The American Dream in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman The American Dream ~ for many, it is the unlocked door that leads to happiness. It is the hope for a future filled with success and fortune. Although most people have a similar idea of what the American Dream is, they may have different ideas on how to achieve it. For Willy Loman, a struggling salesman, achieving this dream would be a major accomplishment. Unfortunately, his unusual ideas of how this dream can be achieved prevent him from reaching his goal. Out of all of Willy’s unusual ideas, one major pattern we can notice is how Willy truly believes that popularity and physical appearance are what make people wealthy. We are first introduced to this…show more content…
An example of how Willy depends on popularity to help achieve the dream is seen when Willy is having a flashback in which he’s speaking to both Biff and Happy about having his own business. The boys ask their father if his business will be like their Uncle Charley’s. Willy responds by saying that he’ll be, “Bigger than Uncle Charley! Because Charley is not- liked. He’s liked, but he’s not- well liked.” From this example, it becomes evident that Willy thinks being “well liked” can make you successful. The most significant example, however, is also one that takes place in one of Willy’s flashbacks. Again, he is speaking to his sons about becoming successful. He tells them, “...the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want. You take me...I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. ‘Willy Loman is here!’ That’s all they have to know, and I go right through.” From these examples, it becomes very apparent that appearance and popularity are unusually important to Willy when it comes to being successful in the business world. As we can see from Willy’s ideas of personal attractiveness, he
An old man. A lost soul. A salesman. Many strive to be one of the greatest or at their highest, even if it takes them forever to arrive there. The longing for success and approbation geared the pathway of a long journey, but what are the events that help or hinder it? In the play, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller focuses on the topic of the American Dream. He infers that the American dream is not all it is cracked up to be. Essentially what Miller conveys is that, despite the fact that Willy is on a constant run towards success, he has never grasped onto even a crumb of it. Additionally, the attitudes of Willy played a huge factor throughout the play; along with the wrong dream.
Willy had a dream and he wished to fulfill it. All he desired was to be well known and successful. Willy figured that if he could be on top, then his life would be worthwhile, he would produce sales and proceed up the charts. However, it turned out differently than expected. Willy’s dream lasted till death, but left unachieved. As Happy, Willy’s son, stated, “He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man” (Miller 104). This section of text means, that his own family had faith in him to be successful, but he never followed through with the opportunities that arose. As the drama continues, many factors lead up to Willy’s failure. The optimistic views of Willy represented a potent and an imperfect side. The good showcased how the happiness he endured led him to believe that he is successful, but it pushed him even further because he still wanted approval and respect from his son and those around him. The dream remained close yet so far, but only due to the delusional thoughts he often projected. Moreover, so many opportunities presented itself, but unfortunately, Willy’s mercurial ways caused him to lose the door that opened. One figures, a trunk of a tree shows the countless different directions one could go as branches grow with leaves at the end representing the award but then it becomes a stump, a burden. The stump, attached by the roots it planted, affects the energy it gives off and little by little the energy decreased as Willy’s hope ceased. His delusions caused him to utter lies and to
The play, Death of a Salesman by Author Miller, focuses on the nostalgic dreams of the main character. The Lomans, especially Willy, pay particular attention to these dreams while fearing that these goals are unreachable. Yet this fear is necessary to the hope; Willy would much rather dream than succeed. It is the destruction of his dream that destroys him, not its failure. So one the most prominent themes in Death of A Salesman – American dream – is discussed in this essay.
Willy Loman, the central character of the play, dreams of achieving the American Dream, wealth. He dreams of success in business. He wants to be liked by all, the quality which he believes is a major token to success. He also wants his sons to follow in his footsteps and be popular and well-liked. During the actual time of the play, however, Willy’s dreams have obviously failed. He is a sixty-year-old salesman whose friends have all died. He later gets fired halfway through the play. One of his sons is a farmhand, the other is in the business world as assistant to an assistant. Willy spends the play thinking back on his better days and often believing that they are reality. His obsession with dreams prevents him from seeing the wreck of his life. Willy does not want to acknowledge the turn his life has taken, and uses his daydreams to escape the knowledge. He even acts on them, refusing to salvage the present if it means breaking from his goal. He desperately entreats Howard, his boss, to give him a job, and is willing to accept absurdly low wages to continue being a salesman, even a salesman who does not sell anything. After Howard refuses, the unemployed Willy will not accept a gift of fifty dollars a week from his pragmatic friend Charley. To take this salary would be to concede defeat, even though it would save his family. Charley repeatedly asks Willy, ‘When are you going to grow up?’ and Charley’s son Bernard, a practical, studious teenager who becomes a high-placed lawyer, advises Willy that sometimes the best thing to do is to walk away from failure. Yet Willy will not walk away from his dreams. Yet sometimes he wonders if he was right to dream in the first place. His doubts take the form of his dead brother Ben, who made a fortune in African diamonds and Alaskan lumber. Ben urges Willy to seek the real, the practical, that which can be felt, inviting him to go to Alaska to work with real lumber. Still, Ben is nothing more than a phantasm, a shape who is himself unreal. He is the only one of Willy’s imaginings who addresses him in the present world, noticing his surroundings and having conversations that are clearly not memories. He may be a symbol of Willy’s distress, but he is no more substantial than that: he is Willy’s model for an imaginary success and his very presence emphasizes the impossibility of Willy’s goal.
