Arthur Miller and Authur Miller - Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism

Pop, I'm a dime a dozen and so are you. Biff Loman

Various people have called him various names: students often find him pathetic, pedestrian, pedantic. Professors of English can't seem to sing enough praise; to them he is an unsung hero, the great American Everyman lurking inside each of us. So slurred, and so lauded, he is Willy Loman, the doomed and demoralized protagonist of Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman.

The Characters

We never told the truth in the house for ten minutes. Biff Loman

Willy Loman: A salesman. Married to Linda and father to Biff and Happy, he desperately wants to live the American Dream everyone else talks about. Though a poor salesman, he is so anxious to project success that he lies to his friends, family and, ultimately, to himself. Willy romanticizes his past accomplishments and fantasizes about life as the perfect salesman - well liked, respected, admired. Eventually he finds he cannot live up to his own ideals and so attempts to live vicariously through his children, who reject his overtures as deluded and pathetic.

Linda Loman: Willy's wife. Always faithful and his staunchest supporter, Linda is an unwitting contributor to her husband's downward spiral. She will not hear a bad word spoken of him, she will not confront him with his erratic behavior. A man who is what he believes himself to be can accomplish anything with such a partner behind him, but Willy is not such a man. She loves him with a childlike adoration that grows up too late.

Biff Loman: The favorite Loman son, and the most burdened by Willy's internal drama, Biff suffers greatly from Willy's delusions of grandeur. He grew up as the handsomest, the most talented, the best liked - and his father taught him that these were the important things in life. Neglected were studies, relationships, ethics - the things we find more useful outside of high school. Biff must acknowledge these faults and correct them if he hopes to live a happy life, but doing so may cost him even the remnants of his link with his father.

Happy Loman: The younger, neglected brother, Happy strives to live his father's dreams. He believes being the kind of man his father admires will earn him his father's admiration, but is mostly ignored at every turn. His relationships with his parents are not as tumultuous as Biff's, but neither is it as close. Moderately successful materially, Happy is as lonely, and as misled, as his father. He spends his life desperately seeking his father's approval, but never seeks himself.

Charlie: The Loman's next door neighbor, and a successful business owner, Charlie serves as the voice of reason.

Uncle Ben: Willy's rich, but dead, brother. Ben appears in flashbacks, reminding Willy of what might have been.

Bernard: A lawyer, Charlie's son and Biff's childhood friend.

The Plot

You can't eat the orange and throw away the peel. A man is not a piece of fruit. Willy Loman

Willy Loman is a travelling salesman. Though not particularly good at his job, he plugs away day after day, year after year, extolling the virtues of his life on the road. He believes the definition of success lies in material accumulation, and in the number of people who like him. In fact he believes that being well liked is the key to success. But Willy is not well liked. He's rather pitied?when anyone thinks of him at all.

He's getting older, too, in his sixties now and feeling the drain of constant travel. His company can no longer support his ineptitude and so puts him on straight commission. With no salary to fall back on, and nonexistent sales, Willy will not be able to support his family for long. He's tired, bone-weary in fact, and a failure in his own eyes. Resentful, often confused, and spending more and more of his days in a private world of dreams and fantasies he cannot always distinguish from reality, Willy has to figure out a way to be a success.

He's got a life insurance policy that makes him worth more dead than alive. If money = success, then death will make him successful.

Biff and Happy recognize some signs of Willy's senility, but are unaware of the extent of his dementia. They are also consumed by and with their own dysfunctions - they could not be of much assistance to their father even if they wanted to be. Though Biff tries to speak to his mother, Linda won't hear of the trouble with Willy. Her denial only worsens the situation, and matters between Biff and Willy come to a head, with Biff finally rejecting the skewed value system Willy has been selling all of these years.

The play begins with Willy coming home from one last failed trip (failed, in part, because he just could not complete it). Biff and Happy are home for a visit, and Miller chronicles Willy's final attempts to connect with his sons and his world before ending it all in a hallucinatory bid for greatness and success.

