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Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 30, 2020 • ( 0 )

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its literary achievement, as such, but is, rather, the impact which it has had on spectators, both in America and abroad. The influence of this drama, first performed in 1949, continues to grow in World Theatre. For it articulates, in language which can be appreciated by popular audiences, certain new dimensions of the human dilemma.

—Esther Merle Jackson, “ Death of a Salesman : Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre”

It can be argued that the Great American Novel—that always elusive imaginative summation of the American experience—became the Great American Drama in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Miller’s masterpiece forms the defining myth of the American family and the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the play’s only rival in American literature in expressing the tragic side of the American myth of success and the ill-fated American dreamers. A landmark and cornerstone 20th-century drama, Death of a Salesman is crucial in the history of American theater in presenting on stage an archetypal family drama that is simultaneously intimate and representative, social and psychological, realistic and expressionistic. Critic Lois Gordon has called it “the major American drama of the 1940s” that “remains unequalled in its brilliant and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its richness of visual and verbal texture, and its wide range of emotional impact.” Miller’s play, perhaps more than any other, established American drama as the decisive arena for addressing the key questions of American identity and social and moral values, while pioneering methods of expression that liberated American theater. The drama about the life and death of salesman Willy Loman is both thoroughly local in capturing a particular time and place and universal, one of the most popular and adapted American plays worldwide. Willy Loman has become the contemporary Everyman, prompting widespread identification and sympathy. By centering his tragedy on a lower middle-class protagonist—insisting, as he argued in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”—Miller completed the democratization of drama that had begun in the 19th century while setting the terms for a key debate over dramatic genres that has persisted since Death of a Salesman opened in 1949.

Miller’s subjects, themes, and dramatic mission reflect his life experiences, informed by the Great Depression, which he regarded as a “moral catastrophe,” rivaled, in his view, only by the Civil War in its profound impact on American life. Miller was born in 1915, in New York City. His father, who had emigrated from Austria at the age of six, was a successful coat manufacturer, prosperous enough to afford a chauffeur and a large apartment over-looking Central Park. For Miller’s family, an embodiment of the American dream that hard work and drive are rewarded, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything. The business was lost, and the family was forced to move to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in a small frame house that served as the model for the Lomans’ residence. Miller’s father never fully recovered from his business failure, and his mother was often depressed and embittered by the family’s poverty, though both continued to live in hope of an economic recovery to come. For Miller the depression exposed the hollowness and fragility of the American dream of material success and the social injustice inherent in an economic system that created so many blameless casualties. The paradoxes of American success—its stimulation of both dreams and guilt when lost or unrealized, as well as the conflict it created between self-interest and social responsibility—would become dominant themes in Miller’s work. As a high school student Miller was more interested in sports than studies. “Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift , and Rover Boys, ” Miller recalled, “and only verged on literature with some of Dickens. . . . I passed through the public school system unscathed.” After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his job that Miller began reading, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world and his vocation: “A book that changed my life was The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up, I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

In 1934 Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan. There he found a campus engaged by the social issues of the day: “The place was full of speeches, meetings and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues. . . . It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.” At Michigan Miller wrote his first play, despite having seen only two plays years before, to compete for prize money he needed for tuition. Failing in his first attempt he would eventually twice win the Avery Hopwood Award. Winning “made me confident I could go ahead from there. It left me with the belief that the ability to write plays is born into one, and that it is a kind of sport of the mind.” Miller became convinced that “with the exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human could do.” He would embrace the role of the playwright as social conscience and reformer who could help change America, by, as he put it “grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” Two years after graduating in 1938, having moved back to Brooklyn and married his college sweetheart, Miller had completed six plays, all but one of them rejected by producers. The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play examining the ambiguities of success and the money ethic, managed a run of only four performances on Broadway in 1944. Miller went to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, tried his hand at radio scripts, and attempted one more play. “I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.” The play was All My Sons, about a successful manufacturer who sells defective aircraft parts and is made to face the consequences of his crime and his responsibilities. It is Miller’s version of a Henrik Ibsen problem play, linking a family drama to wider social issues. Named one of the top-10 plays of 1947, All My Sons won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award over Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The play’s success allowed Miller to buy property in rural Connecticut where he built a small studio and began work on Death of a Salesman .

