Death of a Salesman Critique

Death of a Salesman
In order for a family to be fully and healthily functioning, it has to be honest and communicative, supportive and nurturing. The Loman family, however, lacks these characteristics and appears more dysfunctional than functional. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is essentially a eulogy for the American Dream, killed by the dysfunctionality of American life. That dysfunction is what seeps into the Loman family and prevents it from operating the way it should. As Biff states at one point in the play, “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house” (Act 2, Part 7, pg. 104). Communication barriers exist and dishonesty is rife. It is so stifling in the family that Biff states earlier in the play that his time in the house feels wasted: "I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life" (Act 1, Part 2, pg. 11). However, this is not the only reason the family is dysfunctional. Biff’s ambitions have been derailed by his own father’s infidelity. Willy’s wife Linda has always been a devoted wife to Willy, Biff’s father. Yet Biff catches his father with another woman, and it crushes his spirit. At the same time he wants to leave and be a farmhand, he wants to make his father proud of him—so Biff is torn in two, just like the Loman family overall. Willy wants to kill himself, is jealous of the success of others, and treats those around him miserably. Even Happy struggles to be happy. It is as though the angry, envious soul of Willy hangs around their necks like an albatross, reminding them constantly of their own miserable inadequacies. It is only with Willy’s death that the family finally feels “free,” as Linda states in the end. This paper will explain why the Loman family is severely dysfunctional by looking at the role that Willy plays as head of the household and why his part is the main problem.
As head of the Loman family, Willy is the old patriarch who should be wiser and more generous and loving than he actually is. Feeling stunted and stymied in his own life, Willy has impressed upon others the need to make something of theirs—almost tyrannically. It is so bad that both Biff and Happy feel like they should base their actions on whether or not it will please Willy. Linda is always seeking to accommodate Willy, even though he is not very kind to her. Even Willy’s neighbor Charley tries to help Willy by giving him a new job, which Willy characteristically declines because he does not know how to be generous himself and therefore rejects the generosity of others. Willy’s problem is pride. He is so full of himself and the feeling that he is better or deserves more than he has been given that he is filled with contempt. He feels that he has somehow been cheated out of the American Dream. Prosperity passed him by while it stopped at the houses of others. He never realizes that the reason he never succeeded in life was because he failed to be a good man himself. A good tree produces good fruit, yet Willy does not really want to be a good tree. He wants to pursue his own self-interests, and pick the fruits of others rather than grow his own. He neglects his wife, cheats on his marriage vows, sets a bad example for his sons and gripes about the need for a man to be a success so that his sons are just as narrow-minded as he is. It is only because Biff genuinely wants to be good that he manages to find a happier place—working in the outdoors as a laborer on the farm. Yet, ultimately, he is only able to pursue that happy life because Willy dies and is no longer an obstacle to the family’s functionality. Willy is the main problem.
The sons try to deal with the dysfunctionality of the family by dealing with Willy, but it is difficult to do so because he imposes such a formidable challenge. He wants Biff to live a certain way that is out of character with the gifts and dreams Biff has for himself. Willy is trying to live vicariously through others since he himself never managed to amount to much in his own life. He will not let the members of his family be who they are. He wants them to be empty vessels so that he can fill them with himself. Instead of the family filling themselves with God or goodness, they are stuck being filled by Willy Loman, who is really nothing great at all. It is like a pack of flashlights being powered by half-dead batteries: they do not work and do not operate up to the fullness of their potential—and that is the battery’s fault and the battery in this family is Willy. He does not teach the boys what it means to be a good man. Instead, he just teaches them that material success is all that matters in life. Biff does not believe this lie, however, ever since catching Willy in an affair. Biff understands what it means to be a good person, and he knows that someone who does not act what he preaches is a hypocrite and not to be trusted. He is on to Willy and Willy’s problems. That is why Biff declares, “Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!” (Act 2, Part 7, pg. 105). He has been trying placate his father this whole time and all it has done is make him miserable, because Willy can never be placated: he himself is an empty husk of a man who has never bothered to stretch out his roots to the source of goodness in life. Rather, he has spent his whole life crying over what others had and trying to snatch what he could get without taking the time to learn a better way in life. He has been fascinated by and obsessed with a materialistic goal—the American Dream—and that is why he acts so sourly.
The family thus acts dysfunctionally because its head is not right. Willy has never been able to orient the family towards the good that is required in life. Linda represents the good in her devotion and loyalty to her husband: she embodies kindness and charity—and that is, undoubtedly, where Biff gets his sense of the good. However, Linda is not the head of the house. She is the heart. The heart is healthy but if the head is not healthy, the house will not be right. Willy, as the head of the house, is not right and thus the family itself operates as though it were not right in the head. Biff is the representation of this struggle. His struggle is one between the head and the heart. Eventually the head (Willy) dies, and Biff is allowed to begin to use his own head, which is informed by the good heart that he has and that he received from his mother.
In the end, the Loman family is only able to begin to be “free,” as Linda states, when Willy is dead and buried. Thus, the main obstacle to the family’s real success and happiness is Willy himself—the one person who has been bemoaning the family’s lack of success the whole time. What the family has needed has been freedom, the freedom of each person in the family to be themselves rather than to be Willy’s empty vessels that he can use for his own vicarious aims. Instead of giving them freedom and peace, however, Willy was just an albatross around their necks, dragging them down to his own miserable state of unhappiness, hung up on his own lack of materialistic gain, and hung up on his own disappointments in life. He has never wanted to do what was required of him to be good, to be self-sacrificing, to lift himself up to the ideal. Rather, he has grumbled and groused and made everyone else aware of their own failings. Thus, the reason the Lomans are so dysfunctional is because of Willy. He is the one who brings the dysfunction and spreads it to the rest.

Works Cited
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Dramatists Play Service, 1980.