The basic picture presented of Willy is of a tired and broken man, losing hope, direction and his grip on sanity, with dire consequences for himself and those who depend upon him. Examining the nature of Willy’s plight requires looking at him in the light of his roles as a salesman, a dreamy human worthy of sympathy, and a 1950s American father. This will help to see what has made Willy the way he is, and what could make him happy. It is also necessary to investigate in detail exactly what difficulties Willy is grappling with, as well as the effects he is having upon those around him, in order to best understand the causes and precise nature of his plight; then, the extent to which it can be satisfactorily summed up by the statement, ‘a salesman is got to dream’ can be assessed. This is a line spoken by Charley to Willy, in his typically simple and Americanistically ungrammatical manner of speech, which masks a critical and detached insight.
Discussion of the title requires firstly understanding how Willy’s being a salesman and a dreamer are linked to his plight.
Everyone dreams. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all subject to the phantasms of the mind, re-routing the paths of the past into an imagined future. It is human to aspire to ambitions, or dreams, contemplating impossible possibilities and even imagining ourselves actually living these fantasies.
However, Willy is beyond the realms of normal, healthy, sane dreams grounded in a proper perception of reality. He is rare and dangerous because he is at that ‘terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present’ [1]. There can be little doubt that these vivid distortions of reality are somehow tied to Willy’s plight. The schitzophrenic’s disorder can be traced to a physical defect which renders them unable to distinguish between voices supplied and created by the brain, and real outside voices; Willy shares this inability to retain the grip on reality which is one of the factors which cause him to be labelled ‘crazy’. Willy talks to himself, ‘spewing out that vomit from his mind’, which Linda defends saying, ‘what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn't he talk to himself? Why?’ Her vehemence, demonstrated by the repeated question forms, ‘why shouldn't he …, why?’ is a testament to the ‘iron repression’ ‘she has developed of her exceptions to Willy’s behaviour’, for ‘she more than loves him, she admires him’ [2]. Despite his anger at being called this, he sometimes admits to his tenuous grip on the present and real; even at the very beginning of the play, he confesses brokenly ‘I just can't seem to keep my mind on it’. These rare, miserable moments of revealing self-doubt are touching and distressing, often included amidst a battery of bravado, heightening the intial sense of foreboding. Linda, who knows him best, tries to down-play the gravity of his instability by saying, ‘a lot of people think he’s lost his – balance. But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. The man is exhausted’. This is corroborated by Willy’s first few lines, in which he says brokenly, ‘I'm tired to the death’.
Many of the things upsetting Willy and with which he is having trouble, such as his personal status, his job and his sons, are a result of basic psychological problems, which Miller goes to great lengths to explain in terms of environment and upbringing and the American idolisation of opportunistic and rich “great men” like Ben, who have braved the ‘jungle’ and returned laden with ‘diamonds’.
However, it is not just dreaming in terms of daydreams and “flashbacks” which are inherent in Willy’s plight. “Dreaming” also encompasses the dangerous ambition and plans and desires for the future which so harm his relationship with Biff. Why is it that a salesman in particular has to dream? Certainly, a salesman needs that ability to see a wonderful future in order to instil his products with the false optimism that will sell them, much like the manipulative advertising that is our modern equivalent. A salesman sells potential, the utility that the buyer would gain from the purchase of his goods. Willy realises the need for personality, for selling is convincing the buyer of how much better life would be if they were to buy the product, which necessarily involves buying the salesman’s pitch. In order to paint the most desirable picture of the future, involving the potential buyer and placing them in the magic imagined picture requires creativity and imagination, as well as the ‘personal attractiveness’ he tries to foster in his boys, which is ‘why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises’, because ‘in the business world’ ‘the man who makes an appearance’ and ‘creates personal interest’ ‘gets ahead’; his creed is summarised by ‘be liked and you will never want’. Charley takes the opposite view, asking with his usual rough rhetoric, ‘when’re you going to realise that them things don’t mean anything?’. ‘The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell’. The salesman that Willy archetypally represents recognises the need to engage with people, needing reputation and being ‘impressive’. This in turn builds badly-needed confidence, which in turn increases success by heightening the enthusiasm with which clients buy his dream. Cyclically, this reputation and success will give him more “clout”, just as Singleman could ‘pick up a phone and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people’. For Willy, when people reject his product, they are rejecting him, for ‘they don’t know me any more’ and no one is prepared to send him an order ‘in a pinch’ out of friendship, as ‘in those days when there was personality in it’. Willy fell in love with the idea of ‘making his living’ ‘at the age of eighty-four’, for when he ‘saw that’, he misguidedly and short-sightedly ‘realised that selling was the greatest career a man could want’. However, now all his ‘old buyers’ are now ‘dead or retired’, and the modern way grants little credit for all that he has painstakingly tried to ‘build with this firm’.
