what is the thesis of death of a salesman

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

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

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.

Death of a Salesman

Introduction to death of a salesman.

Death of a Salesman a play having “two acts and a requiem” is the masterpiece of Arthur Miller written in 1948 and produced in 1949. The popularity and success of the play demonstrate the strength of its story . The play was adapted for various tableaus, films, and course books across the globe, securing a Pulitzer Prize for Miller. The story of the play revolves around an unfortunate middle-class man who ruins his life, chasing the idea of the American Dream. This unattainable hunt costs him dearly; he seems stuck between fantasy and reality with a resultant loss of his own life. In one of his interviews, Miller mentions that the inspiration for the play is seeing his father struggle during the Depression.

Summary of Death of a Salesman

The play features Willy Lowman, living in New York City with his wife, Linda. Although Willy has worked as a salesman for almost thirty years, yet he has not achieved the real level of success that would allow him to stop tiring himself and afford the household expenditures that swallow his diminishing wages. He constantly compares himself to another salesman, Dave Singleton, who led a successful career and when he died, many people came to bid him farewell.

The play begins when Willy comes home exhausted from a failed trip with his mind full of tensions and worries. He seems sick of daily travels, while Linda, consoles him and suggests that he should ask his boss, Howard Wagner, to get a placement that demands less travel. Willy consents to request his boss the next day. Then, Linda and Willy start talking about their sons Biff and Happy, who are out for a date and are expected to be home soon. Also, she reminds him not to be critical or judgmental toward Biff, but Willy expresses his resentment over Biff’s lazy approach toward life.

Alone in the kitchen, Willy plunges back in time and remembers old times when his sons were young and idealized their father as an upright man. His flashbacks make the readers familiar with his philosophy of success that has derived him to his current unsuccessful state. Compared with his successful neighbor, Charley and his son, Bernard, Willy’s family is more determined and full of the natural charisma required for success. Willy always thought that his son’s rising high school football achievements would offer him university scholarships and make him a successful man. Yet the same neighbor once offered him a job but he refused despite the fact that he used to borrow money from him to cover household expenses and his son Bernard who was kind of a nerd in school, is now a successful lawyer.

Once again Willy drives back in time when he thinks about his brother Ben, who left home at seventeen and made quite a fortune in Alaska and Africa . Willy and Ben’s father abandoned them and Willy compares himself with his successful brother and regrets it. This comparison adds more to his miserable state, making him think that he is not capable of achieving success in life. Disturbed by Willy’s present state, Linda discusses his deteriorating mental state with his sons. She tells them about his failed suicide attempts as well. The boys get chagrined at themselves that they could not bring comfort to their father; Biff immediately decides to join his brother’s sports goods business and he’d go and talk to his old acquaintance for business funding. This idea pleases Willy, who, in turn, gives some incoherent and conflicting advice to his sons.

The next day, Willy goes to his boss, Howard Wagner, to request him for placement close to home. Howard not only refuses his plea but also suspends him from the job. Humiliated and disheartened, Willy turns toward Charley to borrow some money, and this time he encounters Charley’s son, Bernard. Like his father, Bernard has also achieved a respectful status in society, while his own sons are still striving to get settled in life. Stumbling between reality and illusions about success, he heads toward Frank’s Chop House where his sons are waiting for him for dinner.

Soon, Willy arrives and confesses that has been fired but hopes to have some good news from Biff. Biff tells Willy that the meeting with Bill Oliver was a failed attempt. Biff and Willy lock their horn in a disturbing argument that throws Willy backs into the past when young Bernard informs Linda that Biff has failed in a Math test and sets his trip to Boston to meet Willy to resolve this issue since it would be affecting his career. Biff discovers his illegitimate affair, which became Biff’s disillusionment with his father and the values that he taught all his life. After the argument, Biff and Happy leave with two call girls abandoning their father in the restaurant. Once, Willy comes back to his senses asks the waitress the way to a seed shop. Once home, Willy’s disconnection from reality continues as he plants seeds in the middle of the night , hoping to grow a garden. In his distress, he has an imaginary dialogue with his deceased brother who reminds him about a life insurance policy worth $20,000. Willy plans on getting in a car crash so he could at least leave them that money and show how much he cared for his children and wife. Also, how ‘well-liked’ by his friends at the grand funeral.

Back in reality, Willy has a final confrontation with Biff who announces leaving his family for good. After the announcement, Biff goes to his room and cries. Aggrieved by his son’s miserable state, Willy finally decides to commit suicide; he leaves the house and intentionally kills himself in a car accident. Only his family and Charley attend his funeral, sharing their thoughts about his struggling life and tragic end. The play ends with the contrasting opinions of Biff and Happy about their father’s unsuccessful life. Happy decides to stay back and fulfill his father’s ‘American dream’ of becoming successful while Biff plans to leave Brooklyn forever. Linda was confused with the irony of how the house mortgage was finally paid off with no one to live in it.

