Being Blind

When Aristotle talked about his idea of a tragic hero he said “A man doesn't become a hero until he can see the root of his downfall.” In The Death of a Salesman we know that Willy Loman falls right under Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero. To be a tragic hero you had to have one tragic flaw that brought you to your demise. For example in Macbeth it was the desire to have power and the greed that brought him to his death. Loman’s tragic flaw is that he is too blind to see that he and his son are unsuccessful and he cares too much about his reputation to even accept that he is unsuccessful. Not only did these two things bring Willy to his downfall they eventually brought him to his death.

A wonderful example of this clouded vision of being successful is when Willy comes home from a week of selling and tells Linda his earnings. At first Willy claims his earnings were “...five hundred [dollars] in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston” (Miller 35), then after some questions we find out that he only earned 200 dollars all together, which barely covers the Loman family expenses. Willy believed that his reputation was more important than telling the truth so he had to lie to his wife about what he made. He dissembled to his wife, probably the only person still there for him in his life, so he could still seem like a successful businessman to her. This is just one occurrence of his fibs about how much money he made coming back from a business trip, there could have been other times. Willy doesn't understand that being successful in business is not the way to be truly happy. That might have been one of the main reasons he committed suicide when he was fired. He thought that the more money he said he had the more successful he...

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...ole life searching for a man that he thought was sinful. When Javier finally caught this man, he realized that this man did a 180 with his life, and was a better person, so Javier committed suicide because he wasted his whole life searching for this man. Willy is like Javier. Willy spent his whole life thinking that he was a successful man and that his life was perfect then Biff made him realize he was a failure, so he took his own life. In the end all “[Willy] want[ed was] success, but the meaning of that need extends beyond the accumulation of wealth, security, goods, and status”(Jacobson 1).

Works Cited

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1976. Print.

Murphy, Brenda. Critical Insights: Death of a Salesman: By Arthur Miller. Pasadena, CA: Salem, 2010. Print.