Willy painfully realises the need for imagination,
necessary to ground people’s dreams in the material. Perhaps at one time, his
belief and involvement in the vividness of his own dreams made him more effective
and inspiring; having spent so long dreaming on other people’s behalf, and
becoming so ‘lonely’ (as Happy himself is now
experiencing), he has convinced himself of the value of material dreams. It can
be seen from the effect his career has had on him that it is dangerous for an
impressionable man like Willy to become a dedicated salesman, for his desire to
‘impress’ others has heightened his
natural propensity to brag and try to increase perceptions of his self-worth
(contrasted with Charley’s unconscious put-down, Bernard ‘don’t have to mention it’ because ‘he’s gonna do it’) into these dangerously
exaggerated delusions. Willy wants to buy his own pitch, but cannot afford the
samples of a better life he carries in his valises. Death of a Salesman is doubly critical of the capitalist creed, because
though Charley seems fairly secure in his wealth, the merchandise manager does
not have the ‘peace
of mind’ to
enjoy what he works so hard for, just as Happy knows he would not either.
In many ways, the salesman is merely tapping into the appetitive side of the human psyche. Willy is especially insecure and grasping as a person, and so this ambitious, dreamy greed is translated by his own salesmanship into a desire for wealth, success and popularity for himself. He is surrounded by these ideals, and measures fulfilment in terms of them. The acquisitive mixture of Willy’s particular personality combined with what is asked of him in the salesman’s role in the American Dream, bringer of all good things, prove too heady a cocktail for Willy’s modest talents. Faced with this irreconcilable gap between his in-bred, up-brought aspirations and his abilities, he resorts to the ultimately damaging policies of self-deception and vicarious vivacity, which he propagates as his family values.
However, there are also ways in which Willy could be said to suffering as a result of a multitude of other factors besides his profession.
On a deeper level, Willy describes himself as still feeling ‘kind of temporary about myself’, that those around him ‘don't need’ him, and says ‘I can't seem to keep my mind to it’ when driving (or living, for that matter). He links his long-term malaise with the fact that ‘Dad left when I was such a baby, and I never had a chance to talk to him’. Willy identifies Ben with his absent father, shown by how Willy ‘longingly’ begs him, ‘can't you stay a few days? You’re just what I need, Ben’, as part of his desire for validation of his ‘fine position’ from these authoritarian paternal arbiters of success. Willy’s father is described by Ben as a man who ‘with one gadget … made more in a week than a man like you could make in a lifetime’. There are many differences between Willy and his father, as perceived through Ben. Both ‘drive … right across the country’, selling. However, Willy’s imagined father ‘tossed the whole family into the wagon’, taking them with him. The whole image is romanticised, with the emphasis on a ‘very great and very wild-hearted man’, who ‘played the flute’, and a ‘great inventor’. Crucially, Willy’s father was his own boss, ‘selling the flutes that he’d made on the way’, rather than the the mass-made, mundane stockings and the like that Willy sells (for Happy and Willy, ‘selling is selling’, ‘it gets to be like everything else’, whereas Willy’s father is selling his creation rather than his personality). Willy carries samples with him, because his products are all the same, just as Willy himself is ‘a dime a dozen’. Willy’s father, with his own hand-made, individual musical instruments and the ‘rollicking tune’ that surrounds him in Willy’s mind, is truly a ‘leader of men’ in one of the ways Willy would like to be. With each of these imagined characters, Willy is following his life down a different path according to choices he could have made, whether being a nomadic creator/salesman (‘he was so wonderful with his hands’), cracking the ‘oyster’ of the world in the ‘dark’ ‘jungle’ or simply becoming a ‘partner’ with ‘old man Wagner’.