Men who walk into the jungle at seventeen and come out rich at twenty-one do not exist; the only truly successful people in the play are the solidly pragmatic Howard, Charley, and Bernard. This does not keep Willy from trying to push off his hopes onto his family, and to wreck it by doing so. His wife Linda, is constantly trying to protect Willy from reality, encouraging her sons to lie about their own fortunes to him. Her entire existence seems to be tied soley around her husband even after his infidelity. Happy is more than happy to participate in his mother’s lie. Happy follows his father’s dream even though he recognizes that he does not enjoy the fruits of his labor, suggesting that the reason is his ‘competitive nature.’ This early realization hints at why Willy pursues the dream: because it is a dream, and because he needs something to pursue. After Willy’s death, Charley verifies this, saying, ‘A salesman…[has] got to dream,’ because what a salesman does is so insubstantial. The supreme salesmanly virtue of being ‘well-liked’ is very vague and a mere fantasy. Biff, Willy’s other son, also realizes this, although somewhat less expressively than Charley does. Biff announces that his father hates him because he knows Willy ‘is a fake.’ Biff wants to concentrate on farming and physical labor, things that are real and perceptible. He has no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead he chooses a life of satisfaction over success and attempts to convince Happy to do the same. He only agrees to Happy and Linda’s scheme when he is convinced that it is the only way to save his father’s life. Even then he keeps trying to intrude with the truth, attempting to tell Willy that his plan to open a sporting-goods chain failed, partly due to Biff stealing a pen from Bill Oliver, his prospective backer.
Throughout the play Biff reveals history of theft which in a way shows his need for real items. His need for realness n turn destroys Willy’s hopes. He continuously invades his father’s dreams of fortune with truth and reality. Biff chooses not to dream because he has seen the truth behind his dad’s impractical fantasies. When Biff was young, he was a football star who dreamt more than Happy did and was the focus of Willy’s hopes. He wanted to get an athletic scholarship, but he refused to take a remedial math class in high school that he needed to graduate. This decision came about after he accidentally caught Willy’s mistress in a hotel room. Biff was struck with the reality that even though is father’s dreams seemed at their height, he was still a fake and not the man he took him to be after all. Biff’s presence is the main cause of Willy’s suicide. Biff is the visible sign that his Willy’s own ambitions destroyed his family. Willy clearly feels guilty over betraying his family. He is reminded in several ways of his betrayal and failure to his family. Willy worries that it is his fault that Biff did not attend summer school in order to graduate high school. He also constantly rages at Linda for darning stockings in his presence. The stockings represent his infidelity by reminding him of his mistress whom he bought stockings when his very own wife went without.
Even in all this Linda still tries to bring Willie peace. But where Linda tries to comfort him, Biff insists on telling Willy that his ambitions are failed. Willy not only desires to earn something real, the twenty thousand dollar life insurance policy, but also to earn it for Biff. In Willy’s suicide is the final destruction of the dream. He thinks that he will have a salesman’s funeral that everyone will attend, and that the insurance money will put Biff ahead of Bernard. He kills himself by driving the car that was the subject of his nostalgia, or, more appropriately, by crashing it. Even in his death his dreams are still nothing more than just that. His funeral is the just the opposite of what he wanted. The only people who attend his funeral is his family and two friends. In the moment when he does get something real, he kills his dream and himself.
Willy’s dream fuel the entire play making it evident he lives his life off expectancy and hope. Ironically, having what he works for kills him, as it may well have Ben. The insurance money never appears in the play and Biff’s future never resolved. Willy is dead leaving no one surprised. It does not come as a surprise to the audience, who know the play’s title before ever walking into the theater, nor to the major characters, who have all known about Willy’s designs since at least halfway through the play. Once Willy and his dreams, which controlled the entire play, are dead, the powerful reality of their deaths is all that remains.