Death of a salesman by Arthur Miller

Role Playing vs. Reality in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a classic work in the examination of the human psyche and how it adapts, or fails to adapt, to the demands of the larger society. The play's title character is Willy Loman, a lifelong traveling salesman who has ever failed to make himself a genuine success. He faces a profound conflict between his real skills and abilities and those he believes he must possess in order to succeed in the eyes of his family and his society. His very name - "Loman" - speaks to his stature within the sales profession. Unable to comprehend the fact that he simply does not have what it takes to make that once in a lifetime sale, or to compete with the likes of Dave Singleman, the master salesman, he tortures himself and those he loves, by creating an unattainable, and inherently false facade. The pressure builds outward, affecting his sons Biff and Happy, and wife Linda with the consequences of his own failure to live up to his dreams. Willy Loman lives within a fantasy world, a world in which the past is idolized, and his skills are magnified to a degree that makes the inability to achieve his salesmanship goals a matter of negative circumstances and cruel twists of fate. For Willy Loman, salesmanship is a matter of personal temperament and comportment. One simply attracts customers by virtue of one's inherent pleasantness, handsomeness, and general appeal. Surface appearance is everything, while the internal matters little, if at all. For this reason, Loman conceives of a life and a career that is outwardly perfect despite the flimsiness of its inward supports.

On larger and more dangerous scale, one that is yet more destructive to himself and his family, Miller's title character links his own vision of the perfect salesman with his vision of the American Dream. What Willie wants must be what everyone else wants... And it too is hopelessly shallow and equally unattainable. A show of material comfort; the "perfect" family of a wife and kids - these are the things that make a person happy, that make a red-blooded American man content and fulfilled. Biff and Happy will fulfill their father's dreams whether they want to or not. It is not a matter of personal choice, but one of social compulsion, of keeping up appearances, or "keeping up with the Joneses." Biff must want to be like his father not merely because he should idolize such an obviously good man, but also because it is only natural that any American youth should want to be like a man who is so quintessentially American in every respect. Biff's explosive, "You -- you gave her Mama's stockings! Don't touch me, you -- liar! You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!" sums up the reality of Willy Loman's life. He is nothing but a shell, an empty shell. His marriage is no more real than his brilliant career as a salesman. The idyll that Loman concocts for his wife and his sons exists only in his own head. One wonders, as does Biff himself, whether any of the people in Willy's life were ever more than props. All along, Miller's salesman was creating a tableau vivant, in his work and in his family. If you put the right characters on stage, you create the right image.

In Willy Loman's mind, Dave Singleman, that "single" salesman, no doubt created the proper image. Even Singleman's death was that of a salesman, "When he died -- and by the way he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston -- when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral." A traveling salesman should die on the road, as Dave Singleman obviously did. What greater tribute to a way of life than to die in the course of one's duty? Appropriately, as well, Loman's hero received the adulation of his peers - the ultimate complement in the eyes of a man who believed everything should be done for show. Singleman's public death on a train bound from New York to Boston, put him leaving America's great metropolis, heading off toward some still greater heavenly sales field. The attention that such a death would attract would be wider still, unusual enough that it would probably be reported in the press, enough to "individualize" a man even in a society as oddly and blandly homogenized as Loman's idealized America. For it is a great curiosity that the aspiring hero of sales who so lauds the cardboard sameness of "living the American Dream," can praise the heroic life and death of one man, a story of triumph that lift him far above the ordinary. But then this, too, is the inescapable mystery of the American Dream, and Willy Loman knows it but does not fully comprehend its subtler meanings.