Willy worries that although ‘some people accomplish something’, he is still trying to ‘figure it out’, and seems to want for himself what he demands of Bernard for Biff, that ‘you’ll give him the answers’, almost as though there is some magic formula for life. He desperately wants to leave his mark, and yet in the swirling transient tide of mercenary capitalism, this is very difficult. Linda argues with Ben, wondering ‘why must everyone want to conquer the world?’ and encouraging Willy by telling him that he has ‘enough to be happy right here, right now’. Even so, Willy defensively and uncertainly tries to justify his life to Ben, the embodiment of all that is restless and seeking in him (described as ‘success incarnate’, implying almost a divine, or devilish avatar): ‘I'm building something with this firm, Ben, and if a man is building something he must be on the right track, mustn't he?’ This is characteristic of the pleading, self-questioning way with which Willy addresses his older brother, and others whom he respects, either for their success or self-assurance, whenever honestly addressing what is pressing on his mind so heavily. The dubiousness of the ‘mustn't he’, and the restatement of his own assertion in the form of a question, seeking approval, indicate how little faith Willy has in his own ideals (which we are shown most honestly in discussions with figments of his own mind like Ben, much like Shakespearian asides). Ben responds dismissively with, ‘what are you building, Willy’, asking him to ‘lay his hand on it’. Willy values money, for ‘that is something one can feel with the hand, it is there’. Part of the difficulties between Willy and Biff are because Biff is an ‘idealist’ ‘poet’, in stark contrast to Willy, ‘a happy man with a batch of cement’ who likes to have ‘something one can feel with the hand, [that] is there’. Biff remembers nostalgically that ‘there were a lot of nice days’, ‘when he’d come home from a trip’, ‘making’ and ‘finishing’ the ‘stoop’, ‘cellar’, ‘porch’ etc. He notes, ‘there’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made’, which is perhaps a satisfying and comforting epitaph, though Willy himself might not have thought it so.
Willy builds a very dysfunctional and troubled household. He teaches the value of success according to the capitalist criteria, while secretly wishing to escape to the real “land of opportunity” represented by Alaska and the ranch. Being a pressurised father in a patriarchal society, he feels keenly the need to achieve the success he preaches to his sons, trying to be loved, liked, admired and disciplinarian to them. This confusion is contrasted with the constancy of Charley’s ‘never’ telling Bernard ‘what to do’ or taking ‘any interest in him’. Biff and Happy correspondingly feel the need for Willy’s approval, which is complicated by the different treatment they receive, showing how their different upbringings have led to their adulthood, with their own personalities, problems attitudes and neuroses.
Biff indignantly bursts out, ‘Those ungrateful bastards’ to which Linda witheringly replies, ‘Are they any worse than his sons?’. It is no wonder that Linda describes him as ‘dying’. She defends him passionately, demanding ‘what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn't he talk to himself? Why?’ She is scathing towards Biff and Happy, whom she terms a ‘philandering bum’ and refuses to let Biff ‘go near’ Willy. She eventually tells them to ‘Get out of here, both of you, and don't come back’. It is comforting for the audience to know that for the staunchly-loving Linda, Willy is ‘the dearest man in the world to me, and I won't have anyone making him feel unwanted and low and blue’, even her sons. Yet, upsetting, even this is not enough for him. He needs to feel accepted by the masculine, materialistic, judging world in which he moves, epitomised by Ben. This excess of desire and demand is definitely something to be pitied in Willy.
