Universal Statement: The American Dream is largely a misconception.
Intro: In Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willy, a businessman, contemplates his end during two days of reflection upon his life.
Thesis: Willy’s abandonment as a child leads him to believe that likeability leads to success, which in turn leads to love; this cycle to him is the key to the American Dream, but this misunderstanding leads him to his inevitable failure.
Mapping Statement 1: Willy’s abandonment by his father and brother makes him determined to set Biff on a successful course, which he believes stems from likeability, athleticism, and respectability.
Mapping Statement 2: The cycle Willy discovers from Dave Singleman leads Willy to become consumed with becoming
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Willy has this conviction that personality trumps all when it comes to success based upon salesman Dave Singleman. Dave Singleman’s successful career is the spark that lit the fire of Willy’s consumption with becoming likeable and loved.
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Topic Sentence 3: Willy views accomplishing the cycle as a business deal; once he accomplishes being well-liked, successful and loved, it points him to his inevitable end.
Context: Willy is planting a garden whilst discussing his life insurance policy with Ben. Willy wants to cash on the policy to help Biff in his journey to success.
Quote: “A man can’t go out the way he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something… Remember, it’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar proposition.” (125)
Analyze: Willy cannot leave the physical earth leaving himself and his family broke. Willy needs to become a success. Since Willy was fired, he has to make money a different way. His solution is cashing his insurance policy. Although, Willy knows that he has to die in a specific way to cash the policy. Also, Willy will not die until he has fulfilled being likeable and loved on top of the success that the policy will
After seeing both his father and brother find success, Willy attempts to prove himself to his family by chasing after his own version of the American dream. Willy grows up in the “wild prosperity of the 1920’s” when rags-to-riches tales inspire everybody, making them believe that “achieving material success [is] God’s intention for humankind (Abbotson, Criticism by Bloom). Willy’s father, a “very great” and “wildhearted man,” made a living traveling and selling flutes, making “more in a week than a man like [Willy] could make in a lifetime” (Miller 34). Even though Willy barely knew his dad, he built him u...
This relationship is shown between Willy and his neighbor Charley. While Willy believes likability is the only way to succeed, 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 getting fired from his job as a salesman.... ... middle of paper ...
It is stated by Standage that, “Sandage believes Willy Loman was a success. But the message of the play, he says, is that “if you level off, you have to give up. You might as well not live”” (Baird 25). This is quite ironic because all Willy does is push to be successful and he when he can’t he puts expects his son’s to follow through so he gives up. He constantly reminds them, “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead” (Miller 67). This is also ironic because Willy is the man who creates personal interest in the business world, but when everyone passes away he is left with nothing but the past to remember. This false reality that Willy creates for Biff brings on the conflicts between the father and son duo due to the fact that Biff fails as a result of the way he was raised. So by the time Biff goes to interview for his first job he thinks that his success will come with no effort
Willy Loman is a 60 year old senile salesman who desperately wants to be a successful salesman; however, his ideas about the ways in which one goes about achieving this are very much misguided, just as his morals are. He believes that popularity and good looks are the key to achieving the American dream, rather than hard work and dedication. He not only lives his entire life by this code, but instills his delusional beliefs in his two sons Biff and Happy. As a result, his sons experience similar failures in their adult lives. Willy led a life of illusion, lies and regret which not only ruined his life, but gad a negative impact on the lives of family as well.
He believes that he is well-liked and respected by everyone, which is not true. Willy's pride leads to his downfall, as he cannot accept that he is not successful and that his dream is unattainable. Finally, the illusion of Willy's life that resulted from him dreaming the wrong dream ends up in his tragic suicide and the destruction of his family. Willy's dream creates an illusion of a perfect life, which is not true.
Willy is a multi-faceted character which Miller has portrayed a deep problem with sociological and psychological causes and done so with disturbing reality. In another time or another place Willy might have been successful and kept his Sanity, but as he grew up, society's values changed and he was left out in the cold. His foolish pride, bad judgment and his disloyalty are also at fault for his tragic end and the fact that he did not die the death of a salesman.
In brief, it is apparent that Willy’s own actions led to not only his own demise, but his children’s as well. The salesman tragically misinterpreted the American Dream for only the superficial qualities of beauty, likeability and prosperity. Perhaps if Willy had been more focused on the truth of a person’s character, rather than purely physical aspects, his family’s struggles and his own suicide could have been avoided. On the whole, Arthur Miller’s play is evidence that the search for any dream or goal is not as easy and the end result may seem. The only way to realize the objective without any despair is the opposite of Willy Loman’s methods: genuineness, perseverance and humility.
Like countless characters in a play, Willy struggles to find who he is. Willy’s expectations for his sons and The Woman become too high for him to handle. Under the pressure to succeed in business, the appearance of things is always more important than the reality, including Willy’s death. The internal and external conflicts aid in developing the character Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
The American dream described in the play can be achievable, but Willy’s ways of achieving that American dream leads him to a failure. According to an article published by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the play builds the idea of American dream that it is harmful and immoral as long as it is based on selfishness and greediness. However, the dream us described realistic when it is achieved on values that ar...
Willy Loman will bring his downfall upon himself as he entices his own disillusions and the bedrock of his values pertaining to success and how one can achieve it. His failure to recognize the fruitless outcome of his own idealism will seal his fated suicide and have a determining effect on the failures of his two sons that when adolescent, idolized their father as a guid...
By the time Willy got to be an old man, his life was in shambles. *One son, Biff, was a hopeless dreamer who wasn’t able to hold on to a job. He could have been successful through an athletic scholarship, but he blew the chance he had to go to school. Happy, the other son, had a job, but was basically all talk, just like Willy. Now near the end of his career as a salesman, Willy realizes his whole life was just a joke, and the hopes he placed in the American Dream were misguided. At the end of the play, his only hope is to leave something for his family, especially for Biff, by taking his own life and leaving his family the insurance money. Through his death, Willy thinks he can achieve success and fulfill his dream.
...y he is so obsessed with trying to attain it. He is the product of his own illusions and of a society that believe that with hard work everything is possible. The reader can understand that Willy’s skewed perspective of the “American Dream” is due to his distortion of his life and the dream that he thinks he lives in everyday.
In the end, he kills himself by crashing his car, hoping to get the life insurance money for his family. He is fervently determined to succeed in his contemporary competitive society. In a conversation with his children about Bernard, he enumerates a few features he presumes are important if one wants to have success. Willy tells his children that Bernard might get the best grades in school, but they will certainly have more success than he will as they are “[.] built like Adonis’s” (Miller 34). Willy assumes that it is necessary to be attractive to become successful.
Willy Loman’s tragic flow leads him to purse the idea that reputation in society has more relevancies in life than knowledge and education to survive in the business. His grand error of wanting recognition drove him crazy and insane and lead to his tragic death. Willy’s hubris makes him feel extremely proud of what he has, when in reality he has no satisfaction with anything in his life. Willy Loman’s sons did not reach his expectations, as a father but he still continued to brag about Biff and Happy in front of Bernard. Willy Loman caused the reader to empathize with him because before his tragic death he did everything he could for his family. Empathy, Hubris , and Willy Loman’s tragic flow all lead him to his death that distend for him the beginning.
As shown in this scene, Willy gains satisfaction from having people remember and love him, because such love would validate Willy’s success. Thus, Willy’s adm...