Characters in Death of a Salesman

Willy Loman : Willy Loman, the main protagonist of the play, is a simple family man and Linda’s husband. He also has a brother, Ben, and two young sons, Happy and Biff. As an aging salesman working in various parts of Europe, he seems to be an ambitious man, full of sales philosophy and hopes for a bright future for his son. In fact, he chases the American dream and aspires to enjoy the bliss of life with his family. Unfortunately, his hard work and lowly income not only weakens his determination but also leads him to suffer from anxiety and stress. His mediocre career, estranged relationship with his son Biff and some past mistakes steal the remaining joy of his life. His constant failures and suffering make him stand at the place where he begins to hallucinate. Unfortunately, his sons never understand the intensity of this pain despite Linda’s efforts to make them understand the traumatic state of their father. These worries force the old man to commit suicide.
Linda Lowman: Willy’s wife and mother of Happy and Biff, Linda is a loving lady as she always shares the worries of her husband, making him believe that one day he will taste the fruits of his untiring efforts. Although she supports him in his dreams of prosperity and success, she knows that it is impossible for him to live a life full of wonders. Despite Willy’s disturbed mental state, she stands by him and even rebukes his son for not living up to his father’s expectations.
Biff Loman: The older son of Linda and Willy Loman, Biff is a good and promising athlete and bright student but he never graduates from school. His life is moving at a smooth pace until he discovers his father’s extramarital relationship and becomes mentally upset. Willy wishes him to become a successful businessman, but he flees to the west, following his instinct to become a business tycoon. Despite trying his luck several times, Biff fails to win the admiration of his father. In the end, he admits that he has been chasing the shadow and wishes to lead a normal life.
Happy Loman: The younger son of the Loman family, Happy works as a manager in a store and seems to be a contented person. However, his father thinks that he has not made the right choice in life. He is shown as a really happy person in life with a single flaw that he is a womanizer. Despite his claim that he does not want girls, he fails to avoid them.
Charley : As a successful businessman living in Willy’s neighborhood, Charley helps Willy often with money for paying bills. Once he offers him a job that Willy refuses, claiming he shares distant views about success in life. Although Willy considers his children more practical and successful, he seems jealous of his social status.
Bernard: The intelligent and successful son of Charley, Bernard is a sober young man with a lot of potentials. Unlike his father, he has achieved success and status in society by becoming a successful lawyer. However, Willy’s jealousy toward their success never lets him praise his success.
Ben Loman: Willy’s late brother, Ben proves a constant reminder to the family due to his role of leaving his family years ago to try his fortune elsewhere. His travels to Africa and Alaska and his story of becoming a millionaire reverberates throughout the play. Although he is talked about like a dead person in the play, his success and prosperous life become a model for Willy to follow. He gets obsessed with his brother’s success that he forgets to accept the bitter reality of his own life.
Howard Wagner: Willy’s boss, Howard is shown as a stout and stern kind of person. As a pragmatic manager, he knows how to apply his principles, and caring only for his own interests, and not the problems of his employees. In fact, he is the epitome of a capitalistic owner, who refuses to understand Willy’s plight and when Willy tries to argue, he instantly sacks him.
The Woman: The Anonymous woman appears less in the play, yet plays a significant role in the storyline. She lives in Boston and works in a company. Unfortunately, the lady becomes the reason for contention between Biff and his father.

Themes in Death of a Salesman

American Dream; American dream stands as the most significant theme of the play as every member of the Loman family yearns for a better life. Willy and his sons try to chase this dream but get nothing except failure and dissatisfaction. However, some of the characters have shown it as an achievable model, as Howard Wagner, who has inherited this alluring dream from his father, while Loman’s neighbors have achieved this dream, showing how to lead a prosperous life. Willy is the only person who longs to have this bliss. Despite working hard, he fails to bring any improvement in the standard of his life. Biff, his son also faces continuous failures, while Happy is also not living up to his father’s expectations. Disheartened by the failures of his sons and his own tiring life, Will tries to see his dream through his brother’s success but gets nothing.
Modernity: During the 1950s, modernism started to alter the structure of society, making noteworthy changes in various professions. People started depending on modern gadgets, spending a fortune, and still vying to have another gadget just hitting the market. Creating a false idea of the American dream, modernity eventually creeps in the Loman’s life as they see their sons succeeding in the world like their neighbor but faces only mental torture when they see them failing. Howard keeps on working on his radio, making it clear that technological development has replaced manpower.
Opportunity: Although everyone strives to succeed, yet material luck finds those who seek better opportunities. Howard has been tolerating Willy because his father appointed him. Otherwise, he knows Willy does not deserve the job anymore. So, when Willy asks for some changes in his job, he fires him without having any compassion. Willy does not understand the reason for this sudden decision; instead of equipping himself with a better professional attitude , Willy gets more frustrated. Howard, on the other hand, gets an opportunity to find a new potential salesman. In the same way, Willy’s son, Happy, finds an opportunity to have a good job, while Biff wanders to seek one.
Family: The theme of family emerges through the Lomans, who never accept the changing shift of time, an attitude that costs them dearly. Willy constantly tries to materialize his dreams yet ends up with a failure. After his failed attempts, he fixes his attention to his sons, thinking they may fulfill his dreams of the ideal life through their careers. Unfortunately, both of them fail him; Biff is directionless, while Happy does not run after dreams. In contrast to Willy’s failed family, Charley and his son have resounding success with money and career, making their family achieve the American dream.
Ideal Personality: The concept of ideal or well-liked personality is another major theme Miller discusses in the play. Willy constantly advises his sons that they must be well-liked. To him, well-liked persons are the demands of industry and market as he has seen it during his career as a salesman. It also transpires to them that an ideal personality wins success as they see it in Charley’s son as well as in Howard, the boss of Willy.
Hallucination: Hallucination also stands as another important theme of the play. Willy Loman’s series of failures and constant sufferings drag him to a place where he cuts himself from the biting reality and begins to hallucinate. His hallucination features his successful brother, Ben, who has used his talents to make a fortune. Although Ben is dead, he appears in the form of hallucinations, a state that drags Willy toward disappointment and further mental torture.
Pride: The play projects this theme through the character of Willy Loman. He is an extremely proud man even though he does not have any reason to be proud as his sons have failed him and he is fired from the job. Despite struggling financially, he constantly praises his ideas of success in business and the little accomplishments of his sons. His pride never lets him consider the real success and efforts of his neighbor, Charley, his neighbor, who helps him overcome his financial difficulties.
Betrayal: Although betrayal is a minor theme of the play, it casts a gloomy shadow on various characters as Willy betrays his wife Linda by having an extramarital affair. Similarly, Biff constantly dodges his father’s dreams and tries to figure out his own ways of living. Linda thinks that Biff is betraying his father by not fulfilling Willy’s desires.
Reality versus Illusion : Reality against illusion is another major theme as Willy constantly dreams to be a successful businessman, and in case, if he fails to win glory, his sons will carry the flag to win success for him. Unfortunately, his desires for amassing wealth are only illusions that do not turn into reality despite his struggle. To his surprise, his sons also go against his dreams.