Unfortunately, Willy’s own faltering in pursuit of the capitalist ideals does not come out in his dealings with his sons; rather, he breeds in them a closed-minded utter acceptance of the validity and completeness of the “Great American Dream”. Had he perhaps been less dogmatic, then they might be better able to choose the dream for themselves that they know is right. For though Willy asserts ‘I never in my life told him anything but decent things’, there are examples of where this could be disputed, (such as contradictingly telling Biff about the ball he has ‘borrowed’, ‘I want you to return that’, then laughing confidentially and distorting and undermining the important message by saying that the ‘coach’ll probably congratulate you on your initiative’). That Biff is ‘mixed up very bad’ is displayed by his early conversation with Happy, carried on in parallel with Willy and Linda’s discussion of the same subject. To a large extent, Willy has passed on his own uncertainty to both Biff and Happy, for Willy critically dismisses the life that Biff would like to choose with the small-minded condemnation, ‘he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week.’ ‘Is that a life?’, and yet it seems that he too would probably be happier amidst the ‘grass and trees and the horizon’, rather than being ‘boxed … in’ by the ‘solid vault of apartment houses’ ‘lined with cars’ in this ‘nuthouse’ of a city. Willy’s relationship with his adored older son is fraught, and causes both much anguish. Biff says that he knows ‘he’s a fake, and [Willy] doesn't like anybody around who knows’. Despite the anger he feels towards him, which has grown since the cruelly formative experience with Willy’s mistress, Biff still cares enough to lament sorrowfully that ‘everything I say there’s a twist of mockery on his face. I can't get near him’. Similarly, Willy is extremely touched when he realises ‘[Biff] always did’, ‘he loves me’.
The familial situation is difficult for all involved, because despite the deep but destructive love they bear each other, Willy is vicariously living his life through Biff, and sees any failure, laziness or indirection on Biff’s part as Biff ‘spiting me’. This is shown by the way Willy responds to Ben’s belittlement of himself with ‘That’s just the way I'm bringin them up, Ben – rugged, well liked, all-around’, as though he can somehow make up for his own inadequacies through his boys. This is similar to the way in which he says to Biff and Happy that ‘one day’, he’ll be ‘bigger than Uncle Charley’, who is merely ‘liked but not well liked’, and yet this eventually becomes ‘when the mail comes, [Biff]’ll be ahead of Bernard again’, as though this too will somehow vindicate Willy’s own failure. This puts a great strain on Biff and their relationship, eventually inducing Biff to decide to ‘wrap it up’ by ‘going and … not writing any more’, which is not what either of them truly want. Yet, as Linda observes resignedly, ‘there’s no use drawing it out. You’ll just never get along’.
It is tragic that it is the intensity of Willy’s loving and parental hopes for his son that cause the rift, and give him such problems. Biff complains that ‘I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is!’. This bitterness towards superiors and authorities is shared by Willy, who is resentful towards Charley who offers him a job, but Willy keeps on turning it down until Charley finally tells him ‘you been jealous of me all your life, you damned fool!’. Willy’s misunderstanding and misperception of other people is one of the things that makes him so hard for anyone else to relate to and interact with. The hypocrisy is worrying with which he labels Charley an ‘ignoramus’, telling him ‘I don't play with cheats’ when we have more faith in Charley’s card-playing, and shouting ‘don't insult me’ when it is Willy who should be apologising. He often contradicts himself, calling Biff a ‘lazy bum’, then moments later unwittingly contradicting himself,‘if there’s one thing about Biff, he’s not lazy’ (e.g. his decision to buy the fridge and the car, and misremembering opening the windshield on the Chevy). He makes excuses, saying ‘the trouble was’ one thing or another out of his control, ‘otherwise I woulda broke records’. For this and his whole attitude, Biff angrily rebukes him later, ‘we never told the truth for ten minutes in this house’, as exemplified by Happy, almost the image of Willy, actually ‘one of two assistants to the assistant’, who is ‘full of it’.
Willy is ageing, and scared of what the future will bring for his fortunes, saying ‘I don't want a change’. Other shifts undermine Willy’s sense of stability. Besides the social shifts which are rendering his approach obsolete and unsuccessful, ‘in those days’ all ‘his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch – they’re all dead, retired’, ‘now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he’s exhausted’. When Linda buys a ‘new kind of American-type cheese’, he over-reacts, snapping ‘I don't want a change!’ ‘Why am I always being contradicted?’. Willy is ageing perceptibly, times are changing, and he is finding it difficult to adapt. This is even affecting Linda, as Biff is distraught because ‘your hair got so grey’. She brushes it off with ‘oh, it’s been grey since you were in high school. I just stopped dyeing it, that’s all’. With the characteristic Loman propensity for self-deception, he asks her to ‘dye it again, will ya? I don't want my pal looking old’. Just as Charley refers to Willy as ‘boy’, asking him when he’s going to ‘grow up’, so Linda rebukes Biff ‘you’re such a boy’, which he recognises in himself. There is something of the child in the way in which Willy play-acts his entire life.