A Bit of Background

He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong. Biff Loman

Miller originally conceived the kernel of his thesis when he was 17 and working for his father's company. The focal character was to be an aging, inept salesman. Pitiful in his clumsy, ham-fisted way, the salesman was an object of ridicule to customers and family alike. Miller ended up basing Willy Loman on several different people, one of whom finally committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The character was also based, in part, on Miller's uncle (a salesman) and on some of his uncle's friends. He found these men fascinating. They were, by trade or by trial, resilient, loquacious, imaginative, competitive. They had, in fact, all of the qualities society finds admirable in a man, but for some reason the combination would occasionally fail to "click." What happens to those who posses the same qualities, but in whom the mix is simply wrong? The family's last name serves as part of the answer. "Loman" is constructed from "low man," and indicates Willy's place in the business and social hierarchy.

Long considered, by both critics and college professors, one of the premiere dramas of the American Theatre, Death of a Salesman won, among others, a Tony, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The play originally opened on Broadway in 1949, with revivals being produced in 1975, 1984 and 1999 (the most recent revival starring Brian Dennehy and garnering even more awards).

Impressions

Attention, attention must be paid. Linda Loman

Miller uses time quite loosely here, drifting back and forth between present day and Willy or Biff's reminiscences. The flashbacks sometimes cut and sometimes fade, depending on the surrounding circumstances. The memory sections are more relaxed visions of happier times, and they lack the overwhelming emotional tension of the present-day scenes, thereby offering the reader both a glimpse into the secret life of Willy Loman, and a brief respite from the gloom that pervades the text. However, the more subtle changes can render the dialog difficult to follow in places if one is only reading with half an eye. Of course, the script itself is deceptive if one doesn't give one's full attention. The play seems simple on the surface: a failure of a man takes his own life. But upon closer inspection, we find complexity upon complication lurking just beneath the surface.

The pervading, overt theme is, of course, success, and a person's definition thereof. Is Biff a failure? He believes himself to be because he hasn't the trappings of adulthood: a steady job, a home and family of his own. Brother Happy, however, has these things, or is on his way to acquiring them, yet he also defines himself as being unsuccessful because he hasn't the emotional accoutrements of that state. Linda Loman is a wife and mother, but her family is in disarray, her children emotionally stunted and adolescent. How successful has she been?

We accept Miller's assertion that Willy Loman is a failure. And he is. But why? Loman believes he failed because he did not accumulate mass quantities of wealth, because he was not well liked. While an accurate gauge of success on a partial scale, these are not the only reasons Miller believes him a failure, nor why we should. Loman failures, unlike his sons', are twofold. He fails because he is unable to accumulate the material trappings of success. And, more importantly, he fails in life because he refuses to acknowledge what is truly important: relationships with friends and family. He betrays his wife, alienates his sons, destroys his friendships and even sacrifices his future in pursuit of the illusory American dream. The problem with the great American ideal of wealth is that few can achieve it without imperiling their moral compass, and Willy Loman proves no exception.

Additionally, though exposing the dysfunctional family unit became a popular subject of discussion in the 1980s, and ubiquitous in the 1990s, Miller's work here was groundbreaking for its time. Using themes of marital codependency and patriarchal disconnection, the play exposes the seamier side of family life in a manner that was shocking when first produced.

Miller's dialog is, as always, to the point. He tends to avoid long soliloquies in favor of conversation between his characters, allowing their personalities to emerge through interaction rather than exposition. He again writes from his strength, developing characters who are complete, and compelling, and complex. Though primarily realistic in his expression, the author does make the occasional foray into a Tennessee Williams-like world of dreamy fantasy, a style familiar to fans of The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly Last Summer, but still retaining the more sober quality of Miller's other works.

Probably the most popular and well-known of any of Arthur Miller's plays, Death of a Salesman ponders the social contract we make with one another, and illustrates the desperation of a man for whom even success would be failure. Long known for writing plays with strong social themes, Salesman is a prime, and very readable, example of Miller's media with a message.