Writing Style of Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman shows Miller’s style of writing simple and direct dialogues and presenting down-to-earth real characters. He has used sharp irony and satire to show the poisonous impacts of the American dream upon the middle class. The writer has juxtaposed realism with fantasy at various points in the text to comment on the hollow and unrealistic approach of the people toward the false standards of society. The success of this writing lies in the skillful use of other literary elements, complex characterization , and simple sentence structure though diction at times becomes highly complex, showing the mental state of the Loman family.

Literary Devices in Death of a Salesman

Action: The main action of the play comprises the struggle of Willy Lowman, a salesman by profession. The rising action occurs when Willy is fired from the job, while the falling action occurs when Willy blames himself for the troubles his family is going through.
Allegory : Death of a Salesman shows the use of allegory by presenting the main idea of how the person’s nonadoptive nature creates trouble for himself and the people who belong to him.
Anaphora : The play shows the use of anaphora at different places as give in the below examples, i. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe that’s my trouble. I’m like a boy. I’m not married, I’m not in business, I just—I’m like a boy. Are you content, Hap? You’re a success, aren’t you? Are you content? (Act-I) ii. Willy: Where is he? I’ll whip him, I’ll whip him! Linda: And he’d better give back that football, Willy, it’s not nice. Willy: Biff! Where is he? Why is he taking everything? (Act-I) iii. Willy: No, you’re no good, you’re no good for anything. Biff: I am , Dad, I’ll find something else, you understand? (Act-II) These examples show the repetitious use of the phrases “you’re no good”, “only think”, “I’ll whip him”, and “I’m like a boy.”
Allusion : The play shows the use of various allusions as given in the examples below, i. Biff: But you look at your friend….Happy: Yeah, but when he walks into the store the waves part in front of him… I want to walk into the store the way he walks in. (Act-I) ii. Willi: 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 stand by? And the buyers I brought and the cheers when he came out, Loman, Loman, Loman. God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. (Act-I) iii. Willy: That’s why I thank Almighty God you are built like Adonises.” (Act-I) The first example alludes to Moses and the remaining two to Greek gods.
Conflict : There are two types of conflicts in the play, Death of a Salesman. The first one is the external conflict that is going on between Willy Loman and the competitive world around him as well as his own family. Another is the internal conflict of Willy, his fight with the heavy odds of life, and about the troubles of his life how they are going to be resolved.
Climax : The climax of the play, Death of a Salesman, occurs when Willy confronts his distressed son, Biff, for the last time.
Characters: Death of a Salesman presents both static as well as dynamic characters . Willy’s sons Biff, and Happy are dynamic characters as they change their attitude toward life as well as their father. However, the rest of the characters do not see any change in their behavior as they are static characters like Willy Loman, Linda, Charlie, and Bernard.
Irony : The play shows situational irony in the following examples, i. That’s just what I mean. Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want. (Act-I) ii. CHARLEY (an arm on Bernard’s shoulder) : How do you like this kid? Gonna argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. The irony is clear in the first example through the mention of Adonises and in the second through the mention of the Supreme Court.
Metaphor : Death of a Salesman shows good use of various metaphors besides the extended metaphors of good versus evil such as, i. I am a dime a dozen, and so are you. (Act-II) ii. The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress. (Act-I) These examples show that characters and the world have been compared to different things to make them feel prominent.
Mood : The Play, Death of a Salesman, shows a melancholic, though it becomes tragic, ironic, and highly satiric at times. Sometimes, it also becomes gloomy when Willy is trapped in the troubles of life
Motif : Most essential motifs of Death of a Salesman are mythic figures, the American West, and the African jungle.
Protagonist : Willy Loman is the protagonist of the play. The text starts with his discontent with his life and ends with his tragic death.
Rhetorical Questions : The play shows the use of rhetorical questions at various places such as, i. CHARLEY: Without pay? What kind of a job is a job without pay? (Act-II) ii. WILLY: What’s the matter with you? I’ve got a job. (Act-II) iii. CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? These examples show the use of rhetorical questions asked by Charley and Willy but they do not need answers. They are self-explanatory.
Theme : A theme is a central idea that the novelist or the writer wants to stress upon. The play, Death of a Salesman, shows the clash between dream and reality, the idea of the American dream and betrayal.
Setting : The setting of the play is Willy Loman’s house, his yard, and other places he visits in Boston and New York.
Tone : The tone of the text is somber, serious, melancholic, and tragic.
Simile : The play shows the use of similes at various places such as, WILLY: Sure. Certain men just don’t get started till later in life. Like Thomas Edison; I think. Or B. F. Goodrich. (Act-I) ii. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. (Act-I) iii. Like a young god. Hercules — something like that. (Act-I) These use of “like” in these examples show as things have been compared such as men with Thomas Edison, then Willy with an old dog, and then a person with Hercules.
Symbols : Death of a Salesman presents various symbols such as seeds and diamond symbolize Willy’s hope and the American dream and the rubber horse symbolizes false hopes.