The nature of his job and the pervading work ethic is to ‘work like a coolie’ all his life, making the most of his meagre talents. Although he ‘never made a lot of money’, Linda asserts that ‘attention must be finally paid to such a person’, though in this ‘rough world’, Linda fails to understand ‘why didn't anybody come?’. It is a mark of the society he lives in that one is measured in terms of current worth, with little merit being placed on a lifetime’s commitment of the sort Willy believes in, the traditional values. He bitterly complains to Charley, ‘I'm strapped. I don't know what to do. I was just fired’, ‘that snotnose. Imagine that? I named him. I named him Howard’. Charley is successful in much the way that Willy would like to be, and yet displays the opposite ethos, admitting ‘my salvation is that I never took any interest in anything’. This is accentuated by his adding to extra effect, ‘there’s some money – fifty dollars’, emphasisising his indifference to the very things which seem to provide Willy with purpose. Charley asks frankly a question which would otherwise never cross Willy’s mind, ‘why must everybody like you?’. Although we cannot really know from whence his need to be so popular arises, it is is linked to the motives which induced Willy to see selling as ‘the greatest career a man could have’, mainly inspired by the desire to emulate Dave Singleman. However, his downfall is demanding too much of himself by feeling the need to be both well-liked and impressive. ‘When’re you going to realise that them things don't mean anything. You named him Howard, but you can't sell that’, though sound observations from Charley, fall on Willy’s disastrously deaf ears. Charley summarises this ruthless and wearying way of life by noting that ‘the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell’. Charley notes that irony that ‘the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don't know that’. Even the deluded Happy has learnt that ‘Dad is never so happy as when he’s looking forward to something’; he has lived ‘just to know there’s the possibility for better things’. Miller says that the play was in part about the ‘concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time with within us’, and he tried to mirror this in a form that would ‘literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind’. Part of the pop philosophy that has been absorbed into the current Western intellectual zeitgeist is a recognition of the need to “live for the moment” (just as a peculiar and misunderstood array of Freudian notions have now become almost truisms through over-use), and it is not surprising that Willy is so dissatisfied given his preoccupation with the dream, rather than its realisation or present enjoyment. Though his legacy, Happy, thinks it a ‘good dream’, ‘the only dream you can have’, Biff, with whom the audience has more faith and yet more concern for, laments that ‘he had the wrong dreams’, ‘all, all wrong’. Willy was doubly doomed: by what he dreamt of, and the way in which his compulsive dreaming impinged upon the present (and the realisation of those dreams).
Willy’s desperate desire to further
Biff uses Bernard as a yardstick. Before his suicide, he gleefully imagines ‘that
magificence with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket’, predicting
fiercely ‘when
the mail comes he’ll be ahead of Bernard again’. Even at the very end, Willy fails, or
refuses, to realise the futility of this attempt to quantify and correlate
happiness with tokens of contentment. He seems to hold this idea of ‘being
ahead’ synonymous with his love for Biff, wanting to best for him
(although for whose sake is more dubitable): this glee at the thought that ‘I
always knew one way or another we were gonna make it, Biff and I!’
is intermingled with the more touching ‘did you see how he cried to me? Oh, if I
could kiss him, Ben!’.
Willy over-values money and the material. This is partly a consequence of the era in which he lived, which defined and quantified success in terms of salary and status. Willy sees this in the simple terms of ‘with twenty thousand dollars’ ‘he’ll be magnificent’. Part of Willy’s breakdown could be traced to the indignity of ‘now in his old age they take his salary away’, leaving him ‘on straight commission, like a beginner, an unknown!’, for truly, ‘no man only needs a little salary’. He yearns for a comfortable, satisfied retirement with something to be proud of, causing him to be so hard on Biff: ‘not finding yourself at thirty-four’ in the ‘greatest country in the world’ ‘is a disgrace’. Perhaps he is really voicing his frustration that Biff ‘not getting anywhere’ deprives Willy of a ‘silver … trophy’ of achievement. It is almost as though Willy’s sorrow is more that Biff not finding himself at Willy’s age of sixty-three is a disappointment for his father. However, this is justified with what seems like a personal attack, recriminating Biff with the destitute ‘disgrace’ of a money-driven society.
