Death of a Salesman

1. Death of a Salesman Key Aspects

2. Key Aspects • Tone - Death of a Salesman has a tone of high tragedy. Despite the banal subject matter--this is not the family of Oedipus the King but a family of lower middle-class New Yorkers--Miller treats the Lomans like doomed Greek heroes. Through the heightened reality of Willy's disintegration, we see the epic scale on which Willy lived his small life. Thus his life is brought up to the level of high tragedy. It is the epic tragedy of the everyman .Accordingly, the tone of the play is dishearteningly sad, being quite morose and morbid. The family members hide their sadness behind a facade of greatness and imagined success, which gives individual lines an overt tone of pride but an obviously ironic subtext carrying a tone of shame and disappointment. The disappointment also leads to many lines expressed in anger. Just about the only sincerely happy emotions and lines occur when the two manly brothers think about picking up women, and when they succeed in doing so. In this area is their only demonstrated success.

3. Setting • Setting - The play is set in New York City in the postwar 1940s: "The action takes place in Willy Loman's house and yard and in various places he visits in the New York and Boston of today." The action bounces frequently from the present to the past, reaching back to scenes from as early as Biff's and Happy's later childhood. One major scene from the past takes place in Boston. In an important sense the real setting is Willy Loman's mind, without which we would not have the scenes from the past or from out of town, seen through Willy's memories.

4. P.O.V. • Point of View - Much of the play is seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Willy Loman. Significant parts of both scenes take place inside his memories. When the action occurs in the present day, however, we are outside Willy's mind, and the point of view is third-person. Frequently the attention of the audience is matched with his family members and acquaintances in their focus on what is going on with Willy. Given his depression and senility, Willy is far from a reliable narrator. Even worse, he and his sons commonly rely on false stories about their greatness in order to feel like they amount to something, so their factual statements cannot be taken at face value. Their expressions of negative emotion about one another, however, seem sincere; this occurs when they cannot keep up their charades of family joy. Willy's wife Linda is the most sincere member of the family.

5. Character Development • Character Development - The main arc of the play is the fast disintegration of Willy Loman's identity, which had already taken major hits prior to the opening lines. He has been so wrapped up in status and success that he cannot allow himself to conceive of failure. He did almost everything right as a salesman but never distinguished himself in a way to earn a promotion to management. Thus, he dutifully paid his bills but had nothing to show for his life's work (except a house with a mortgage that was almost paid off). Over the course of the play, he is forced to accept the truth: he is a failure, the system did not reward his hard work because it was merely mediocre, and he was a major factor in the failure of his son Biff. Willy's one victory (since he and his wife seem to take their love as a given) is his final recognition that he loves his sons and they love him, despite all the animosity and disappointment. But this only puts his failures in sharper relief. Willy has let himself feel some final hopes for success, but as these hopes fail, his descent into depression and senility becomes complete.

6. Character Development • Linda's character is tragic, too, for she does what she can to support her husband in his decline. Her love is not enough, for he has been focused on success outside of marriage, and she descends into grief. The development of Biff's character is presented through revelations about the past. He was a successful football player in high school, but after feeling deeply betrayed by his father extramarital affair, he spitefully (and irrationally) punished his father by refusing to amount to anything. At the same time, he blames his father for giving him an irrational level of pride that made it impossible for him to hold down a job under a boss. By the end of the play, now in his mid-thirties, he seems to be finally ready to move on, having understood how he became who he is and ready to make choices in accord with his true self.

7. Themes • Themes - The Dangers of Modern Capitalism - Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, when the United States was emerging from the economic difficulties of the Depression and the Second World War. The 1950s became a decade of unprecedented consumerism and technical advances in America, and Miller finds occasion here to recount the obsolescence of Willy Loman's career in that traveling salesmen were rapidly becoming out-of-date. Although Willy Loman is deeply flawed, there is something compelling about his nostalgia for a time when his career was valued. Many innovations applied specifically to the home; it was in the 1950s that the television and the washing machine became common household objects. Significantly, Willy reaches for modern objects, the car and the gas heater, to assist him in his suicide. Overall, the danger of modern capitalism is that as the pace of technological advances quickens, it is easier and easier to find one's skills and even one's whole profession becoming obsolete. A lifetime of hard work is not valued by the market as much as someone's actual competitiveness today. Note that when the son of Willy's boss becomes the new boss, the son does not value Willy's longtime relationship to the company.

8. Themes • Madness - Madness is, in one sense, a major deviation from "normal" society, and in another sense it is an actual psychological condition. How can we tell the difference? Madness is a dangerous theme for many artists, whose creativity might put them on the edge of what is socially acceptable themselves. It appears that Willy has seldom been honest with himself about his business achievements, but he has always been on the safe side of sanity. As everything unravels, however, he becomes depressed enough to commit suicide. His approaching age also forces us to consider where Willy is going senile. His visions, which lead him to talk to people from his past (in both actual past situations and imaginary present ones), make clear that he is not sane; but is it because of his sadness, his old age, or some kind of coping strategy in the face of deep anxiety and loss? The expression of Willy's madness reflects the greatest technical innovation of the play--its seamless hops back and forth in time and through the set. The audience or reader quickly realizes that the jumps are based on Willy's confused perspective as products of his confused mind. Willy's madness and unreliability as a narrator become more and more of an issue, both for us and for the other characters, as his hallucinations gain strength. We must decide for ourselves, for example, how concrete of a character Ben is, and even how reliable the plot and narrative structure are, given that so much of the story comes through the perspective of the less and less sane Willy Loman.

