Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman ,a play by Arthur Miller, produced and published in 1949, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Willy Loman , a bewildered , well-intentioned , unsuccessful traveling salesman aged 63, is pleased by the return home for a visit of his sons Biff and Happy, but they are upset by his peculiar behavior and hallucinatory conversations with figures of a happier past , and they worry about the effect on Linda, their compassionate mother , who loves his husband and recognizes that his actions stem from the disparity of his “massive dreams” and a disappointing reality.

Wanting desperately to be successful and well liked, Willy had fallen victim to the false values of society and cannot cope

With her failure or that of Biff, once a high-school football hero, now moody and jobless. Linda persuades Biff to try for a good job to make his father proud , but when, with Happy , he meets his father in the restaurant where they intend to treat him to a celebration, Biff tells the truth about his ill-fated appointment and destroys Willy's hopes.

In confusion Willy goes to the washroom and relives the awful time when Biff desperately needing his help , traveled to Boston, where he discovered him with his mistress. Realizing his responsibility for Biff's aimlessness and disillusionment , Willy stumbles back to the table , only to find that the boys have deserted him for two prostitutes.

Humiliated and stunned , he returns home , fights with Biff , and then is touched by Biff's tears of concern and love .In a final hallucinatory talk with his brother Ben, once a successful self-made man, Willy decides on suicide to provide Biff with insurance money. At the funeral , which none of his business acquaintances attend , a friend points out: ”Willy was a salesman …a man …riding on a smile and a shoeshine…Nobody durst blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy.It comes with the territory.”

As an artist, Miller learned his art from two great masters of the drama: Shakespeare and Ibsen. From Shakespeare he learned the pattern of tragedy with the hero torn between illusion and reality , between an ideal and hard facts, the technique of giving dramatic body to ideas and imaginary happenings. From Ibsen he took over the interest in social problems and the constructions of the play in such a way as to study the psychological implications of these social problems on the human individual. Also from Ibsen he borrowed the idea of the well-made play with social implications and the specific blend of melodrama and tragedy.

Meaning “Death of a Salesman” to be both a realistic psychological drama and a modern version of tragedy , he organized his material in such a way to make audiences aware of the collapse of such concepts as family , parent-children relationships, moral ideas, under the pressure of a system which substituted clichés for ideals and material success for moral achievement. On the other hand the playwright meant to give them a sense of participation in a major humanly significant conflict between idealism and practical purposes.

The conflict between father and son is realized not only through their words but also through physical action and stage movement -the personages move about, run up and down the stairs, fight each other-.When Willy remains alone , external action is replaced by inner tension and conflict .Running side by side, this realistic plane , with its natural patterns of speech and colloquialism, and the symbolic on, on which Willy appears as the Father-figure , ready to lay down his life for his family , are achieved with different techniques. The latter plane is built with the help of themes and patterns , recalling Shakespearean tragedies , with the help of modern , theatrical devices :”flashback, lighting, music and, last but not least , by the rhythm of speech. One can note for instance the presence of the Shakespearean theme of human identity. Biff discovers who is he; knowing who he is helps him become himself .Biff and Willy fight over their identity. Biff says:” I'm a dime a dozen” and Willy says : “I'm Willy Loman.” The motif of dream and reality , of close space and open space are also skillfully blended into the conversation. Biff says : “Take your phony dream and burn it “, the metaphor suggesting the concreteness of Willy's dream and Willy answers with another metaphor : “The door of your life is wide open!,” suggesting that there is for Biff a future which he sees as liberation through money and success.Biff himself means something else when he speaks of “outside “and the sun which he suddenly saw in the middle of that office building .For him , liberation meant neither success, nor money , but only time to sit and smoke a cigarette , to work and to eat. The irreconcilable nature of their position is thus suggested.

In a world in which society plays the role of destiny , forcing man to worship it or be destroyed , the common man is the true hero and his name is Loman (Low Man)signifies his status.