Like Biff, Willy secretly yearns for the ‘grand outdoors’. Ben, his ideal, thrived in the wild ‘jungle’, soaring and succeeding in ‘diamonds’, rather than measly cooped-up commerical pay-packets. Biff and Happy enthuse, ‘men built like we are should be working out in the open’, because ‘the trouble is we weren't brought up to grub for money’. Willy’s sentiments are expressed by Ben and his sons: ‘get out of these cities, they’re full of talk and time payments and courts of law’, taking ‘orders from those common, petty son-of-bitches till I can't stand it any more’. He wants to do as Ben bids him, ‘screw on your fists and you can fight for a fortune up there’, in the ‘new continent at your doorstep’, just as Happy ‘dreams about’ ‘outboxing goddam merchandise manager’. The Lomans are better suited to ‘raise cattle, use our muscles’, just as Willy’s response to Charley’s painful insights is ‘you big ignoramus. If you say that to me again, I'll rap you one’. Willy has made his career out of ‘damn-fool appointments’, ‘talk and time payments’, and now that he feels the ‘woods are burning’ around him, it is almost too late to escape and ‘rip my clothes off in the middle of the store’, as all three Loman men wish to, metaphorically. Willy’s character is too inadequate to deal with the constant wearying concrete pressure and judgement of the urban ‘angry glow of orange’ of the city in the ‘greatest country in the world’.
Worryingly and revealingly, Ben’s presence becomes more frequent and takes a greater hold of him as the play continues. Ben has his own music, which accompanies him, like a sort of associated aura. One can imagine that it would be in a minor key, haunting and somehow uncomfortable and difficult to retain in one’s mind, with ‘great weight’ and ‘a certain vicious audacity’ [3]. It would be simplistic to merely label Willy ‘crazy’ because he is becoming increasingly reliant on a phantasm; whether Willy actually perceives Ben and other characters from the past in the same way they are portrayed on the stage is irrelevant; Miller states that form was an outgrowth of his image of the play as the opening of a massive head, revealing the ‘mass of contradictions’ inside. Although Miller claims not to have read any literature on psychoanalysis prior to having written Death of Salesman, it seems that Willy’s quest and need is to reconcile, or “integrate”, the conflicting sides of his psyche and ‘overcome’ his psychoses, in a manner very reminiscent of Jung. Whether he eventually does this is debatable, because until the last he appeals to Ben, shown by the continual reference to his name, ‘Oh, Ben’, showing how he looks up to him as what Willy could have been, had he chosen to try during the ‘gold strikes’ in Alaska as a ‘boy’; somehow, by repeatedly looking to him, he is judging himself by the social criteria that Ben embodies. Only by justifying his suicide in those terms can he actually go through with it, and this is perhaps a final failure on Willy’s part. A satisfactory victory over his own plight would have required a renouncement of Ben by acting against what Willy would perceive to be those wishes, and behaving as he knows he should. That might involve a happier ending, perhaps embracing the ‘things that I love in this world’, as Biff describes his epiphany: ‘in the middle of that office building’, ‘I stopped’ ‘and I saw – the sky’. Even at the last, Willy never truly soars, though there is still hope for Biff.
Until he can somehow resolve his own inner conflicts, of which his dreams are merely a symptom, he cannot die happy. Whether this could ever be possible for one such as Willy is debatable, but one option from which the play deliberately shies might be for Biff to make a supreme effort, and for Willy to retire and the family to move away from the city; this would be an outward demonstration of the renunciation of their present way of life, symbolically taking ‘that phoney dream’ and burning it ‘before something happens’.