This play, subtitled “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,” about the last 24 hours of an aging and failing traveling salesman misguided by the American dream, began, as the playwright recounts in his introduction to his Collected Plays , with an initial image

of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons —a method one might call linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be “brought forward” in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment. . . . I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.

The play took shape by staging the past in the present, not through flashbacks of Willy’s life but by what the playwright called “mobile concurrency of past and present.” Miller recalled beginning

with only one firm piece of knowledge and this was that Loman was to destroy himself. How it would wander before it got to that point I did not know and resolved not to care. I was convinced only that if I could make him remember enough he would kill himself, and the structure of the play was determined by what was needed to draw up his memories like a mass of tangled roots without ends or beginning.

At once realistic in its documentation of American family life and expressionistic in its embodiment of consciousness on stage, Death of a Salesman opens with the 63-year-old Willy Loman’s return to his Brooklyn home, revealing to his worried wife, Linda, that he kept losing control of his car on a selling trip to Boston. Increasingly at the mercy of his memories Willy, in Miller’s analysis, “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Reflecting its protagonist, “The way of telling the tale . . . is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical.” The family’s present—Willy’s increasing mental instability, his failure to earn the commissions he needs to survive, and his disappointment that his sons, Biff and Happy, have failed to live up to expectations—intersects with scenes from the past in which both their dreams and the basis for their disillusionment are exposed. In the present Biff, the onetime star high school athlete with seeming unlimited prospects in his doting father’s estimation, is 34, having returned home from another failed job out west and harboring an unidentified resentment of his father. As Biff confesses, “everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” His brother, Happy, is a deceitful womanizer trapped in a dead-end job who confesses that despite having his own apartment, “a car, and plenty of women . . . still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” The present frustrations of father and sons collide with Willy’s memory when all was youthful promise and family harmony. In a scene in which Biff with the prospect of a college scholarship seems on the brink of attaining all Willy has expected of him, both boys hang on their father’s every word as he exults in his triumphs as a successful salesman:

America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ’cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.

Triumphantly, Willy passes on his secret of success: “Be liked and you will never want.” His advice exposes the fatal fl aw in his life view that defines success by exterior rather than interior values, by appearance and possessions rather than core morals. Even in his confident memory, however, evidence of the undermining of his self-confidence and aspirations occurs as Biff plays with a football he has stolen and father and son ignore the warning of the grind Bernard (who “is liked, but he’s not well liked”) that Biff risks graduating by not studying. Willy’s popularity and prowess as a salesman are undermined by Linda’s calculation of her husband’s declining commissions, prompting Willy to confess that “people don’t seem to take to me.” Invading Willy’s memory is the realization that he is far from the respected and resourceful salesman he has boasted being to his sons as he struggles to meet the payments on the modern appliances that equip the American dream of success. Moreover, to boost his sagging spirits on the road he has been unfaithful to his loving and supportive wife. To protect himself from these hurtful memories Willy is plunged back into the present for a card game with Bernard’s father, Charley. Again the past intrudes in the form of a memory of a rare visit by Willy’s older brother, Ben, who has become rich and whose secrets for success elude Willy. Back in the present Willy is hopeful at Biff’s plan to go see an old employer, Bill Oliver, for the money to start up a Loman Brothers sporting goods line. The act ends with Willy’s memory of Biff’s greatest moment—the high school football championship:

Like a young god. Hercules—something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges standing by? And the buyers I brought, and the cheers when he came out—Loman, Loman, Loman! God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!

