Family influences all aspects of one’s life, including, but not limited to, behavior, personality, values, and beliefs, and this holds true when analyzing Willy Loman from the play Death of a Salesman. Both Willy’s past family life and his present family lead him down certain paths that ultimately end in failure. Despite the fact that some believe Willy’s failure stemmed from his inability to be satisfied, what predominantly influenced him were his deep ties between his family and self worth. Like many American citizens, Willy had the obsession of providing for his family: “financial prosperity is simply the visible sign that he is a good provider for his family” (Miller 33). The typical “man of the household” served the sole purpose of …show more content…
The popularity of the salesman job in pursuit of the American Dream can also be seen in The Great Gatsby, for Nick Carraway moves across the country to become a bond salesman in New York City in search of his American Dream. Like Carraway, Willy Loman could have also been blindly following the trend of the times and became a salesman because that was what everyone was doing. Using this analogy, however, does not account for the specific motives in choosing this profession. When looking deeper into Willy’s past through the memory scenes provided in Death of a Salesman, we can see that he deeply cares about his family and providing for them. His motives are different from Carraways in that he does not simply become a salesman because of the trend, he becomes a salesman in hopes that he will finally make his family …show more content…
Instead of looking for happiness in what he had, Willy continually found the faults in his life. He focused on how he was not making a large amount of money, how he was not as successful as other, instead of the family that was present for him. This, however, is invalid because Willy was not dissatisfied with his success, he was just worried that he did not provide enough for his family. His outburst relating to his income was not caused by his desire to make more money, but his desire to be the best father he could possibly
The saying, like father like son, is typically praise, but In The Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, it is evident that it may have a negative effect on a man’s life. In the play, Happy Loman is similar to his father, Willy, in that he is stuck in his dream world, has a false sense of confidence, and is desperate for attention. This resemblance is portrayed in the play through different instances where Happy and Willy demonstrate these characteristics in nearly identical ways. Happy’s purpose in the play is to resemble a young version of his father, and to show how Willy’s “legacy” has been passed on.
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...
Willy is the head of the household. For the most part everyone looks up to him. Because of him the family lives in the self-deception that they do. His two sons were taught “it’s about whom you know, not what you do”. This shows them to never really work hard, just like Willy did his whole life. He tells them popularity is everything.
Many dilemmas throughout the recent decades are repercussions of an individual's foibles. Arthur Miller represents this problem in society within the actions of Willy Loman in his modern play Death of a Salesman. In this controversial play, Willy is a despicable hero who imposes his false value system upon his family and himself because of his own rueful nature, which is akin to an everyman. This personality was described by Arthur Miller himself who "Believe[s] that the common man is as apt a subject for a tragedy in its highest sense as kings were" (Tragedy 1).
It is human nature for a person to desire to better understand themselves and to acquire a distinct identity. People look to what is simple and familiar when trying to gain a sense of individuality. These identifiers can be found in the jobs people perform, the relationships they share, and any other type of activity that takes place in their daily life. It is also in this search for understanding that can cause the relationships a person shares, such as with close family and friends, to be strained. Willy Loman, the leading character in the play Death of a Salesman attempts to comprehend his place in society, but at the same time he loses the one thing that is his source for identification-his family.
Willy Loman was an unsettled soul. With vivid, frequent flashbacks, he suffered an inability to progress through the future productively. His thoughts about the inability to obtain his American dream haunted him, and affected his life negatively. Willy worked hard for a living, and expected the same from his kin. His son, Biff worked hard, but Willy believed that Biff’s work did not build dignity. Willy’s youngest son, Happy, followed in his father’s footsteps in sales as well as the promiscuous behaviors.
In many literary works, family relationships are the key to the plot. Through a family’s interaction with one another, the reader is able decipher the conflicts of the story. Within a literary family, various characters play different roles in each other’s lives. These are usually people that are emotionally and physically connected in one way or another. They can be brother and sister, mother and daughter, or in this case, father and son. In the Arthur Miller’s novel, Death of A Salesman, the interaction between Willy Loman and his sons, Happy and Biff, allows Miller to comment on father-son relationships and the conflicts that arise from them.
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.
Willy's main flaw is his foolish pride, this it what makes him a tragic hero. Yet there are many facets to his personality that contribute to the state he and the family are in during the play. His upbringing of the boys is one major issue, he raised them with the notion that if one is well-liked, he need not worry about qualifications, he believed that if his boys were popular they would come out on top. Sadly, he doesn't realize that the only way an ordinary person can get rich is through work (represented by Bernard) or through luck and good timing (Ben), and Willy missed the boat when it came to ...
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.
After losing his job and ability to provide for himself, Willy saw that as the worst possible outcome for his life and decided to commit suicide. His ultimate downfall reveals many things about the nature of the quest for the American Dream such as the fact that it is not possible for everyone to reach, and even if you strive for it your entire “Charley: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he dont tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a Shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”(Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman). Charleys interpretation of Willy being amongst the dreamers of the American people establish Willy as a true tragic hero, a victim of the American society and himself. “LINDA: Why didn’t anyone come? CHARLEY: It was a very nice funeral. LINDA: But where were all the people he knew? Maybe they blame him.”(Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman). After Willy’s death, Linda notices no one showed up to Willy’s funeral. The reason being that Willy had no friends which reveals a lot. Although he worked his whole life on being well-liked and harnessing a good reputation, in the end he is
The play, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller is about a dysfunctional family that continually struggles with a multitude of problems. These problems range from physical to emotional and to psychological. The root of these problems was due to psychological trauma that had resulted from the broken psyche of one of the main characters, Willy Loman. Willy Loman’s psyche was broken at a young due to abandonment issues which developed from both Willy’s father and brother walking out on him when he was still a child. This had left Willy without any proper male role model he could look up to. As well as no proper male role model he had developed a philosophy that an individual should be well-liked by all in order to be successful. This pseudo philosophy
Willy Loman equates success as a human being with success in the business world. When Willy was a young man, he heard of a salesman who could "pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, make his living." (81) This salesman is Willy's inspiration; someday to be so respected and so well known that he can still provide for his family, even at an old age. Of course, Willy is no good at being a salesman because his heart isn't in it. The only time Willy puts his heart into anything is when he works with his hands, and his son, Biff, comes to realize this. "There's more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made." (138) Willy never comes to the realization that it is not being a salesman that he cares about, but rather being well known and, perhaps more importan...
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.