Despite beginning to realise the profundity and nature of his own mistakes and troubles, Willy continues to try to force Biff into making the same ones; even though Happy is more successful in terms of fitting Willy’s mould, he is dismissed, for both know themselves to be ‘a dime a dozen’. Willy perceives in him the mediocrity that characterises himself, whereas Biff’s spark captures Willy’s imagination, dashed by Biff’s attempts to rob him of his treasured illusions, with his painfully honest acceptance of the truth that ‘I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you’.
There seems something almost fatalistic about Willy’s plight, about the ‘mass of tangled roots’ which lead to what Miller sees as an inevitable conclusion, the ‘death of a salesman’. In fact, this idea of an almost inherent, determined truth is represented by Charley’s two statements, ‘a salesman is got to dream’ and ‘you don't understand. Willy was a salesman’, as though they encompass explanation within the description ‘salesman’. This is quite the opposite of Miller’s intention to use the play (especially its unique form crafted for this purpose) to somehow convey the ‘mobile concurrency of past and present’. To me, it does not seem certain from the first minute that Willy is going to die. Admittedly, the title (which could merely mean the spiritual death, or might hint at the shedding of the salesman persona without actually dying), and Willy’s words, ‘I'm tired to the death’, and the sense of culmination do hint that Willy is literally at the ‘end of his strength’. Interestingly though, one could argue either that it is his constant dreaming and salesmanship that eventually wears him down, or that it is his dreaming that sustains him, as shown by Happy’s observation, ‘Dad is never so happy as when he’s looking forward to something’.
The sympathy and pity we undoubtedly feel for Willy is mitigated by intense frustration at the spectacle we are forced to witness. The play was originally titled The Inside of his Head, a testament to the extent to which Miller was trying to allow us to understand Willy; the audience is given special knowledge of Willy, and is able to see things much more from his perspective than an impartial observer, like another character in the play, could; without this crucial extra dimension that we witness, it would be extremely difficult to muster any sort of empathy, and we would be tempted merely to incomprehendingly pity his plight, which we may or may not hold him responsible for.
Willy’s suicide need not necessarily be regretted and seen as a terrible tragic disaster. ‘Willy Loman did not die in vain’. His suicide was also a magnificent sacrificial gesture, with which he briefly rises above his seemingly small stature with single-minded decisive determination. This ‘greatness’ seems within his reach throughout the play, and yet he seems somehow restrained by himself and outer pressure from realising it. Finally, he is allowed to ‘thankfully let his burden down’, stilling the ‘turbulent longings within him’. He tells Linda desperately, ‘I’ve gotta overcome it’, and this is his way of doing so, dreamily claiming ‘[Biff]’ll worship me for it’. His insecurity and the issues of which he is most sensitive are discussed with Ben, who cautions him, ‘you don't want to make a fool of yourself’, ‘it’s called a cowardly thing, William’. Willy poignantly and frustratedly answers Ben’s accusation of cowardice with ‘Why? Does it take more guts to stand here rest of my life ringing up a zero?’ His case is strong that if by dying he can achieve more than living, his action would be noble in its placing of his family far above himself, as Linda would see in it: ‘he loved’ ‘his sons’ ‘better than his life’. It is tainted by the gleeful and petty one-upmanship still so much a part of him, as revealed by ‘When the mail comes, he’ll be ahead of Bernard again’. This would seem to indicate that his motives, though not directly furthering himself, are still concerned with trying to ‘conquer the world’ (or merely scrabble away from the bottom) by proxy. For the first time in the play, Ben is ‘yielding’ [4], conceding ‘that’s a point’, when Willy explains to himself why Biff will not ‘hate’ him and ‘call you a coward’. This approval or acceptance from Ben is the signal necessary for Willy to go ahead with his plans. Finally, the dichotomy in his personality is integrated, as his conscious persona of Willy is in agreement with Ben, who dictates Willy’s values. He is certain in himself, and is admirable and dignified in his decisive, contented last action. Interestingly, Willy doesn't tell his family about his plans, but just goes ahead and carries out his intention unassumingly; this time, he ‘don’t have to tell anyone’ because ‘he’s gonna do it’. Perhaps, once he loses the capacity to dream, he cannot be a salesman any longer, and his plight changes; maybe this newfound rootlessness (also realised by Linda in the Requiem, with her repeated ‘we’re free’) makes his death a necessity.