The second act shatters all prospects, revealing the full truth that Willy has long evaded about himself and his family in a series of crushing blows. Expecting to trade on his 34 years of loyal service to his employer for a nontraveling, salaried position in New York, Willy is forced to beg for a smaller and smaller salary before he is fired outright, prompting one of the great lines of the play: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” Rejecting out of pride a job offer from Charley, Willy meets his son for dinner where Biff reveals that his get-rich scheme has collapsed. Bill Oliver did not remember who he was, kept him waiting for hours, and resentfully Biff has stolen his fountain pen from his desk. Biff now insists that Willy face the truth—that Biff was only a shipping clerk and that Oliver owes him nothing—but Willy refuses to listen, with his need to believe in his son and the future forcing Biff to manufacture a happier version of his meeting and its outcome. Biff’s anger and resentment over the old family lies about his prospects, however, cause Willy to relive the impetus of Biff’s loss of faith in him in one of the tour de force scenes in modern drama. Biff and Happy’s attempt to pick up two women at the restaurant interconnects with Willy’s memory of Biff’s arrival at Willy’s Boston hotel unannounced. There he discovers a partially dressed woman in his father’s room. Having failed his math class and jeopardized his scholarship, Biff has come to his father for help. Willy’s betrayal of Linda, however, exposes the hollowness of Willy’s moral authority and the disjunction between the dreams Willy sells and its reality:

Willy: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.

Biff: You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!

Willy: I gave you an order!

Biff: Don’t touch me, you—liar!

Willy: Apologize for that!

Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!

Willy’s guilt over the collapse of his son’s belief in him leads him to a final redemptive dream. Returning home, symbolically outside planting seeds, he discusses with Ben his scheme to kill himself for the insurance money as a legacy to his family and a final proof of his worth as a provider of his sons’ success. Before realizing this dream Willy must endure a final assault of truth from Biff who confesses to being nothing more than a thief and a bum, incapable of holding down a job—someone who is, like Willy, a “dime a dozen,” no better than any other hopeless striver: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Biff’s fury explodes into a tearful embrace of his father. After Biff departs upstairs the significance of his words and actions are both realized and lost by the chronic dreamer:

Willy, after a long pause, astonished, elevated Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!

Linda: He loves you, Willy!

Happy ,deeply moved Always did, Pop.

Willy: Oh. Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Plays

Doggedly holding onto the dream of his son’s prospects, sustained by his son’s love, Willy finally sets out in his car to carry out his plan, while the scene shifts to his funeral in which Linda tries to understand her husband’s death, and Charley provides the eulogy:

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 don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a 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 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.

Linda delivers the final, heartbreaking lines over her husband’s grave: “Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free. . . .”

The power and persistence of Death of a Salesman derives from its remarkably intimate view of the dynamic of a family driven by their collective dreams. Critical debate over whether Willy lacks the stature or self-knowledge to qualify as a tragic hero seems beside the point in performance. Few other modern dramas have so powerfully elicited pity and terror in their audiences. Whether Willy is a tragic hero or Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy in any Aristotelian sense, he and his story have become core American myths. Few critics worry over whether Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero, but Gatsby shares with Willy Loman the essential American capacity to dream and to be destroyed by what he dreams. The concluding lines of The Great Gatsby equally serve as a requiem for both men:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Death of a Salesman is that rare thing: a modern play that is both a classic, and a tragedy. Many of the great plays of the twentieth century are comedies, social problem plays, or a combination of the two. Few are tragedies centred on one character who, in a sense, recalls the theatrical tradition that gave us Oedipus, King Lear, and Hamlet.

But how did Miller come to write a modern tragedy? What is Death of a Salesman about, and how should we analyse it? Before we come to these questions, it might be worth briefly recapping the plot of what is, in fact, a fairly simple story.

Death of a Salesman : summary

The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn’t make a sale, he doesn’t get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family’s table. He wants to get a desk job so he doesn’t have to travel around any more: at 62 years of age, he is tired and worn out.

