1. Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman

2. Biff Happy
Willy Linda

3. Death of a Salesman Introduction
Death of a Salesman is a expressionist reconstruction of naturalist substance, and the result is not hybrid but a powerful particular form.
The continuity of social expressionism remains clear, however, for I think in the end is not Willy Loman but the image of the Salesman that predominates.

4. Death of a Salesman
The social figure sums up the theme referred to as alienation, for this, is a man, who from selling things has passed to selling himself, and has become, in effect, a commodity which like other commodities will at a certain point be economically discarded.
Death of a Salesman placed the whole question of American values at the center of attention.

5. Death of a Salesman Death of a Salesman and Society
Death of a Salesman – the story of an ageing salesman, baffled by a lifetime of failure in a society which apparently values only success- has proved one of the most powerful and affecting plays in American theatrical history.

6. Death of a Salesman
The confusions and dreams of a single individual on the verge of psychological collapse were made to embody the collapse of national myths of personal transformation and social possibility.
Miller’s achievement lay in his ability to distil in the person of Willy Loman the anxieties of a culture which had exchanged an existential world of physical and moral possibility for the determinism of modern commercial and industrial life.

7. Death of a Salesman
The dislocation of Willy Loman’s private life are equally those of a society chasing the chimera of material success as a substitute for spiritual fulfillment.
All characters of the play feel a need which they can articulate only in terms of the rhetoric of a society which has itself lost touch with its youthful ideals.
Aware of a profound sense of insufficiency they seek to remedy or at least to neutralize it in the public world of consumerism and status.

8. Death of a Salesman
For the most part they are blind to the consolation and even transcendence available through personal relationships.
Willy Loman
Willy Loman betrays himself and others. Desperate to sustain his self-esteem he has an affair with another woman, buying her attention with a gift of stockings while his wife sits at home mending her own.
Biff ‘s failure thus becomes a living reproach which fuses love and guilt together in such a way as to threaten the spontaneity and integrity of his responses.

9. Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman, increasingly anxious to justify his life and expiate what he sees as his responsibility for his son’s willful self-annihilation, he plans a suicide which will create the fortune that his life could never accumulate.
The proceeds of his insurance policy will thus stand as a justification of his dreams while offering some kind of belated restitution to his wife and son he had betrayed.
Desperate for love they are offered cash.

10. Death of a Salesman
The play is Miller’s requiem for a country which, no less than Willy, had all the wrong dreams as it is a gesture of absolution towards those who allow themselves to be too fully known. Though in a sense it is a story of defeat.
Willy is a kind of Everyman. Miller may have taken care to root him in a specific social and historical world but that specificity is raised to another level by the authenticity with which he reproduces the tangled emotions and diffuse longings of those who translate into the language of national myth what has its origins in more fundamental necessities.

11. Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman lives and dies in a struggle which has its correlative in terms of American notions of self-fulfillment and social status it is equally a battle waged by everyone who tries to locate a sense of significant purpose in a life which seems to consist of little more than a series of contingent events.
Willy’s Denials
Perhaps one of the most tragic aspects about Willy Loman’s life is his incapacity to deal with reality.

12. Death of a Salesman
This leads him to live in a constant denial, not only of who he is, but also regarding the situation he finds himself.
There are two aspects to this:
a) one that vacillates between recognition of failure and denial of failure: “I could not drive anymore..” 13
“Biff is a lazy bum! […] Biff-he’s not lazy. […] He could be big in no time.” […] I will put my money on Biff” 16, 18.

13. Death of a Salesman
“I did five hundred gross in Providence and seven hundred gross in Boston. […] Well, I-I did –about a hundred and eighty gross in….. 35
“My God, if business don’t pick up I don’t know that I’am gonna do!...” 36, 37
“Bernard, was it my fault?” 93, 94
b) one that is self-aggrandizing and delusional: “I’m vital in New England”. 15
“And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England….. 31

14. Death of a Salesman
“Did you knock them dead, Pop? Knocked ‘em cold in Providence, slaughtered ‘em in Boston”. 33
“You want a job? I got a job, I told you that.” 43
“It’s contacts, Charley, I got important contacts! 51, 56, 57
“Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens! Big shot! 62
“They’re working on a very big deal”. 84
“Yeah, Biff’s in. Working on a very big deal, Bernard.” 91

15. Death of a Salesman
“Well he’s been doing very big things in the West…” 91, ve got a 92
“I offered you a job… […] I got a job” 96, 97
“Ben, that funeral will be massive!” 126

16. Death of a Salesman Willy and Biff
Death of a Salesman is built around the relationship between Willy and his son, Biff.
Here the relationship between father and son is a crucial one because it focuses the question of inherited value and assumptions, it dramatizes deferred hopes and ideals, it becomes a microcosm of the debate between the new generations, of the shift from a world still rooted in a simpler rural past to one in which that past exists simply as myth.

