Death of a Salesman – A play by Arthur Miller about the reality of The American Dream

May 29th, 2005 admin Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

I read this play in a single sitting. The play is written in a style that helps you draw the imagery, the sounds, sights and smells intended by the author. Arthur Miller, who passed away this year, wrote this Pulitzer Prize winning play in 1949. It was converted to a movie in 1952. It helped my understanding of the “American Dream”, a phrase I have heard mentioned many times in the USA. It added a new perspective to my understanding of this phrase. “American Dream” to me brought visions of owning a house, a car, raising a family and making money. Death of a Salesman added to that image a new shade. The cost. At what cost do you live the American Dream? What moral and social pressures do you have to overcome to live this dream? What is this dream worth? Is this the dream one should go after? What if your understanding of the dream is wrong? What if this realization comes too late in life?Death of a Salesman is a poignant story about growing turmoil in an aging man’s soul. His confidence in his values and benevolent trust in the society’s morality are eroded gradually by reality. He never is able to find a clear direction or a satisfying reason for the way his and his family’s life turned out. Searching forever to find the point at which his “dream” betrayed him, the Salesman, tries to find his peace by making the biggest deal of his life. He kills himself in the hope that what he could not achieve in life, could be achieved by his death, in the form of insurance money that his family could use and remember him by.

The story is told in a series of conversations between the salesman, Willy Loman, his grown up sons, Biff and Happy, his wife Linda, with occasional, yet crucial conversations with Willy’s neighbour Charlie, Charlie’s son and Biff’s childhood classmate Bernard, and Willy’s brother Ben. Willy believes that to be “well liked” is the most important qualification of a salesman and for that matter, any individual. It is the sole criterion that decides a person’s success in life. Biff, endowed with loads of the “well liked” character, was his favourite son, in whom he lay all his hope. Biff turns out to lose his way in education and life. Charlie, Willy’s neighbour, who has a vision attuned to reality, is looked at by Willy as an innocuous bystander. Linda, Willy’s wife is the ever supporting and loving wife, who has never felt it necessary to correct Willy’s viewpoint of the world, partly because she herself has been drawn into his charm at selling the idea of his dream. Ben, Willy’s brother whom Willy idolizes because of his success, is the epitome of where Willy is hoping to reach one day.

Willy’s grown up sons are failures in life, though they want to do the right things and do love their parents. Willy himself is old and his tact at selling “with a smile and a shoeshine” are lost. He realizes that the dream has eluded him. He is confused by and unable to overcome the pain of realizing that it all went wrong somewhere. He lives in a life interspersed with flashbacks to a happy time, drawn back to the harshness of his real failures. Dejection reaches unbearable proportions, caused by slow but overpowering realization that all that he lived by and thought mattered were misplaced ideals. He ends his life with a hope to leave back something. At last, at least, a small piece of the dream he had promised his family. Charlie, at the end of the play brings out the subtlties of this act. Why Willy committed it and why he must not be blamed for doing what he did. “A salesman is got to dream”, says Charlie. This is basically the reason for whatever success Willy had in his younger days. A salesman has got to charm his customers, a salesman has got to beileve in what he is selling, even if it does not deserve that respect. Willy was a salesman and he knew only the materialistic aspect, the undying ambition, the big success associated with the American Dream. He sold himself to this dream, and finally the dream sold him.