He is married to Linda. Their son, Biff, is in his thirties and usually unemployed, drifting from one temporary job to another, much to Willy’s displeasure. Willy’s younger son, Happy, has a steady job along and his own home, and is therefore a success by Willy’s standards.

However, Happy, despite his name, isn’t happy with the life he has, and would quite like to give up his job and go and work on a ranch out West. Willy, meanwhile, is similarly dreaming, but in his case of the past, rather than the future: he thinks back to when Biff and Happy were small children and Willy was a success as a salesman.

The Lomans’ neighbour, Charley, offers Willy a job to help make ends meet, but Willy starts to reminisce about his recently deceased brother, Uncle Ben, who was an adventurer (and young Willy’s hero). Linda tells her sons to pay their father some respect, even though he isn’t himself a ‘great man’.

It emerges that Willy has been claiming to work as a salesman but has lately been borrowing money as he can’t actually find work. His plan is to take his own life so his family will receive life insurance money and he will be able, with his death, to do what he cannot do for them while alive: provide for them. Biff agrees reluctantly to go back to his former boss and ask for a job so he can contribute to the family housekeeping.

Meanwhile, Willy asks his boss, Howard, for his desk job and an advance on his next pay packet, but Howard sacks Willy. Willy then goes to Charley and asks for a loan. That night, at dinner, Willy and Biff argue (Biff failed to get his own former job back when his old boss didn’t even recognise him), and it turns out that Biff once walked in on his father with another woman.

Willy goes home, plants some seeds, and then – hearing his brother Ben calling for him to join him – he drives off and kills himself. At his funeral, only the family are present, despite Willy’s prediction that his funeral would be a big affair.

Death of a Salesman : analysis

Miller’s family had been relatively prosperous during the playwright’s childhood, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious. This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen in much of his work for the theatre.

Death of a Salesman represented a decisive change of direction for the young playwright. His previous success as a playwright, All My Sons , was a social drama heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen, but with his next play, Miller wished to attempt something new. The mixture of hard-hitting social realism and dreamlike sequences make Death of a Salesman an innovative and bold break with previous theatre, both by Miller and more widely.

In his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which Miller wrote to justify his artistic decision to make an ordinary American man the subject of a theatrical tragedy, Miller argued that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes.

As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

Death of a Salesman is an example of this ethos: Loman, who cheated on his wife and lied to his family about his lack of work and his reliance on friends who lent him money, makes his last gesture a tragic but selfless act, which will ensure his family have money to survive when he is gone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Miller is somehow endorsing the hero’s final and decisive act. The emphasis should always be on the word ‘tragedy’: Loman’s death is a tragedy brought about partly by his own actions, but also by the desperate straits that he is plunged into through the harsh and unforgiving world of sales, where once he is unable to earn money, he needs some other means of acquiring it so he can put food on the table for his family.

But contrary to what we might expect, there is something positive and even affirmative about tragedy, as Arthur Miller views the art form.

For Miller, in ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, theatrical tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life, but there is something affirmative about the events leading up to this final act, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man – a man willing to take a moral stand and evaluate himself justly – in the way that it has.

Does Willy Loman deserve to be pushed to take his own life just so his family can pay the bills? No, so there must be something within society that is at fault. Capitalism’s dog-eat-dog attitude is at least partly responsible, since it leads weary and worn-out men like Willy to dream of paying off their mortgage and having enough money, while simultaneously making the achievement of that task as difficult as possible. When a younger and better salesman comes along, men like Willy are almost always doomed.

But by placing this in front of the audience and dramatising it for them, Miller invites his audience to question the wrongs within modern American society. Thus people will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve it. The hero’s death is individually tragic but collectively offers society hope.

So it may be counter-intuitive to describe a tragedy like Death of a Salesman as ‘optimistic’, but in a sense, this is exactly what it is. Miller takes the classical idea of the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , and updates this for a modern audience, too: the hero’s tragic flaw is redefined as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society.

There is something noble in his flaw, even though it will lead to his own destruction. So really, the flaw is not within the individual or hero as much as in society itself.