9. Themes • Cult of Personality - One of Miller's techniques throughout the play is to familiarize certain characters by having them repeat the same key line over and over. Willy's signature line is that businessmen must be well-liked, rather than merely liked, and his business strategy is based entirely on the idea of a cult of personality. He believes that it is not what a person is able to accomplish, but which people he knows and how he treats them, that will get a man ahead in the world. This viewpoint is tragically undermined not only by Willy's failure but also by that of his sons, who learned from him that they could make their way in life using only their charms and good looks, rather than any more solid talents. This has worked in their social life with women but not anywhere else.

10. Themes • Nostalgia and Regret: One of the reigning emotions throughout this play is nostalgia, tinged with regret. It is a key element of Willy's sadness. All of the Loman’s, especially the men, feel that they have made mistakes or wrong choices. The technical aspects of the play feed this emotion by making seamless transitions back and forth from happier, earlier times in the play. Youth is more suited to the American Dream, and Willy's business ideas do not seem as sad or as bankrupt when he has an entire lifetime ahead of him to prove their merit. Biff looks back nostalgically to the time when he was a high school athletic hero and, more importantly, regrets the loss of the time when he did not know that his father was a fake and an adulterer--when he still idolized his father. The nostalgia of the Loman men also is based, as nostalgia often is, on unreal, overly rosy recollections of a better past.

11. Themes • Opportunity: Tied up intimately with the idea of the American Dream is the concept of opportunity. America is commonly seen as the land of opportunity, where economic achievement and social mobility are open to anyone. Even the poorest man should be able to move upward in life through his own hard work. Miller complicates this idea of opportunity by looking at a likely endpoint for many who bank on the belief that hard work and entrepreneurship are enough. Time proves that most people are mediocre and do not reach their aggrandizing dreams, while others fail because of the inherent risks in capitalism's opportunities. As people age, their opportunities seem more limited. Does Willy really have a career choice to turn to, having been a salesman for essentially his whole career and now being in his sixties and out of a job? His only remaining opportunity, which fails in the asking, is to be a different kind of salesman--a stationary one instead of a traveling one. After Willy realizes that he has no opportunities left, he turns to suicide and insurance money as the last opportunity to bring money into his family.

12. Themes • Can a potential employer trust Biff, now in his thirties and with his history of theft and disrespect for authority? Biff banked on his athletic prowess to the point that he failed to graduate from high school on time and never got his life back on track. He basically ruined his prospects with a decision that he made at the age of eighteen. He had the chance to redeem himself by taking a summer course, but he chose not to. Now, there seems to be no going back for Biff; he knows that the only career he can maintain is one that gives him the opportunity to use his strength of body and independent spirit. At least, this would be the kind of career he would develop if he had the money and the opportunity. Bernard, from the same high school, has made the most of his opportunities. By studying hard in school and succeeding in a lucrative career, he has risen through the ranks of his profession and is now preparing to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. Marriage, most people believe, limits one's romantic opportunities to one's spouse. Willy Loman finds opportunity for an affair while far from home, however, but he is caught availing himself of the opportunity when Biff finds him unexpectedly.

13. Themes • Growth: This is a story of endings, with growth either a memory or a dashed or impossible hope. Willy does not recognize that his business principles are not enough, and he continues to emphasize the wrong qualities (making friends instead of work to get ahead), so he remains stagnant and does not grow in his career or in his personal life. Biff and Happy are similarly stuck with their childhood names in their childhood bedrooms when we meet them. They have tried other things but ended up more or less where they began. Biff also remains hobbled by his childhood problems, unable to overcome his bitterness toward his father. In a poignant moment at the end of the play, Willy literally (and metaphorically) tries to plant some seeds when he realizes that his family has not grown at all over time and that he has utterly failed to provide for his own retirement, either financially or in his relationship with his sons. All of the money has gone to maintenance and the mortgage, but Willy does not seem to value the capital he has amassed in his home so much as the physical results of his successful home projects. Yet, these projects give him no sense of growth, for the neighborhood has encroached on his property and his yard and has made him feel smaller and smaller instead of any larger.

14. Themes • Gender Relations: Tragically, Willy cannot be satisfied with the deep, sincere love of his wife; he takes her for granted as he tries to succeed. She is content with domestic life, but this is never good enough for him. While Willy is willing to cheat on his wife, to his sons Linda is the unmatched Madonna, the paragon of a good woman, wife, and mother. The other women are merely sexual or romantic conquests, portrayed as easy to get by the manly brothers. (Take, for instance, the woman with whom Willy has an affair and Miss Forsythe.) The men curse themselves for engaging these women primarily for their bodies but are still irrepressably drawn to them. In a somewhat Oedipal moment, Happy laments that he cannot find a woman like his mother. From the men's point of view, the women are two-dimensional, firmly outside the male sphere of business, with no thoughts or desires other than those pertaining to men. Linda is the exception, but we seldom see the situation from her point of view, and she seems to be fixated merely on a reconciliation between her husband and her sons, selflessly subordinating herself to her family to help them in their problems. Indeed, she loves her family deeply and has embraced domestic life, and she is loved and appreciated especially by Biff, who never forgets the harm that Willy did to her by sleeping with another woman.

15. Themes • Structure - Miller expertly found a way to put various locations and times into continuous action, as Willy goes back and forth between reality, memory, and illusion. The major innovation of the play was this fluid continuity between its segments. Flashbacks do not occur separate from the action but rather as an integral part of it, with the unreal scenes marked by characters walking "through" the walls of the "real" set of the house. Musical themes and changes also can suggest the distinction between segments of a single scene, which could span as many as fifteen years and move from Brooklyn to Boston without any interruption. The two-scene structure provides for a traditional intermission. Although the "Requiem" scene is marked off as separate, it begins at the end of Scene 2, marked by a musical change and "the leaves of day ... appearing over everything." Biff and Happy do not leave the stage, instead merely putting on their funeral jackets in their bedroom…gradesaver.com