Death of a Salesman

1.            1.  Author/Setting:  Written by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman is set in the late 1940’s with multiple flashbacks to unidentifiable years.  The actual happenings of the play are in Brooklyn, but the flashbacks take place in other cities in the U.S.

2.            2.  Characters: The play focuses on the life of Willy Loman, a destitute salesman who has possibly started to go crazy after being fired from his job and being underappreciated.  Willy places large emphasis on his being well liked, though by the end of his life he isn’t liked so well.  Linda Loman is Willy’s wife, a very kind and patient woman who tends to let people trample all over her.  Their kids, Happy and Biff, also play a large role, neither is truly successful and so neither is truly loved by their father in the end.    

3.         3.  Plot:  When Willy realizes that the only way to support his family or keep his house is to accept charity from a friend or a job offered out of pity he decides he'd rather kill himself than admit that defeat.  This is the story of why Willy committed suicide, as told through flashbacks of Willy’s life.  Willy works as a salesman but never really works up the corporate ladder, so he drives to other cities to sell his products.  In one of the cities he has a mistress and unfortunately Biff stumbles upon this fact.  When he does he and his father grow apart, leading to more familial problems.  In the “present” of the play Biff and Happy are staying at home for a bit, trying to help cheer up their father who appears to have attempted suicide a couple times.  Instead of helping their attempts show Willy that he needs to get money even more and drives him to make one last attempt at suicide.  This time he succeeds, thereby getting the insurance money to help provide for his family.

4.         4.  Quotes: “A diamond is hard and rough to the touch.” – Ben.  This quote says that a true dream is a diamond.  A true, organic dream isn’t manufactured or manipulated by society, it’s solid, it’s got substance that you can thrive off of.  It also shows that a true dream like that is rare, and may look hard and unsuitable on the outside.  “I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I'm gonna win it for him." – Happy.  Happy here is telling us what the stated dream is in this play, and he shows how his father did die in vain.  Willy’s sons should’ve learned from his death that what he had been striving for isn’t what anyone should be striving for, but Happy instead thinks that it’s all he should work for.  He’ll follow in his father’s footsteps toward the dream which will alienate him entirely.

5.        5.  Theme Sentence: The more you work for a petty society driven ideal the farther from it and more alienated from yourself and those you love you’ll become.  The symbolism of the single flute playing in parts of the work show how alone Willy is, which proves that his striving for a societal ideal has cut him off from his family.  Through Willy’s confrontation with his boss about not going on the road anymore we see that he really is getting farther from his goal, because he explains that earlier in his life he was promised a job there in New York, but as he got older he got farther from getting the job.  We also see this idea in the imagery of the jungle that Ben wants Willy to go to.  He lives in NY, so to go diamond hunting in a jungle is definitely farther away than his job on the road.