A key context for Death of a Salesman , like many great works of American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, is the American Dream: that notion that the United States is a land of opportunity where anyone can make a success of their life and wind up stinking rich. Miller’s weaving of dream sequences in amongst the sordid and unsatisfactory reality of the Lomans’ lives deftly contrasts the American dream with the American reality.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman”

This is a very insightful and convincing appreciation. What it misses is any idea that Miller’s being Jewish may have had a hand in helping him to see why the American dream and its popularity-cult needed to be criticized. The word “cult” in “populairty-cult” says it all, because “The Death of a Saleman” is at its core a play about idolatry, the Ol,d Testament theme against which its prophets railed the most.

Willy is portrayed as an idol-worshipper, whereas his friend, Charely, and Charley’s son, Bernard, are both seen as devotees of the “true” God, in whose religion the human being is always endowed with dignity and always seen as an end in himself, never as a means to some other end. The play, in fact, asks a very Jewish question. If the true God and the false god both require sacrifice, how can you ever know which is which? And its tragedy supplies us with Miller’s answer: those who worship idols discover in the end that THEY are the sacrifice!

Miller, like Philip Roth later on, was a Jewish-American inheritor of the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition, a tradition in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremia en Ezekiel continually used their verbal art to expose Israel’s stinking moral corruption, foreseeing nothing but doom if it continued in irs idolatrous ways. Change ancient Israel to America, change the average Israelite of that time to Willy Loman now: both wind up destroying themsevles for the very same reason: with all the good will in they world, they have no self-knowledge and spend their whole lives worshipping a false god, deluded in the belief that they are worshipping the true one.

Their mistake in both cases only becomes apparent when it is time to offer the sacrifice, but by then, of course, it is always too late!

Perfect analysis, particularly when viewed in regards to recent events, involving American involvement with Israel dogma

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Death of a Salesman

Arthur miller.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Death of a Salesman: Introduction

Death of a salesman: plot summary, death of a salesman: detailed summary & analysis, death of a salesman: themes, death of a salesman: quotes, death of a salesman: characters, death of a salesman: symbols, death of a salesman: literary devices, death of a salesman: theme wheel, brief biography of arthur miller.

Historical Context of Death of a Salesman

Other books related to death of a salesman.

• Full Title: Death of a Salesman
• When Written: 1948
• Where Written: Roxbury, Connecticut
• When Published: The Broadway premiere was February 10, 1949. The play was published in 1949 by Viking Press.
• Literary Period: Social Realism
• Genre: Dramatic stage play
• Setting: New York and Boston in 1948.
• Climax: Biff's speech to Willy at the end of Act Two.
• Antagonist: Howard Wagner; the American Dream that allows Willy and his sons to delude themselves.

Extra Credit for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Simpson: Beleaguered, overweight family man Willy Loman has been the genesis not only of live-action domestic sitcoms like All in the Family and Married with Children , but animated satires like The Family Guy and The Simpsons , both of which have made knowing reference to Death of a Salesman in various episodes.

Salesman in Beijing: In 1983, the People's Art Theatre in Beijing wanted to put on a Chinese-language production of Death of a Salesman . Arthur Miller flew to Beijing and spent six weeks directing the cast, though he only spoke two words of Chinese. He documented his experiences in the book Salesman in Beijing , published in 1984 with photographs by his wife, Inge Morath.

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Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Argumentative Essay

Introduction, personal failure, cultural failure.

Although he appears visionary and hardworking, Willy Loman fails to teach his sons the lessons of becoming successful in life because of his beliefs. Willy survives with a misconstrued ambition of becoming wealthy and inculcates this idea into his sons, Happy and Biff, even though he did not know how to achieve it. He trained his sons on his approach to life and hoped they would follow and achieve his dream of success.

He has no plan for his life and concentrates on his past failures, and his children seem perched to being successful, primed on his world hypotheses. Salesmanship has given Willy a feeling of greatness and merit. He believes that the present world has dishonored them by taking away the personality of salesmen.