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Death of a Salesman

Read our detailed notes on the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Our notes cover Death of a Salesman summary and analysis.

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.

Initially the play was titled as The inside of His Head, however, later he appears dissatisfied with the title and conferred the second title of the play i.e., Death of a Salesman. We, from the 1 st title, get a deep intuition into the psychosomatic temperament of the central character who is a salesman.

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller reconnoiters subjects of money, death and the loss of individuality. Other than the American Dream, Willy Loman desires nothing. He craves his brother’s prosperity and endeavors for a flawless life, nonetheless, he frequently is unsuccessful to accomplish his dreams.

He, as a salesman, is subject to the impulses of the flea market and thinks that it is this job that can only rise him in the world of business. But, due to a miserable financial status, he couldn’t secure a loan for his son to start his own business. And in the end, Willy commits suicide, realizing his so little accomplishments in his life.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary

Willy Loman, after having set out on a sales trip to Portland, Maine that morning, returns to his Brooklyn home very late at night since he continually drove his car off the side of the road. Willy, who is now sixty-three years old, has been working as a traveling salesman for more than thirty years. Recently, his sales rate has declined as his old costumes are either dying or retiring.

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.

Biff and Happy, Willy’s two sons, upstairs in their bedroom recalls their past happier times of their adolescents and compares it with their disappointing lives of today. Biff, now thirty-four years of age, has held four different jobs since graduating from his high school. He senses that he’s not moving ahead toward anything at all.

At a high school, he was among the best football player but couldn’t get a college scholarship since he failed the mathematics test and declined to earn money for his summer school to graduate. After working on a farm in Texas, Biff has just returned home and Willy, that morning, begins criticizing for his failures to earn money and to find a prestigious profession.

Happy, the younger son of Willy, works as a low-level sales position in New York City, employing most of his time seducing women. Biff and Happy, as they talk, resolve that they can be effective, successful, and happier if they initiate a business of their own, together.

Meanwhile, Willy sits downstairs in the kitchen and talks to himself loudly, recalling happy moments from past: their family car cleaned by Biff and Happy, Biff’s preparation for his important football game, willy’s joyfully working on projects around his own home, his afternoon with a woman in a hotel room on trips to Boston.

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.

Meanwhile, Linda comes downstairs and speaks to Biff and Happy that she dreads that Willy is planning to kill himself as she had found a piece of rubber hose that was connected to a gas pipe in the basement. The conversation turns to dreams when Willy returns home: of Biff becoming a successful entrepreneur and a salesman that Willy has of him. Willy advises Biff, upon which the whole family agrees, to see Bill Oliver, one of his former bosses, and request for a mortgage so that he can start his own sporting goods business.

The very next morning, Willy visits his boss, Wagner, to requests for a place in the New York office. However, despite getting a new place, Wagner fires him from the job. Leaving Wagner’s office, Willy directs his way to Charley’s office to request for a mortgage to pay off his bills where he meets Bernard, Charley’s son. Bernard was a boyhood friend or Biff and Happy, now a successful lawyer dealing with cases before Supreme Court. Willy, being amazed, inquiries that how he was able to succeed since Biff and Happy failed, however, Bernard asks Willy why Biff never went to school to graduate, after doing badly in a mathematics course for a scholarship.

Happy arranges a dinner in a local restaurant so as to celebrate the successful meeting of biff with Mr. Oliver, however, when Biff reaches he informs that his owner didn’t recognize him, and Biff, as a reaction, angrily stole Mr. Oliver’s fountain pen.

Biff lies to his parents about his meeting (that it was a successful one) when hears about his father’s news that he is fired so as to console them. At the restaurant, happy arranges two women to join them. When Willy excuses for the washroom, Biff and Happy abandon their father and leave the restaurant with their father. While in the washroom, Willy recalls the time when Biff failed his Mathematics test and comes to Boston on a surprise visit and discover him with another woman in a hotel room. It was because of this incident that Biff refused to join summer school and to graduate from high school.

Willy, after leaving the restaurant, resolves on the way to the home that the only way to provide the best livings is that he commits suicide. By doing so, the twenty thousand dollars for his life insurance settlement would come to his family.

When Biff and Happy return from their date with the women, they encounter Linda’s scolding for abandoning their father at the restaurant. In return, Biff angrily accused his father and brother of not taking life seriously and claims that he, now finally, knows himself and will work at the farm with his own hands, that gives him more satisfaction than any other job could. Biff confronts everything and cries at his father’s shoulders.

Willy, moved by Biff’s affectations, leaves home and drives the car to commit suicide and ultimately died. Linda, in the last scene, in the graveyard, talks ironically to Willy that he killed himself in the same way when they ended disbursing for their house.

Death of a Salesman Characters Analysis

Willy loman.

He is a sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman. Willy has started dwelling on past unknown of the present condition. His past life frequently flashes back before his eyes in the last two days of his life. He has two sons, Biff and happy, who he wants to have a cherished lifestyle and worldly success, though he is unable to help to achieve it. At last, he commits suicide, the last gesture for his family, so that they can have a lavish lifestyle by the insurance money.

He is the elder son of Willy Loman. Biff, thirty-three-year-old, is still in search of himself. The best football player at school, couldn’t get anywhere for further studies. When his owner refused to give a loan, frustrated, he steals his owner’s cheap fountain pen. Though he loves his father, however, because of his defeated state curses him as a fool and a dreamer.