17. Death of a Salesman
It highlights the contrast between youthful aspirations and subsequent compromises and frustrations.
It presents the submerged psychological tension which complicates the clear line of social action and personal morality.
The family, so much an icon of American mythology, becomes the appropriate place through which to view that mythology.

18. Death of a Salesman
Biff’s and Willy’s relationship is bedeviled by guilt.
Willy feels guilty because he feels responsible for Biff’s failure.
Having discover Willy with a woman in a Boston Hotel room, he had refused to retake a mathematics examination, thereby abandoning his chance of reaching university and his access to a better career. (121)

19. Death of a Salesman
But Biff equally feels guilty because he recognizes a responsibility which he cannot fulfill, the responsibility to redeem Willy’s empty life.
For Willy, constant contradiction is a linguistic reflection of the collapse of rational control, but, more fundamentally, for all the Loman men it is indicative of a basic contradiction between their aspirations and the reality of their lives, between their setting and the essence of their dreams. (15-16, 35, 36)

20. Death of a Salesman
They are denied peace because the philosophy on which they have built their lives involves competition, a restless pursuit of success, a desire to register a material achievement which they can conceive only in financial terms because they have neither the language nor the capacity to assess its significance in any other way.
Hence Biff, who tries to retrace the steps of his father into the past and the West, is unable to accept a simple sense of harmony with his surroundings as adequate to the definition of success which his father has instilled in him, though that harmony is precisely what his father longs to achieve. As Biff explains to his Bother. (22)

21. Death of a Salesman
The drama of the play emerges from the fact that Biff now gradually recognizes the necessity for his abandonment. (60)
Biff breaks free not Happy.
In order for Biff to survive he has to release himself from his father and the values which he promulgates.
In order for Willy to survive he has to cling to Biff and the conviction that material success is still possible. (67)

22. Death of a Salesman
Thus guilt becomes the principal mechanism of human relationships.
As Miller notes, ‘Biff’s conflict is that to tell the truth would be to diminish himself in his own eyes. To admit his fault’.
His decision then is a surgical break with Willy, and which Willy could not accept.
His motive then is to destroy Willy to free himself.

23. Death of a Salesman
This was certainly to be the conclusion that Miller reached.
The fault not only lies in the individual; it also patently lies in self-interest systematized into capitalism.
Willy Loman is thrown on the scrap heap by his employer after thirty-six years of work. (82, 83)

24. Death of a Salesman
Biff and Willy feel a profound if unfocussed sense of dissatisfaction with their lives.
Beneath the monotony of daily survival is a yearning spirit, a perception of some kind of spiritual need which they can only express through material correlatives.
One of the problems of the play, indeed, derives from the fact that their lack of success actually confuses spiritual with financial failure.

25. Death of a Salesman
The more significant question is whether material success would have blunted or indeed even satisfied that need and, though this might have brought Miller perilously close to cliché, his portrait of Bernard – moral, hard-working, successful, attractive – is perhaps in danger of validating the dreams which Willy had had for Biff.
Willy had, admittedly, regarded such success as an inevitable product of life in America and had taught Biff to take what he could not earn, and yet in some way the adequacy of that success is not challenged in Bernard’s case.

26. Death of a Salesman
Indeed this seems to represent the apparently untroubled serenity which is the reward of honest toil.

27. Death of a Salesman
As a salesman he has always to simulate, to smile, to put up a front.
He is an actor who has increasingly lost his audience. His life is a falsehood. (65)
For Miller implies that Willy had the wrong dreams, not simply that his methods of fulfilling those dreams were wrong.

28. Death of a Salesman
He seems to suggest that Willy’s mistake was to imagine that he could gain possession of his soul through gaining possession of the material world. (138)

29. Death of a Salesman
Biff’s anger at his father derives partly from Willy’s weakness and helplessness, partly from his bitterness, but partly also from his love for him, a love which won’t cut Biff loose from his own sense of guilt.
To absolve his father would be to admit to his own weakness and culpability. ( )

30. Death of a Salesman Linda
Thus Linda, whose love for Willy has revealed itself in an encouragement of his dreams combined with a practical capacity which has enabled him to sustain his illusions in the face of reality, proves finally to be deadly.
Her actions are motivated by a compassionate concern but there is a clear connection between her refusal to challenge those illusion and his death.
Nor is she free of responsibility for the warped values of her children. She is simply too passive a force.