Willy has taught this notion to his sons, who are very receptive and obedient to their father. However, these believes have caused him disappointment as they end up turning down his principles and goals. Willy Loman fails to guide his sons to greatness in their lives because of his personal and cultural beliefs.

Willy has an insensitive personality. He does not realize that his capabilities and aspirations are different from those of his sons. While Biff wanted an outdoors job, his father wanted a white collar job for him. Willy does not admit failure nor consider the opinion of his sons. This has led to rebellion from his sons, when they discover what is right for them.

For example, Biff disliked the business life recommended by his father and opted a life on the farms after realizing that success means an enjoyable life and not money. Willy believed that Biff would be successful in business because of his attractiveness, and his past splendor in high school soccer. However, this notion was wrong as Biff failed to graduate from high school and join college because of his arrogance.

He later recognizes his true personality and decides to work on a farm, where he would enjoy and feel comfortable. Willy is very upset in him and is discontented in all that he does. Contrary to his believe that popularity and fame lead to success; Willy never earned handsome wealth despite his claim for fame, and many years of experience.

This is made unsound when his boss demotes him, and he merely earns a commission before he finally gets fired, despite his friendship with Wagner’s father. His claim for connections fails him again. Willy’s idea of connecting Biff with important people at Penn State would be futile as football does not seem to be the best career for him. To Biff, having the right connections does not always help.

The expectations of Willy that his requiem would be fully packed due to his well connection and popularity failed to turn out as he thought since only the family members were present. Willy had inculcated a sense of superiority in Biff Loman that made him arrogant. This made him unsuccessful in graduating from high school and advance to college.

Willy’s melancholy originates from the misconceptions he had about the American dream and his incapability to connect how the world works with how he thinks it should work. The American dream stated that: through the established qualities of determination, creativity, hard work, and resilience, one may get contentment through riches and that a good-looking and loved man will no doubt attain the comforts of modern life.

This dream can be divided into two significances; the traditional dream and the business achievement dream. When one owns a house, has a good paying job, and lives a secure life, then h/she has accomplished the traditional dream. Willy Loman has accomplished this vision as he has an occupation, a vehicle, a residence, and a family, but he did not appreciate it.

He was so preoccupied with the business dream that he dismantles his family in the end. This dream made him sacrifice going to Alaska in search of his father where he came across the successful salesman, Dave. He decides to follow the same career path as Dave and hopes to get the same success as Dave. It is not until thirty five years of his career when he realizes he had not achieved the prosperity he had hoped to achieve.

What Willy fails to know is that even Dave Singleman, who is his epitome of prosperity, has not fulfilled the American dream. This is because at the age of eighty-four, Dave has not retired, lives in a hotel room, and has no family. His illusion about life and his mental disarray about the real American dream make him fail his sons as he does not know what is really needed of them to succeed.

Willy’s life was a disappointment as he had the wrong ambitions and failed to teach his sons the lessons for victory in life. He deluded himself that he could be a wealthy salesman, when he knew that he would be excellent at operating with hands. If Willy had faced his capabilities in a rational and sincere way, his life would not have ended this way.

It is evident that the top secret to success is a fortune in possessing ordinary talents and aptitude, and readiness to take chances in the corporate world, in addition to being industrious, devoid of taking shortcuts with friends. Cultural believes, such as the American dream, should help to instill values in individuals to put efforts in everything that they do.

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Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Death of a Salesman Material

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Death of a Salesman Essays

Shattered dream - the delusion of willy loman james lee, death of a salesman.

"The jagged edges of a shattered dream." Do you find that the play leaves you with such an impression?

Death of a Salesman tells the story of a man confronting failure in the success-driven society of America and shows the tragic trajectory which...

Perceptions of Self Worth and Prominence: Spaces and Settings in Death of a Salesman Lorin Veigas

A wise and possibly very cynical man once said "Nothing fails like success." Even if one is not familiar with Gerald Nachman, or the other rebel comedians of his time, we can all appreciate the clever irony in this quotation. In the complex and...

