Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller 1949

 Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller 1949

 

Oedipus, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello or Willy Loman. Most classic tragedies embrace the Aristotelian "fall of princes," or they may also include the modern common man. Playwright Arthur Miller believes that the common man can be a center of dramatic interest as well, and he demonstrated this belief in Death of a Salesman, a tragedy about a very common, common man: a salesman from Brooklyn.

 

Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1949,    Death of a Salesman combines realism and surrealism in the story of a small man swallowed up in a world of sham and shoddy values. Willy Loman is bewildered, well-intentioned, and unsuccessful: "Suddenly I realize I'm going sixty miles an hour, and I don't remember the last five minutes." His actions stem from the brutal difference between fact and fantasy. This story of a common man, victimized by his own fake values and those of modern America, caught the imagination of theatre audiences immediately.

 

Months before its premiere on Feb. 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theater on Broadway, the word was out and the public was storming the box office. This time the public was right. Critics acclaimed Death of a Salesman, as “a great play of our day, “and lavished upon it such accolades as “superb,” rich, “and” memorable. John Chapman's review called it "a very fine work in the American Theater, with script, staging, setting, and acting all in perfect combination." John Glassner proclaimed the play "one of the most powerful and moving plays of our time, representing a culmination of American playwrights' efforts to create a significant American drama."

 

So, we must ask what is behind the honours. If this modern story is destined to challenge classic tragedy, or perhaps to take its place alongside, we must look behind the glitz and glitter to find a message.

 

If for instance, as Miller suggests in his autobiography, the struggle in Death of a Salesman was simply between father and son for recognition and forgiveness, it would diminish in importance. However, he continues, when the struggle extends itself out of the particular family circle and into the lives of each of us, it broaches the questions that trouble all of us: social status, social honor, and recognition, success. When we are brought to feel what Willy Loman feels, the play expands its vision and moves from the specific to the fate of man. We become Willy Loman, and his struggle becomes our struggle.

 

In an essay titled "The Family in Modern Drama," Miller expands this concept: "We are all part of one another, all responsible to one another. The responsibility originates on the simplest level, our immediate kin.

The family is pivotal, he suggests, but beyond the immediate family is the family of mankind. Connection with others, the need to feel others as a part of ourselves and ourselves as a part of them is an impulse native to all of us. We call people without this connectedness "sick." Yet we see this prime impulse constantly being impeded and crippled. Miller's work dramatizes and depicts the forces that induce these impediments.

"All plays we call great," he continues, "let alone all those we call serious, are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem: how may a man make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must he struggle, what must he strive to change and overcome if he is to find safety, love, ease of soul, identity, and honor?”

Miller's work has variety but also an essential, overriding unity. Willy Loman speaks not of "success," as so much as of being "well-liked." He has given up a small inclination toward carpentry to become a salesman because it promises a brighter future of ease and affluence, and by turning away from himself he has become an utterly confused person. He dreams of the American legend. He can no longer recognize his own reality, or why he has failed. "Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it."

 

Thus he wreaks havoc on his own life and that of his family. Unaware of what warped his mind and behavior, he commits suicide on the conviction that a legacy of $20,000 is all that is needed to save his beloved but also damaged offspring all that is standing between them and success.

 

Further Notes

Miller was absorbed by the concept that a man “is” his own past; that the past and the present exist together at the same time in the man. Miller’s self-stated goal was to show a little man battling to make his mark in the world while maintaining his dignity intact.

The principal conflict of Willy is the hopeless pursuit of elusive success. Willy is the dreamer. He has aspirations of financial and personal grandeur. He becomes lost in the process of finding himself. Willy sees himself in his son Buff and wishes to relive his life through Biff's, his son's success.  As a result, he lacks definition and organization, lives his life on an essentially physical level.

 

Willy is going through a moral and spiritual deterioration, and it eventually winds its way into the actual physical death of the protagonist, Willy. Willy's reality becomes less and less based on the visible, tangible world. Willy is trapped in a lifestyle of resentment and frustration. He has discovered the torture of living in a world of illusions. Willy’s conflicts have confused his thinking. The pain of reality forces him to regress to earlier, happier times, particularly those involving the young Biff and his other son, Happy. The problem here is that the past is taking the place of the present.

 

The boys do not yet know any better then to worship this man, their father whom they judge to be a true hero. Will is their father and they love him. Anything that he says is recorded by their minds as Truth. But he only sets them up later when it doesn’t actually stand for anything remotely like the truth. An example is Will's notion of total invincibility.  Willy is desperate to win the affection of his sons. Willy’s represents the dream of “anything is possible” except for the fact that he fails to incorporate into to this dream a sense of organization, dedication, hard work and sacrifice for the sake of the long-term effect. It is no wonder that his children enter adulthood with distorted images of success. Willy did not understand the meaning of integrity, absolute truth and hard work.  He prefers to make his life glamorous in his attempt to impress his sons, but he does not realize that he is damaging their ability to assume responsibility as grown men as Biffs later believes in himself as the most important human being around. Willy becomes a pathetic, lonely, desperate man, one who knows that he is not the ‘larger than life’ that he pretends to be.  In the recesses of his mind, he knows that he is a failure.