Happy Loman

He is Willy Loman’s younger son, who is somehow successful in his life, he works as a clerk in a store. He is a womanizer, who chases a woman to seek pleasure.

He is a friend and a neighbor of Willy Loman. He provides money to Willy and also suggests him a job.

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

She is Willy’s wife. She is fearful, however, patient woman. Despite Willy’s failures, she loves him very much and consoles him in his hard times.

Howard Wagner

He is the son of Willy’s boss at the company. He fired him from the company and let him know that he is no more able to work as a salesman

He is a brother of Willy. He is a rich man whose success is an accusation to Willy. He once goes into the jungle and comes out, after a few years, from the diamond mines, a rich man.

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.

One of the most important themes of the play Death of a Salesman is the failure of the American dream. The American dream symbolizes a promise and commitment of opportunity and freedom for all. Those who follow the American dream believed that the only way to accomplish a dream is hard work and those who work hard are only qualified to be the follower of the American dream.

The followers of American dream believe in a happy and prosperous life; moreover, they also believe that those who are born Americans naturally acquires a happy and prosperous life. Moloch, money, and materialism have become the famous song of the followers of American dreams. They believed that, in a material world, one is always destined to have a prosperous and successful life. Failure is no option for the one born in America and if a failure occurs, suicide is much better than that failure.

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.

Opposing this expectancy, he was downgraded and terminated. He, financially ruined, had to lend money from his friend to pay off his bills.

Furthermore, his son Biff, from whom Willy had great expectations, has ruined his life by not joining the school. Biff, another follower of American dreams, didn’t know how to start his career from the bottom and also wants to start from the top. Biff was not settled in his life, even in the age of Thirty-four, he was moving from one job to another. It was wearisome for Willy to see the unsettled life of both of his son. Failure of his son was equally burdened for him as his own failure.

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

Fake existence

Willy Loman turned out to be an obsessive believer of the deity of success. Success, to him, was life, and life is all about success. He was ambitious to make his dream for successive life a reality. He not only became ambitious is striving towards success but also made his son ambitious, too. There was no limit in his struggle to achieve his dreams as they were natural, however, the consequences of all the struggle that he made turned out to be humiliating.

Willy, throughout his life, encourages his son to realize the principles of the American dreams, but Biff turned out to be immature and reckless boy who couldn’t proper in getting a settled life and a salaried job and turned out to be a briber; Happy carried dishonor by seducing the women in his store whom he had no concern at all. Willy was penniless when fired from the job, and borrowed from his friend Charley, in order to give an impression to his wife, Linda, that he is earning money.

Willy was living a fanciful, fake life that was filled with illusions. He was full of arrogance, egocentric and unreasonably over-assertive. It was because of these flaws that he was unable to accept and face the reality. Sightless to his genuine dilemma he instigated to hide in the sanctuary of illusion. Despite his total failure, he wasn’t accepting his failure. It was more insulting and painful for him to accept his failure.

It was due to this reason, he stopped talking to his friends and avoided people around. He would use to lie to others and was just making himself a fool by a false vision of his popularity.

Nature versus City

The comparison between nature and city is shown through Willy’s love for music. He is a great admirer of natures. When Willy’s self goes close to his nature, the music plays in a loud tune. This melody is a representation of Willy’s sentimental yearning for instinctive rusticity that has exemplified in the affiliation between music and Willy.

It appears that Willy is certainly prone to adore and appreciate nature. When we traced the family background of Willy Loman, we see that Willy father was a wanderer, a musician, a maker of flute and a pioneer. Similarly, his brother Ben was also an adventurer. Willy’s son has strong athletic skills. Thus all of them were wonderful in outdoor skills. However, Willy’s monetary anxieties locked in on him, overwhelming him with the need to produce money.

Morality versus Immortality

The dramatist Arthur Miller has said that besides hunger and thrust, to leave a thumbprint after death is also another strong need of humans. Every human, consciously or unconsciously, has a strong desire to be remembered after his death. Physically man is mortal, however, through his deed, he can make himself immortal. In the play, Willy is a symbol of failure. He is accused, mocked, and humiliated by many. He is considered petty and useless. It was because of this, he planned suicide and the insurance money of twenty thousand dollars will be given to the family which will settle their lives. Willy, by committing suicide made himself immortal.

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.

The play The Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy that depicts the last days of the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. The play is both emotionally and psychologically realistic when the action occurs in the present; however, when the action occurs in past, the drama appears more dreamlike. For instance, only Willy can see the scenes when his sons Biff and Happy are in high school. Moreover, to inculcate Willy’s elder brother Ben, a rich man whom Willy consulted for advice when things were not functioning well in his life, a flashback system is also used.

The plot of the play is complex not only because it chains past and present events but also as it propagates out of a period of deceits, lies, and reputation. The tragic hero, Willy, is unable to uphold his energetic life on the path as a traveling salesman and is looking for a stable job in New York City. On request for this job, he is fired by his boss, Howard Wagner, the son of the man who hired him in the first place. Furthermore, he is burdened by his Thirty-four-year-old son Biff, who has recently returned from the farms in Texas in hopes of finding a salaried job in New York.

Biff and Happy have moved back to their parent’s house lamenting of their failures and their loss of innocence. Their boyhood friend’s Bernard, success has become accusation for both of them. Only Bernard has realized his dreams. Both brothers, consequently, blame Willy for not directing them well, though their resentment is yet oppressed with respect and affection.

