Death of a Salesman was a powerful play, written by Arthur Miller, which was produced in 1949. He establishes a serious tone towards his subject. Also, Miller sets an ambiguous attitude towards the audience.
Miller established a very serious tone about the relationship between the father, Willy, and his son, Biff. Miller feels that a father should always be loved. However, Willy has filled his son with false values, emphasizing flashy success and personal popularity, like being star quarterback for his football team, at the cost of real effort and personal integrity, like when Biff flunked his math exam. He even taught Biff to steal, without even realizing it. “Willy:...[Biff] Go right over to where they’re building the apartment house and get some sand...Charley: Listen, if they steal any more from that building the watchman’ll put the cops on them!...Willy: You shoulda seen the lumber they brought home last week...';(50). As one can see, Willy is almost encouraging Biff to steal in order to make a new stoop. However, when Willy finds out Biff has been stealing other things, like the school’s football, he seems shocked. “Willy: What is he stealing?...Why is he stealing? What did I tell him? I never in my life told him anything but decent things.';(40). Because of the lack of morals, Willy had made it extremely difficult for Biff to love him, especially when he caught him with a women other than his mother. Nevertheless, he always loved his father, even when he totally ignored him. “Biff, crying, broken: Will you let me go, for Christ’s Sake?...Willy, astonished, elevated: Isn’t that-isn’t that remarkable? Biff-he liked me!...Happy, deeply moved: Always did, Pop';(133). When Biff was crying, it showed that he still loved his father, even though Willy is making it hard for him to live his own life. Happy’s quote shows that Biff always loved his father. As a result, Miller feels that no matter what circumstances, a son should always love his father.
Miller set an ambiguous tone towards his audience. The audience must chose whether they pity or scorn Willy’s actions. For example, when Willy committed suicide, one can pity him because killing himself could have been an act of love for his family. Since he saw himself as an inadequate husband and father, Willy felt that his family would be better off without him in their lives. Also, by killing himself, his family would reap the life insurance benefits from his death for his family.
support is a pathetic effort to protect his identity. Linda will never admit to herself,
Miller’s use of personification and symbolism in the book shows the situational irony that surrounds Willy. This highlights the overall message of blind faith towards the American Dream. The major case of irony in the book is Willy’s blind faith in the American Dream. This belief is that if one is well-liked, they will become successful. The truth is actually completely opposite. The real belief is that if one works hard, with no regard to how well liked they are, they will be successful. This relationship is shown between Willy and his neighbor Charley. While Willy believes likability is the only way to success, Charley works hard and does not care how people think of him. Through his hard work, Charley started his own business, and is now very successful. Willy, however, ends up getti...
In the course of the play, Willy Loman is displayed as an adolescent who has not taken a grip on life. When parenting his children, Willy does not act as a father figure. He acts as if he is one of the boys who do not discipline his children. Because of this, Happy and Biff have nothing to strive for in life. Willy yearns for attention and he obtains this by bragging about how popular and athletic his sons are in comparison to his neighbor, Charley’s son, Bernard. “When this game is over, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face. They’ll be calling him another Red Grange. Twenty-five thousand a year” (Page 63). In this line, Willy is showing off to Charley that Biff’s athletics will get him somewhere in life, while Bernard’s classwork and lack of social skills will never give him real world experience. Willy believes that hard work and dedication will never pay off “because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.” (Page 22) In sum, Willy Loman believes that living in the momen...
Willy Loman becomes incredibly involved in work-related matters, instead of the happiness surrounding his family life. He discourages Biff to take his own path, and instead, nearly forces him to become a salesman, in hopes that Biff will be more successful than he turned out to be. Willy tells Biff that his dreams will “cut down (his) life…!” Willy cannot simply hope for Biff and Happy to attain satisfaction in life, which is the element that Willy misses. He is so consumed by the idea of success that he had not once stopped to reflect on being a good father or loving his wife. Having an affair was one of his main problems-he could not put enough love into his family, so he put it anywhere else he could. He visited his mistress on business ventures, which is the only aspect of his life he truly appreciated. Therefore, his home life became full of lies, Biff saying that they “never told the truth for ten minutes.” Miller is, again, critiquing American households, since their typical values revolve more around money and presentation than a loving, kind, and caring home. Willy had a family who loved him, but he neglected to notice this, which lead to his unhappiness. Never placing any type of value of love and kindness can cause a person to become cold and bitter, which is exactly what Willy became. He may have avoided suicide if he had realized the love and care he could have been surrounded
BANG! Your father is dead. Within a few seconds, although he attempted many times, your father dies. He gave up. All the fights, all the disrespect, and all the struggles are behind you. However, all the hope, all the passion, and all the love is still there. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the main conflict is between Willy Lowman and his son Biff. Most of their struggles are based on disrespect; however, much of the tension throughout the play is also caused by the act of giving up.