 

Willy knows the truth and cannot escape the nightmare of his inadequacies.  Along the way, there are various detonators to the delayed explosion, which lies ahead. He is ill-equipped to deal with all the negative forces. Willy is beginning to lose control. His memories of the past are no longer Utopian or joyous; they are filled with sadness and regret and threaten to destroy the imaginary peace, which Willy believes, existed in days gone by. When he reaches the point where his imagination and memories are no longer pleasant, he will have nowhere to go to escape the present and so he chooses death.  His present situation is intolerable, and this will be worsened by an agonizing past, which he refuses to leave him alone.  Neither reality nor illusion is any longer possible. There is a growing confusion between the past and the present. Luck is not enough; hard work and ingenuity are just as important. He is blinded by the dazzle of money.

 

He is caught up in the dreams of impractical thinking. He is unable to cope with life as a responsible, realistic adult. He, in the end, is mired by his dependence and unable to find comfort in his family system, as it is such a dysfunctional unit. Growth is impossible for Willy as he is choked out of reality by his exaggerated illusion. The reality, which he has fled, comes to knock him down with all its force. It is no longer an opponent against, which he can compete. Willy has led himself into a dream world based on illusion. When Willy is tormented by reality, he reverts to his memories, fantasies and imaginations. He is trapped in his own fiction and does not want to humiliate himself in front of his wife, who still believes that he is a genuine success.

Willy is emotionally immature, muddled in his thinking and has a shaky grasp on reality.

 

Unlike his neighbour who possesses self-confidence and a feeling of direction in his life and no need to prove himself to others. In Biff’s case, the failures of the Father are the failures of the son. Willy has been stripped away of all honour and dignity. His pride is gone and all that remains is hatred; hatred for himself, hatred for being a failure, and hatred for being humiliated before a friend. He is unable to throw off a lifetime of values. Willy could not bear the agony of defeat.

 

The end of the novel is the lowest point in his descent from his illusion. Trapped in his own illusion and cornered without hope. Previously he was only prolonging the illusion of success. The facade of adulthood is stripped away, exposing a frightened vulnerable child. He is now even more certain of his immaturity. His life was simply a flight from reality and the problems of his life. All efforts of honesty are choked by Willy’s inability to listen.

 

When Biff discovers that he has been living a lie, he desires a correction of the facts and to purses the truth with his Father. Willy is not interested in the truth. If a fact threatens his dream world, Willy will have no part in it. Towards the end, Willy’s thought processes have begun their final descent. He is caught between the horrors of the present and the agony of the past.  Both Happy and Willy refuse to see their fantasy world crumble. Biff finally realizes that he can no longer live a life based on lies. For Biff, it is the beginning of a new life, one of honesty and straightforwardness. He was able to see his Father more clearly once he was able to understand himself more deeply. Biff’s crying in the garden with his Father indicates that his conflict has exploded and he can now live a new life.  This is the scene of denouncement and unravelling.  Act II Scene 14.

 

Character Sketches

 

Willy. He owns nothing and he produces nothing. His imagination and self-deception take over. The lies he tells himself entrap him.  Not only is his real and present failure humiliating, it also makes him face the dishonesty with which he had lived his entire life. Willy’s life was a lifelong habit of prideful rationalizations. Buff says Willy is a fake and so are his dreams. Willy has mistaken his identity. He assumed a character other than his true one, his true self.

 

Biff,                  He suffered from deep anxiety since losing the respect of his Father and bounced back and forth in his quest for values, for self-esteem. He in the end was unable to tolerate his Father’s belief system. Biff has lived a life based on Willy’s values. Between Willy and his sons, there was mutual idolatry.  Biff, in the end, discards them in favour of a life based on integrity and a belief in himself. Biff is unable to play Willy's game any longer and confronts him with his convictions. It was on a deaf ear, as Willy didn’t want to hear anything other than success, talent, and excellence from his sons. Biff is in a position to learn from Willy’s errors and plan for the future with more realism. He knows that a man cannot live by the values of his Father and that every person needs to have his own set of unique values and beliefs.

 

Happy is a proficient liar. He has mired himself in Willy’s values.

 

Charley           Is neither a snob nor a bore.  His success proves that there is more than one way of looking at life. It is Charley’s success that annoys Willy. It is Willy’s idea of success that brings about Willy’s defeat and failure in the end. It is his unrealistic approach to solving problems, preferring the quick and simple method of closing his eyes to all conflict.

 

The play addressed the question of the meaning of success. Success is a state of mind and has nothing to do with material trappings, money and social prestige. One can be successful, according to one’s own definition of success, without external possessions. Millers' message is loud and clear: one must define what is truthful and real about one’s personality and goals, and then measure success by what can be realistically achieved. It is implied that it is through a realistic assessment of the Self.

Willy is blind to the basic contradiction between his progress as a salesman and his self-realization as a man. Happy, like his Father fails to understand that a smile is no safe conduct to pass through the jungle of life. The whole question of Willy’s hidden identity is curiously like that in Oedipus. The key words, “he does not know who he is”, point to the parallel almost unmistakably. Willy’s downfall is based on the motive of his soul. The shallowness of Willy’s achievement; we know the falseness of his aspirations and how their falsity keeps him from laying real foundations for the future of himself or his sons. Like Oedipus, Willy does not know who his father is or who his children are. Willy had only the weakness of his ignorance. He only vaguely comprehends that his life is without meaning or substance. We reject Willy because his life, the unexamined life is not worth living.

 

The Death of a Salesman is along the lines of the finest tragedy. It is the revelation of a man’s downfall, the destruction whose roots are entirely in his soul. It examines the great American dream of success, as it strips away to the core a castaway from the rat race for recognition and money.

 

Book Notes – March 22 2011 – W. Howe