Linda, during the quarrel, discloses before her sons that their father has been attempting to suicide by different means that is he has attempted suicide in a car with series of accidents and also with a hose that is fastened to a gas pipe. Upon hearing this, Biff decides to modify his life for his father. Act 1 of the play closes with the acquainted renunciation of long-standing abrasions and Biff’s promise to create a professional deal in New York.

The act two opens with Biff, Happy and Willy’s meeting at a restaurant. Willy, after being fired from the job, hopes to listen to good news regarding his meeting with his former boss, however, Biff reveals him the scene of the stolen fountain pen.

Shocked, Willy departures to the restroom, where he recalls the crucial and critical moment of his and Biff’s life, i.e., the time when Biff discovers his father with another woman in a hotel room, after coming back from failing math course. Biff, crumpled by his dad’s unfaithfulness with his mother, snubbed to go to summer school and to graduate from high school. This incident was the beginning of the series of trivial tragedies and insignificant robberies that have tumble-down his life.

The family, after meeting in the restaurant, reunite at home. In this gathering, they have the final short-tempered confrontation. Both Willy and Biff accuses each other: Biff accuses his father of not taking his life seriously and calls him the cause of his failures while Willy accuses Biff of spoiling his life without any reason.

Linda, a patient lady, and a peacemaker try to calm them down, however, is shouted down. Biff throws a hose before Willy and asks him whether committing suicide will make a hero out of him or something else. Willy starts weeping and both of them reconciled crying on each other’s shoulders. When the rest of the family goes to sleep. Willy accelerates his car for suicide in hope that the insurance money will provide Biff to initiate his own business and a new life that he greatly needs.

105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Examples

Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis.

UMD Libraries announce the recipients of the 2024 Library Awards for Undergraduate Research and the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Award

drawing of a trophy with the text: Library Award for Undergraduate Research

The University of Maryland Libraries is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Library Awards for Undergraduate Research. This year’s Library Award for Undergraduate Research is Masong Yang, class of 2025 majoring in history. Julia Grafstein, class of 2024, also studying history, is the recipient of the Libraries’ Award for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) research.

The Library Award for Undergraduate Research and IDEA Award competition is open to all currently enrolled undergraduates. Each year, awards of $1,000 are issued to undergraduates whose work best demonstrates the value of using library services and information resources in research projects. The IDEA award seeks to recognize and empower students to explore diversity issues, educate themselves, and inspire others to advance social justice by embracing IDEA values in their research.

Julia Grafstein: 2024 Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Library Award Winner

Grafstein's submission is a research paper written for the History Honors Thesis program at the University of Maryland. Her submission explores coalition-building in the transgender movement which has received scant attention from scholars in history or gender studies. In an effort to understand trans activists' motivations and how they worked with others, this thesis analyzes the partnerships formed within the transgender community and with potential allies of the lesbian, gay, and feminist communities. Using archival records, magazines and newspapers, published reports, and oral histories, this thesis argues that trans activism in the period between 1970 and the end of the 1990s was multifarious, fractious and inconsistent. It also demonstrates that trans activists worked to build coalitions with potential allies in the women's movement and the gay and lesbian rights movement whenever possible. Such coalitions held the promise of greater influence and of shared values. Grafstein submitted only the introduction and my second chapter of a larger thesis. The submission focuses on transgender coalition-building within the transgender community and gives insight into the internal struggles of a nascent movement.

Dr. Katarina Keane, who supported Grafstein’s application, writes "Julia examines the challenging, slow, contentious but ultimately successful work at building a trans rights movement in the late twentieth century. She is attuned to the subtle ways that trans activists were at odds but worked to find common ground and to advance rights and access to resources for their community. Julia’s papers offered an innovative and valuable contribution to the historical literature on the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and trans activism. As Robyn Muncy, the director of the department honors program noted, this was "a gutsy and painful history to uncover."

Mason Yang: Winner of the 2024 Library Award for Undergraduate Research

Written as a research paper for an independent study, Yang seeks to define what masculinity and success looked like to Jewish men in the mid-twentieth century. To do so, this paper examines New York Times obituaries throughout the 1940s and analyzes the content that prominent Jewish men had published about themselves. These obituaries represent the fulfillment of the Jewish male aspirations and what they wanted to be known for. Along with this, this paper also explores Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a 1949 play that narrates the life and death of an “everyman.” While he strives to find success and fame for himself and his family, he fails to achieve the same aspirations as the men in the obituaries. Ultimately, this paper works to add complexity and new dialogue to the understanding of Jewish masculinity and also seeks to generate interest in comparatively working with both nonfiction and fiction primary printed sources.

Dr. Bernie Cooperman, who supported Yang’s application, writes "What made Mason’s paper stand out was not just the sophistication of the task he had set for himself but also the next step. Mason went looking for a literary source that could help him bring his newspaper accounts into focus. I intend to use his model and his research in creating library exercises for students in two of my courses next year requiring all students to do a (more limited) newspaper search and analysis with reference to literary sources. If Mason could do it more or less on his own, I think students will be able to do it on a more limited scope and with more direction and help."

Members of the 2024 Awards Jury were Patricia Kosco Cossard, Chair, University Libraries; Katy Lawly, Senior Lecturer and Faculty Director, Master of Information Management (MIM), CPIM, CIRPS, College of Information Studies; Eric Lindquist, History, American Studies, Classics, and Religion Librarian; Celina McDonald, Government Information & Criminology Libraria; Jordan Sly, Head of Humanities and Social Science Librarians, Anthropology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Digital Humanities, and SLLC Librarian for German, Italian and French Studies, University Libraries. These awards were funded by the generosity of the University of Maryland Libraries.

