things have changed though and the people Willie once knew in the business are no longer there and he no longer has the connections he once had. His inability to cope with and adapt to this changing business has caused, among other things, a loss in pay. Willie has lost his competitive edge, and with it his feeling of self worth and identity.
Loss of respect can ruin a relationship. Biff left town for many reasons, but one important one had to do with Willy cheating on his wife. During a flashback in the play, Willy is in a room with a woman when Biff knocks on the door. The woman was actually in the washroom as Biff came in, but came out before Biff left. Biff saw the woman and knew that his father was not being loyal to his mother.
all father to have a son who emulates their successful aspects and to carry these traits into the preceding generations. However, Biff knows that h...
Throughout his life, Willy has been telling other people and himself lies about his success at his job and about his and his son´s achievements. He tells everyone that he is well liked and that all his customers would recognize him when he came into a store but in fact he is not earning any money at all and he even has to borrow it from a friend. Linda knows that her husband is not earning any money and that he is borrowing 50 $ from a friend so that it at least seems like he had success in the past week. In my opinion this is the case because Willy always tries to achieve things which are unreachable for him and as said at the end of the tragedy he has different skills but none of them had anything to do with selling. Even when biff tells him that their life is a failure and that he has no success at all and when the truth is really immense, he lies, claiming that he is wrong.
is a perfect symbol for society in the play. Biff knows his father has problems,
When Biff was going to see Willy, he was going to ask for help because he teacher failed him in math, because of this Biff wouldn’t graduate high school. All Biff would’ve had to do to pass the class is to go to summer school and retake the class. But because Biff found his father with another woman, he began to resent him. Biff begins to think that his father is nothing but a liar, that everything that he has ever told him is false. When Biff is arguing with Willy after discovering the woman Biff says that Willy is “fake! You phony little fake! You fake!” (Miller, 121). Biff begins to disobey everything that Willy tells him to do, so he purposely didn’t go to summer school. Because of the affair Biff was determined to defy his father so he no longer gave any effort in his life, becoming a homeless worker.
Biff’s story was told in an honest way because he couldn’t deal with lies anymore. His endurance with all the cover-ups was over. He honestly admitted that his father’s job has been on the downside and implicitly agreed it was a suicide, but we still see his respect for his deceased father because Biff only vague...
At the beginning of the play it is evident that he cannot determine the realities of life, and so he repeatedly contradicts himself to establish that his conclusion is correct and opinion accepted. These numerous contradictions demonstrate that Willy is perturbed of the possibility that negative judgements may come from others. Willy strongly believes that “personality always wins” and tells his sons that they should “be liked and (they) will never want”. In one of Willy’s flashbacks he recalls the time when his sons and him were outside cleaning their Chevy. Willy informs Biff and Happy the success of his business trips and how everyone residing in Boston adores him. He mentions that due to the admiration of people he does not even have to wait in lines. He ultimately teaches his sons that being liked by others is the way to fulfilling one’s life and removing your worries. These ideals, that one does not need to work for success, demonstrate Willy’s deluded belief of achieving a prosperous life from the admiration and acceptance of others. This ultimately proves to be a false ideology during his funeral, when an insufficient amount of people arrive. Willy constantly attempts to obtain other’s acceptance through his false tales that depict him as a strong, successful man. In the past, he attempts to lie to his wife, Linda, about the amount of wealth he has attained during his
Biff is tired of all the lies that the family tells to appear like they are something they are not. In Act II, Biff tells Willy, “No, you’re going to hear the truth-what you are and what I am! …We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house.” Biff then tells his family that he was in jail for three months for stealing a suit and that he spent his life stealing himself out of every good job. When Willy asked whose fault it is, Biff states, “Yours, you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody” (Miller, 1074). This shows how each character wanted the other character to love them yet to receive love from the other one they felt they had to be something they really were
Growing up, Willy doted on Biff the most, which reflects the way his own father doted on his older brother Ben. Their father-son relationship was strong until the incident with The Woman caused a rift to grow between them. Willy feared seeing his son due to the chance of being exposed, and Biff did not want to be reminded of his father’s betrayal. However, near the end of the play, Biff and Willy had a heart to heart which seemingly did some repair work on their relationship. Biff grew to forgive his father and confessed that he loved him despite their past. He experienced growth through the events of the story, making him another candidate for the
When Willy was young, he had met a man named Dave Singleman who was so well-liked that he was able to make a living simply by staying in his hotel room and telephoning buyers. When Dave Singleman died, buyers and salesmen from all over the country came to his funeral. This is what Willy has been trying to emulate his entire life. Willy's need to feel well-liked is so strong that he often makes up lies about his popularity and success. At times, Willy even believes these lies himself. At one point in the play, Willy tells his family of how well-liked he is in all of his towns and how vital he is to New England. Later, however, he tells Linda that no one remembers him and that the people laugh at him behind his back. As this demonstrates, Willy's need to feel well-liked also causes him to become intensely paranoid. When his son, Biff, for example, is trying to explain why he cannot become successful, Willy believes that Biff is just trying to spite him. Unfortunately, Willy never realizes that his values are flawed. As Biff points out at the end of the play, "he had the wrong dreams."
That kind of favoritism has a profound effect on a child, in order to be acknowledged by his father, Happy believes he must become Willy’s version of success by acquiring wealth and popularity. Happy has been living his entire life in a way that he believes will bring him attention from his father, yet his father ignores him and he becomes more miserable that if he had gone his own way. When a father chooses to favor upon one son over another, the father-son relationship occurs as well as in the son’s life. Within this relationship, the responsibility of the father is to provide values, a role model and leadership for his sons. In almost every family, the sons will look to their father as role model and a hero, which in this case Biff does but Happy does not. It is in the father’s best interest to use this opportunity to give these qualities and allow his sons to become responsible