31. Death of a Salesman
Her culpability lies in her acceptance, which is simultaneously an expression of her love.
In her own way she is as obsessive as Willy. She has reduced her own life to a single focus – Willy. (56, 57)
Her almost complete failure to understand Willy, as opposed to sympathise with and admire him, is thus finally a sign of the inadequacy of that love.
She is not strong enough to make demands, to wrestle Willy away from his illusions. (104, 105, 137, 139)
Add her situation as a woman in the late 40s

32. Death of a Salesman Happy
He is totally delusional, and is unable to confront reality, in fact, he is more delusional than Willy and he does not have Biff’s strength in confronting the situation. (63, 99, 101, 102, 138, 139)

33. Death of a Salesman
The Flashbacks (44-47; 47-52; 85-90; ; ; ; )
The past we see is as it is recalled by Willy Loman, as he tries to track down the moment when things began to go wrong.  
The action had to move easily between past and present.
The realistic texture of Willy’s environment was crucial but so were the distortions created by his memory, the fragment of the past and present.

34. Death of a Salesman
The result was a blend of realism and expressionism which dramatized personal psychology in the context of social change.
Miller has confessed to standing ‘squarely in conventional realism’, but has equally insisted that where necessary he has ‘tried to expand it with an imposition of various forms in order to speak more directly, even more abruptly and nakedly of what has moved me behind the visible façades of life’.

35. Death of a Salesman
He is fully aware that the innovative power of realism has long since been blunted but he has always been drawn to find some ways to relate the private anguish of his characters to the environment which presses upon them and which in part they themselves shape and form.
In Death of a Salesman the production style was necessitated by the need to create a ‘continuous present’.
In allowing past and present to collapse towards one another, Miller was able to trace causalities and hence identify the possibility of change.

36. Death of a Salesman
But the flashbacks also have a structural function. They fragment the unfolding of the story, and stops the flow of a linear development.
This allows the spectator/reader to ‘get out’ of the story, to take a distance by avoiding to be captured in a sympathetic disposition towards Willy.
At the same time they provide the possibility to materialize on the stage (and in the text) a deep pathological reality and the inner workings of Willy’s mind.

37. Death of a Salesman
The flashbacks concentrate on two central situations: Ben and Bernard.
Ben represents the extreme self-made ‘man’, harden by life but particularly by being consumed by ‘business’. He is always on the move, looking for more ‘deals’.
This is the Icon of success, and represents everything that Willy and his sons are not and would have like to be.

38. Death of a Salesman
But here there is an implicit criticism: Miller presents Ben almost like a robot, a caricature of a person, devoid of all humanity.
Bernard, on the other hand, is the consciousness which reflects the other side of false dreams and aspirations, and he is a premonition of Biff’s future failure.
end

39. Death of a Salesman A Tragedy??
However, talk of tragedy is rather relative. Willy never really shows any evidence of self-knowledge or awareness of the reality of the situation in which he is involved.
Is Biff, and not Willy, who provides self-knowledge and develops as a character through the understanding the mechanism by which he has suffered and of which he has been a primary agent.

40. Death of a Salesman
Suicide is the logical projection of his many failures. Just as his insurance payments are overdue and he is relying on the period of grace, so he is inhabiting a personal period of grace prior to an inevitable termination.
He survives but without a sense of himself. His sons are his only chance to succeed by proxy, the only mark he has left on the world resistant to his charm and his human needs alike.

41. Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller on Tragedy
In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack. Is to to the paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection.
The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fir only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words its is most often implied.

42. Death of a Salesman
And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.
I think that the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing- his sense of personal dignity.

43. Death of a Salesman
From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his “rightful” position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

44. Death of a Salesman
In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his “tragic flaw”, a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters.
But there are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them, and in the process of action everything we have accepted out of fear or insensitivity or ignorance is shaken before us and examined, and from this total onslaught by an individual against the seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us – from this total examination of the “unchangeable” environment- comes the terror and the fear that is classically associated with tragedy.

45. Death of a Salesman
The quality in such a play that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world.
Among us today this fear is as strong and perhaps stronger, that it ever was. In fact, is the common man who knows this fear best.
Tragedy enlightens – and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom.

46. Death of a Salesman
The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won.
The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.
It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time – the heart and spirit of the average man.

47. Death of a Salesman Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. The had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment that futile and hopeless labor.
Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He hoes back down to the plain.

48. Death of a Salesman
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.
But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.
The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crown his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

49. Death of a Salesman
If this myth is tragic, that is, because its hero is conscious.
But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.