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Death of a Salesman

Arthur miller, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The central conflict of the play is between Willy and his elder son Biff , who showed great promise as a young athlete and ladies' man, but in adulthood has become a thief and drifter with no clear direction. Willy's other son, Happy , while on a more secure career path, is superficial and seems to have no loyalty to anyone.

By delving into Willy's memories, the play is able to trace how the values Willy instilled in his sons—luck over hard work, likability over expertise—led them to disappoint both him and themselves as adults. The dream of grand, easy success that Willy passed on to his sons is both barren and overwhelming, and so Biff and Happy are aimless, producing nothing, and it is Willy who is still working, trying to plant seeds in the middle of the night, in order to give his family sustenance. Biff realizes, at the play's climax, that only by escaping from the dream that Willy has instilled in him will father and son be free to pursue fulfilling lives. Happy never realizes this, and at the end of the play he vows to continue in his father's footsteps, pursuing an American Dream that will leave him empty and alone.

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Three Lives Entwined by Tragedy — and a Love of Literature

In Monica Wood’s rich new novel, “How to Read a Book,” death, prison and poetry become the catalyst for new beginnings.

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The cover shows a stylized illustration of a cozy well-lit bookshop with white folding chairs out front and a bird perched atop the entry door.

By Helen Simonson

Helen Simonson is the author of “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” and “The Summer Before the War.” Her latest novel, “The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club ,” is out now.

HOW TO READ A BOOK, by Monica Wood

”How to Read a Book” might be the perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours. It’s a charming, openhearted novel, deceptively easy to read but layered with sharp observations, hard truths and rich ideas.

Set in Portland, Maine, the novel opens in a women’s prison book club full of caustic inmates whose spirited discussions reveal a thick vein of humor and a weary compassion. According to Violet, a young woman with a manslaughter conviction and a gift for wicked turns of phrase, the weekly meetings are the highlight of a prison life so dull that “every day: same, same, same. The boredom feels like lice and you itch all over.” She and her fellow members have insulted every book choice but, she admits, “sometimes a sparkling sentence can really rip you up.”

Violet’s voice is self-aware, with a haunting fragility beneath the tough talk. And just as we fall for her we also meet Frank, a bookstore handyman still stunned by the death of his wife in a drunk-driving accident — caused by Violet. So much for easy! Wadsworth Books, a warm and welcoming independent bookstore full of young people and foster cats, is also the favorite haunt of our third narrative voice: the book club’s leader, Harriet, a widowed English teacher who is struggling to find purpose. “Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all,” she reflects. Harriet cultivates her prison book club as if gardening, “exposing the women to the open air of literature, to the sunshine of fresh ideas.” When Violet is released from prison, Harriet bumps into her at the bookstore and must hustle her to safety as Frank suffers a full meltdown.

Even after these three lives are neatly entangled (and recounted in alternating chapters), the heart of the story remains Violet, who stumbles into a job as an assistant at a research lab dedicated to proving that African gray parrots don’t just talk but also think (at last, real talking animals!). As she makes her fresh start, with the help of Harriet and occasional acts of random kindness from strangers, Violet still has to face Frank and the tragedy she caused.

Harriet instructs us that “stories have a ‘meanwhile’ — an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along,” and so the many layers of “meanwhile” delicately accrue. The novel asks us to stop and consider: Which kinds of people deserve second chances? Are people their worst acts, or a lifetime of better days? Is it possible to stop judging fictional characters (or each other in this divided, angry world) long enough to see that we are all “fellow creatures”? Personally, I want to talk about the parrots whose powers of cognition did nothing to free them from their life sentences.

Another “meanwhile”: The story here also serves as a meditation on the power of books. While Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 poetry collection “Spoon River Anthology” plays a prominent role, works from J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Butler Yeats to Zadie Smith and Maya Angelou underpin and suffuse every chapter.

“Harriet had always considered Angelou a tad pious,” Wood notes — a pot-calling-kettle moment that made me chortle, as “How to Read a Book” nudges the conscience as much as it pulls at the heartstrings. But it is also generously seasoned with unexpected twists and a wonderful wit. It’s never saccharine. In book clubs and in life, sometimes you just need a break from the sense of gritty hopelessness. This novel is a reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world.