Sales and Dreams Alex Hoffer

In Arthur Miller's Play Death of a Salesman, the dreams of the major characters are the central focus of the plot. The Lomans, particularly Willy, struggle to realize their dreams while fearing that these goals are unreachable. Yet this fear is...

Musical Motifs Marleigh Russell

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into a respectful ambiguity through Miller's ingenious stage directions, nonverbal expressions and, most importantly, his...

Death of A Salesman: Shifting of the American Dream Richard Salgado

From its very infancy, the American continent was often equated with boundless opportunity. In A Description of New England John Smith characterized the early colonies of 1616 as a land of economic potential, declaring that "If a man work but...

Death of a Salesman: Psychological Criticism and Deconstruction Anonymous

Arthur Miller's American masterpiece Death of a Salesman, first presented on the stage in New York City in 1949, represents a successful literary attempt at blending the themes of social and personal tragedy within the same dramatic framework. Yet...

Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' Exemplifies how Careful Attention to the Linguistic Features of a Play tell us all we need to know about Performance Kerri Margaret Scullion - Reid

A thorough analysis of the linguistic features of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) will illustrate how, for a conscientious reader, all we need to know about performance is supplied within the written text. Focusing on the dramatist's...

Society In The Crucible and Death of a Salesman Michael Brooks

Two plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, both contend that society is the indifferent, sometimes brutal, force that crushes an individual. Although the plays take place in different time periods, they each convey the force...

Symbolism Portrayed Through Common Objects Karen Hill

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller uses common objects as symbols of the evolving relationship between the main characters in his play. Women’s stockings and their holes symbolize the failing relationship between Willy Loman and his wife,...

House Versus Home in The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman Anonymous

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, both authors use their characters’ living space, the house, as a metaphor for the attainability of the American Dream of security, wealth, and...

Fetters of the Dream: Failure and Success in Death of a Salesman Yvette Whitaker College

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a story about the futility of self-deception, but it also examines the definition of "success" in post-WWII America and the danger of suppressing one's own inclinations to meet the expectations of others....

Biff's Self-Discovery in "Death of a Salesman" Sukayna Ibrahim 11th Grade

In Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman,” Willy Loman is an individual who strives to achieve the “American Dream” in the 1940’s. This era was characterized by America’s climb out of the Great Depression in addition to its recognition as a...

Sympathy for Willy Loman Anonymous 11th Grade

Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a domestic tragedy that centres around the dysfunctional Loman family, most notably Willy Loman, a failed salesman so captivated by the American Dream and his desire to be a good father that it ultimately...

Is Tragedy Possible in the Modern Society Depicted in Death of a Salesman? Anonymous College

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman can be measured against Aristotle’s notions of tragedy expressed in his Poetics , involving a fall caused by hamartia and hubris , and an eventual recognition and reversal of fortune, culminating in the audience...

The Redefinition of Tragedy in Death of a Salesman Anonymous College

The definition of a tragic character is something that has been considered set in since the times of ancient Greece. Aristotle’s Poetics defined what makes up a comedy and tragedy, and that definition has been widely accepted since then....

Emotional Intertextuality Between Death of a Salesman and The Kite Runner Haley Paige Parson 12th Grade

There are numerous similarities between Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. However, most of the similarities readers identify are only surface deep, and essentially superficial. Sure, readers know that both...

The Death of Dave Singleman: A Study of Contrasts Anonymous 11th Grade

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman actually makes reference to the deaths of two salesmen: protagonist Willy Loman and an admired yet never-seen character named Dave Singleman. It can be argued that the most obvious difference in the deaths of...

The Crucial Need for Feminism in a Patriarchal Society: Evaluating Death of a Salesman Sofia Gemma Corsetti 12th Grade

The issue of gender equality is a pressing topic in our modern society. Over the course of the past century, we have established human rights, racial rights, and even animal rights. So why is it that when a woman demands equality, she is looked at...