The title assumes that Willy has an individual plight, and that it is linked to the statement, ‘a salesman is got to dream’. It begs the question of whether everyone has a plight, perhaps linked to their defining characteristic. The question is partly asking whether a salesman’s having to dream is sufficiently plausible as an explanation for Willy’s plight. Despite the universally human nature of Willy’s inadequacies and grapplings with his ‘boxed in’ allotment in life, few of us are affected in quite the same unfortunate and disastrous way as Willy, even other salesmen (indicating that Willy’s plight cannot be summarised simply in terms of the title). Even if everyone’s separate plight is different, could they all have the same root cause? One principal destructive force in Willy’s life is excess: the ‘massive dreams’ of a ‘small man’. Perhaps the opposite, too little, like Charley who regards his ‘salvation’ as having ‘never took any interest in anything’, should to be avoided too; though Charley is preferable to Willy in many ways, there is a detachment about him that robs him of Willy’s child-like humanity and zeal.
Biff sighs, ‘there is nothing more inspiring or – beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt’; these simple, limited dreams should be enough; they elicit wonderment from Happy, who gushes ‘You’re a poet, you know that, Biff? You’re a – you’re an idealist’. It is largely Willy’s influence which provides the accompanying, spoiling dissatisfaction, ‘And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I’m not gettin' anywhere’. Willy too is aiming for somewhere, but his plight could perhaps been seen as a blind, directionless striving, for it is the nature of money that no finite quantity once achieved can ever be enough, for there is always more to be had (‘no man only needs a little salary’). Similarly, ‘selling is’ merely ‘selling’, and nothing more of inherent value (‘oh it gets to be like everything else’). Seeing it as a goal in itself, a pinnacle, is fatally futile, for though it inspires dreams, it offers no means of realising them.
The play is full of contrasts, within and between families, fathers and sons, attitudes, youth and age. Miller serves us these as part of a message that perhaps paths and dreams need not be the same for everyone; part of Willy’s mistake was foisting his own ambition upon his champion, Biff (he ‘never worked a day but for your benefit’, seeking ‘reward’ and ‘medals’ through Biff’s ‘bringing home prizes’). The challenge in human relationships is in empathising sufficiently to understand and assist in one another’s individual plights.
Miller has various intentions when writing the play. He is trying to open up Willy’s head to allow us to see the writhing ‘mass of contradictions’ ‘inside’, as well as writing a ‘love story between a man and his son’ and ‘in a crazy way’, their country’s creed. However, his creation grows beyond these basic aims.
That ‘a salesman is got to dream’ is certainly implicit in the way Willy’s profession is depicted. The play also analyses what it is that Willy dreams of, and the dichotomy between his two opposite dreams, the ‘good dream’ (of being ‘number one man’, the ‘only dream a man can have’) and the ‘phoney dream’ of a ‘liar’ and a ‘fake’. The play succeeds by Miller’s own criteria because our uncomfortable proximity lends intense pathos for Willy, which observers and other characters cannot fully appreciate. Willy’s plight stems from the multi-causal ‘mass of tangled roots’ which are unsatisfactorily summed up by the title quotation. Besides the problems associated with dreaming and his profession, there is a long list of partially plausible justifications and reasons which Miller offers to flesh out the skeletal picture the sense of the script offers: exhaustion; his absent father; the self-destructive, corrosive “Great American Dream”; the conflict between his two dreams; his impossible desire to be both well-liked and successful; his jealousy and mis-directed meagre talents; burdensomely living his life through his sons; stifled, constricting urban mundane life; failure, broken dreams and rejections; loneliness; desire to be simultaneously respected, loved and liked by his sons; his excesses; his judging criteria and wishes; ageing inability to adapt the traditional to the modern; his foolishness, pride and insubordination; and his self-deception.
His plight is the combination and culmination of this multitude of choices and chains that he made for himself and have come to define him, and everything else that makes up Willy as a person, outside his actions and inside himself. For this reason, I think that The Inside of His Head, the first title for Death of a Salesman was more apt. His soul is opened up for the audience in such a way that the layers, aspects and contradictions form the coherent whole of Willy’s ‘disintegrating personality’.