HOW TO READ A BOOK | By Monica Wood | Mariner Books | 288 pp. | $28

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What Is a Good Thesis Statement for "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller?
A valid and provocative thesis statement on Arthur Miller's Pulitzer-prize-winning play "Death of a Salesman" should focus on one of the major themes of the play. These themes revolve around the ideas of denial, abandonment and the disorder of madness. Because everyone in the Loman family in "Death of a Salesman" is either living in ...
A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
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 ...
Death of a Salesman: Full Play Analysis
Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, explores the promises and perils of the American Dream. As the Loman family struggles with what it means to be successful and happy in post-war America, its members serve as symbolic representations of the struggle to define that dream. The play ends with the death of one salesman's Sisyphean ...
Death of a Salesman Study Guide
Key Facts about 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.
Death of a Salesman
Essays Sample A+ Essay: Willy Loman's Constant Reminiscing and Thinking of the Past. Next . To an unusual degree, The Death of a Salesman interweaves past and present action. Willy Loman, the play's protagonist, repeatedly revisits old memories, sometimes even conflating them with the present moment. But these memories are not the sentimental ...
Analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Categories: Drama Criticism, Literature. 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 ...
Death of a Salesman
Introduction to Death of a Salesman. Death of a Salesman a play having "two acts and a requiem" is the masterpiece of Arthur Miller written in 1948 and produced in 1949. The popularity and success of the play demonstrate the strength of its story.The play was adapted for various tableaus, films, and course books across the globe, securing a Pulitzer Prize for Miller.
Major Themes in Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman addresses loss of identity and a man's inability to accept change within himself and society. The play is a montage of memories, dreams, confrontations, and arguments, all of which make up the last 24 hours of Willy Loman's life. The three major themes within the play are denial, contradiction, and order versus disorder.
Death of a Salesman
The basis for the dramatic conflict in Death of a Salesman lies in Arthur Miller's conflicted relationship with his uncle, Manny Newman, also a salesman. Newman imagined a continuous competition between his son and Miller. Newman refused to accept failure and demanded the appearance of utmost confidence in his household.
Death of a Salesman: Study Guide
Flashcards. Overview. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller premiered in 1949 and remains a powerful exploration of the American Dream and its toll on individuals and families. The play revolves around Willy Loman, a traveling salesman whose aspirations for success and elevated social status lead to a tragic unraveling of his mental state.
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Plot Summary
Death of a Salesman Summary. Next. Act 1. Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, returns home to Brooklyn early from a sales trip. At the age of 63, he has lost his salary and is working only on commission, and on this trip has failed to sell anything. His son Biff, who has been laboring on farms and ranches throughout the West for more than a ...
Death of a Salesman
About Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman addresses loss of identity and a man's inability to accept change within himself and society. The play is a montage of memories, dreams, confrontations, and arguments, all of which make up the last 24 hours of Willy Loman's life. The play concludes with Willy's suicide and ...
Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman is a 1949 stage play written by the American playwright Arthur Miller.The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949, running for 742 performances. It is a two-act tragedy set in late 1940s Brooklyn told through a montage of memories, dreams, and arguments of the protagonist Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is despondent with his life and appears to be slipping into ...
Death of a Salesman
Pulitzer Prize. Death of a Salesman, a play in "two acts and a requiem" by Arthur Miller, written in 1948 and produced in 1949. Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for the work, which he described as "the tragedy of a man who gave his life, or sold it" in pursuit of the American Dream. After many years on the road as a traveling salesman, Willy ...
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary and Analysis
The play The Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy that depicts the last days of the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. The play is both emotionally and psychologically realistic when the action occurs in the present; however, when the action occurs in past, the drama appears more dreamlike. For instance, only Willy can see the scenes ...
Death of a Salesman Critical Essays
Analysis. Death of a Salesman raises many issues, not only of artistic form but also of thematic content. Dramatically speaking, the play represents Arthur Miller's desire to modernize the ...
Death of a Salesman Themes
The tragedy of Willy's death comes about because of his inability to distinguish between his value as an economic resource and his identity as a human being. The Woman, with whom Willy cheats on Linda, is able to feed Willy's salesman ego by "liking" him. He is proud of being…. read analysis of Abandonment and Betrayal. Previous.
THE CRITICAL FORTUNES OF ARTHUR MILLER'S
DEATH OF A SALESMAN by Angela M. Metzger Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Summer 2009 This thesis undertakes the task of exploring Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman through various venues and critical interpretations. In particular, it will focus
Death of a Salesman Sample Essay Outlines
Outline. I. Thesis Statement: Being a salesman not only constitutes Willy's occupation but shapes his entire personality and outlook on life. His identity as a salesman greatly influences his ...
105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Samples
Updated: Dec 6th, 2023. 12 min. Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller's multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis. We will write.
Death of a Salesman: Full Play Summary
Upset at his father's unrelenting misconception that he, Biff, was a salesman for Oliver, Biff plans to relieve Willy of his illusions. Willy enters, and Biff tries gently, at first, to tell him what happened at Oliver's office. Willy blurts out that he was fired. Stunned, Biff again tries to let Willy down easily.
UMD Libraries announce the recipients of the 2024 Library Awards for
Grafstein's submission is a research paper written for the History Honors Thesis program at the University of Maryland. Her submission explores coalition-building in the transgender movement which has received scant attention from scholars in history or gender studies. ... this paper also explores Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a 1949 ...
Manoa Valley Theatre Presents "Death of A Salesman"
Honolulu (KHON2) - Former Executive Director of Manoa Valley Theatre, Dwight Martin is returning to the stage as a performer in "Death of a Salesman." Dwight Martin will play Willy Loman, an ...
Fathers and Sons Theme in Death of a Salesman
Fathers and Sons Theme Analysis. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Death of a Salesman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The central conflict of the play is between Willy and his elder son Biff, who showed great promise as a young athlete and ladies' man, but in adulthood has become a thief and ...
Three Lives Entwined by Tragedy
In Monica Wood's rich new novel, "How to Read a Book," death, prison and poetry become the catalyst for new beginnings. By Helen Simonson Helen Simonson is the author of "Major Pettigrew ...
Death of a Salesman: Mini Essays
When Willy and Linda purchased their home, the neighborhood was quieter than they now find it. The house was surrounded by space and sunlight. Willy was a young man with ambitious hopes for the future, and his house represented a space in which he could expand his dreams. In the present, the house is hemmed in on all sides by apartment units.
‎We Have A Meeting: Death of a salesman?
Join us this for week's episode as Zac and Jack discuss the death of a salesman - Is the future for sales bleak? Why do people need to get good now ===== WANT TO ELEVATE YOUR PODCAST GAME? 🎤 Get in touch! https://shorturl.at/hkIPV NEED HELP WITH SALES…

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

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UMD Libraries announce the recipients of the 2024 Library Awards for Undergraduate Research and the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Award

Death of a Salesman

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