Forgetting Family, Finding Freedom Sarah Noor 12th Grade

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie capitalize on the theme of abandonment. In both plays, the protagonists experience abandonment and later desert their respective families; as a result, they illustrate...

Opposite Takes on the “American Dream” in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Kevin Andrew Fagan College

Money is one way to achieve one of the “American Dreams.” The “American Dream” is different for everyone and that dream for most people depends on how they were raised. There are many plays that critique the “American Dream” but only two will be...

The Use of Props in Master Harold... And the Boys and Death of a Salesman Noah David Perry 12th Grade

Playwrights, unlike the authors of novels and other forms of literature, employ the use of production elements and stage designs in the development of their works. These additional aspects present within the creation of theatre grant playwrights...

Capitalism as Masculine Identity in American Theater: Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross Riley Stephen Meachem College

America has long prided itself on being a land of opportunity. Since the fifteenth century, pilgrims have flocked to American shores, urged onward by the thought of making money, off the rich lands and resources available here. As time has gone...

Father-Son Relationships in “Death of a Salesman” and “Fences” Anonymous College

In the drama Death of a Salesman, the conflict that arises from a failing paternal-son relationship is illustrated akin also to the play Fences. Both storylines follow middle-class households in the mid-20th century and the interactions between...

Fragile and Fantastic, Fake and Flawed: Two Conflicting Views of Willy Loman Sophia Nadler College

Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, endures today because of its ability to effectively convey a complex family dynamic in the wake of its patriarch’s failed American dream. Themes of disappointment and denial, embellishment and skewed...

Death of a Salesman

Introduction to death of a salesman, summary of death of a salesman, characters in death of a salesman, themes in death of a salesman, writing style of death of a salesman, literary devices in death of a salesman, related posts:, post navigation.

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Death of a Salesman

Introduction.

Death of a Salesman  by Arthur Miller, is written in 1949, is a modern tragedy and is considered both the masterpiece of the playwright and foundation of modern American drama. The play is awarded various honors and awards that also includes the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary

Moreover, the company has taken away his salary so that he works on a straight commission. On his return to home, Linda, Willy wife, ease him and motivates him to ask the master of the company, Howard Wagner, for a place in in the New York office where he his salary will be guaranteed without traveling.

Ultimately, Charley, Willy’s neighbor, enters from the next door. While playing play cards and talking to Charley, Willy imagines himself talking to his elder brother, Ben. Ben once invited Willy to Alaska and ask him to join him in order to make his fortune. Willy moves outside the kitchen, after Charley leaves home, and is still caught up in his imagined conversation with his elder brother.

Death of a Salesman Characters Analysis

Willy loman, happy loman.

He, son of Charley, is a successful lawyer who argues cases before the Supreme Court. His success is an indictment for Biff and Happy.

Linda Loman

Howard wagner.

The unnamed character in the play with whom Biff caught his father in a hotel room and due to this discovery he refuses to join the summer school for further studies.

Themes in Death of a Salesman

Failure of the american dream.

Willy Loman is also facing this kind of creed behind the American dream in his life. Willy had a natural capability in the field of carpentry, but the craze of earning more money and a bright future made him choose the field of business with an occupation of a salesman. He spent the mature and productive period of his life doing hard work in hopes of having a comfortable and settled life in a later part of life.

Crumpled by absolute defeat and great desperateness Willy planned suicide. When his miserable itch overwhelmed him, he committed suicide.

Fake existence

Nature versus city, morality versus immortality, death of a salesman literary analysis.

The play  Death of a Salesman  is also subtitled as “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem”. According to the subtitle, the play is divided into two acts and each act is further divided into conversations- the present conversation and the conversation from the past- that are intermingled. The play covers an evening and the day following, however, the action is intermittent with past memories and flashbacks, mostly 17 years back.

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Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Tragedy

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Published: Apr 11, 2019

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