During most father-son relationships, there are certain times where the father wants to become more of a "player" in his son’s life than his son believes is necessary. The reasons for this are numerous and can be demonstrated in different ways. Miller is able to give an example of this behavior through the actions of Willy Loman. When Biff comes home to recollect himself, Willy perceives it as failure. Since Willy desperately wants his oldest son, Biff, to succeed in every way possible, he tries to take matters into his own hands. "I’ll get him a job selling. He could be big in no time" (16). The reason that Biff came home is to find out what he wants in life. Because Willy gets in the way, matters become more complicated. Partly due to Willy’s persistence in Biff’s life, they have conflicting ideas as to what the American dream is. Willy believes that working on the road by selling is the greatest job a man could have (81). Biff, however, feels the most inspiring job a man could have is working outdoors (22).
Happy Loman has grown up to be a well-adjusted man of society. He has developed from a follower to a potentially successful businessman. Throughout his childhood, Happy always had to settle for second fiddle. Willy, his father, always seems to focus all his attention on Happy's older brother Biff. The household conversation would constantly be about how Biff is going to be a phenomenal football star, how Biff will be attending the University of Virginia and be the big man on campus, how Biff is so adulated among his friends and peers, and so on. Young Happy was always in Biff's shadow, always competing for his father's attention but failing each time. Happy would resort to such antics as laying on his back and pedaling his feet backwards to capture his father's attention but to no avail. Willy would continue to not take notice of his younger son and maintain his attention on other matters that he thought were of greater importance. Growing up under these conditions is what motivated Happy to be the man he is today.
Willy Loman receives a deserving punishment for many reasons, but the lesson he leaves behind to his sons is one of the most everlasting to his family. Field in his article claims “what he has taught them does not look to him like what he had wanted them to learn” (21), but Willy’s failure is that Biff and Happy have learned exactly what he has taught them their whole lives. Much of the conflict stems from their similarities rather than their differences. Much of the contradictory nature of Willy’s own thoughts are the same as that of Biff’s. For instance when Biff catches Willy with another woman, he is furious with his father shouting, “You fake! You phony little fake!”(2. 745), but even though Biff is angry with his father h...
Willy Loman’s feelings of alienation and loneliness are direct psychological results of his interaction with society and the conditions that are found within it. Although, he does not necessarily have the ability or allow himself to have the ability to define his feelings as such, they are still very much a part of his everyday existence. This is evident in his constant bragging and attempted compensation. He does not feel that he is truly a part of society. Indeed, he is not. Miller himself seems to be saying that this is not necessarily a bad thing; this society is not that wonderful. Yet Willy still yearns to be like his brother, Ben, and the other men he sees making up the work force. He desperately wants to command respect and be a part of the group. Although usually he just goes about his business as best he can, he does at times admit his feelings:
While Willy blames himself for his failure in achieving the American Dream, Patricia Hamilton (Leroy’s wife) blames her husband for his failure. This aspect of failure in Miller’s characters can be connected to Miller’s father’s failure, as Miller often harbored some form of resentment towards him. The reality of his father withdrawing from his failures as a businessman led Miller to create the figure of a failed father. This figure became one of Miller’s most significant roles that he would characterize in his plays, particularly within his character Willy Loman whose failure is criticized by him and others, and is more keenly seen by
Death of a Salesman swept the award field in 1949, winning the Drama Critics' Circle award, the Tony, Theatre Club, and Front Page awards, as well as the much-coveted Pulitzer Prize. Road companies took it on tour. European productions in translations played to full houses. The printed edition was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and set a sales record for plays in book form. The movie rights were snapped up, and for months it was the most popular play for college and amateur productions. In fact, Salesman was a triumph that Miller has not been able to repeat - whatever the success or the true merit of his later work.
“Death of a Salesman” written by Arthur Miller in 1948 attempts to give the audience an unusual glimpse into the mind of a Willy Loman, a mercurial 60-year-old salesman, who through his endeavor to be “worth something”, finds himself struggling to endure the competitive capitalist world in which he is engulfed. Arthur Miller uses various theatrical techniques to gradually strip the protagonist down one layer at a time, each layer revealing another truth about his distorted past. By doing this, Miller succeeds in finally exposing a reasonable justification for Willy’s current state of mind. These techniques are essential to the play, as it is only through this development that Willy can realistically be driven to motives of suicide.
In the original 1949 play of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller was the American playwright. Death of a Salesman was a tragic play that presents a story about a salesman named Willy who believes that personality and being “well-liked” will achieve his American Dream. The play premiered on February 10, 1949 at the Morosco Theatre in Manhattan, New York (Avery). Miller’s play reflected on his relationship with uncle, Manny Newman who was also a salesman like the protagonist of the story and two sons who he took great pride on (Tierney). Through his characterization of Willy and Biff Loman, Miller presents contrasting (or surprising similar) illustra...
Miller’s Willy shows many times that his idea of success goes no deeper than the superficial by teaching his sons the wrong path to a successful life. When Biff was in high school, Willy had already started to teach his son the false values in which he believed. When Willy found out Biff had stolen a football and was caught by his coach, who did not get angry, Willy responded by using the incident as an example of the importance of his philosophy.
He wrote Death of a Salesman in 1948 in a small Connecticut studio. The play took place in the great depression where a struggling business man tried to provide for his family. He has been working for years and is becoming very tired and crazy. He dies a sudden death in the end and he never completes the dream he wanted to as a salesman.