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Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 30, 2020 • ( 0 )

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its literary achievement, as such, but is, rather, the impact which it has had on spectators, both in America and abroad. The influence of this drama, first performed in 1949, continues to grow in World Theatre. For it articulates, in language which can be appreciated by popular audiences, certain new dimensions of the human dilemma.

—Esther Merle Jackson, “ Death of a Salesman : Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre”

It can be argued that the Great American Novel—that always elusive imaginative summation of the American experience—became the Great American Drama in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Miller’s masterpiece forms the defining myth of the American family and the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the play’s only rival in American literature in expressing the tragic side of the American myth of success and the ill-fated American dreamers. A landmark and cornerstone 20th-century drama, Death of a Salesman is crucial in the history of American theater in presenting on stage an archetypal family drama that is simultaneously intimate and representative, social and psychological, realistic and expressionistic. Critic Lois Gordon has called it “the major American drama of the 1940s” that “remains unequalled in its brilliant and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its richness of visual and verbal texture, and its wide range of emotional impact.” Miller’s play, perhaps more than any other, established American drama as the decisive arena for addressing the key questions of American identity and social and moral values, while pioneering methods of expression that liberated American theater. The drama about the life and death of salesman Willy Loman is both thoroughly local in capturing a particular time and place and universal, one of the most popular and adapted American plays worldwide. Willy Loman has become the contemporary Everyman, prompting widespread identification and sympathy. By centering his tragedy on a lower middle-class protagonist—insisting, as he argued in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”—Miller completed the democratization of drama that had begun in the 19th century while setting the terms for a key debate over dramatic genres that has persisted since Death of a Salesman opened in 1949.

Miller’s subjects, themes, and dramatic mission reflect his life experiences, informed by the Great Depression, which he regarded as a “moral catastrophe,” rivaled, in his view, only by the Civil War in its profound impact on American life. Miller was born in 1915, in New York City. His father, who had emigrated from Austria at the age of six, was a successful coat manufacturer, prosperous enough to afford a chauffeur and a large apartment over-looking Central Park. For Miller’s family, an embodiment of the American dream that hard work and drive are rewarded, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything. The business was lost, and the family was forced to move to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in a small frame house that served as the model for the Lomans’ residence. Miller’s father never fully recovered from his business failure, and his mother was often depressed and embittered by the family’s poverty, though both continued to live in hope of an economic recovery to come. For Miller the depression exposed the hollowness and fragility of the American dream of material success and the social injustice inherent in an economic system that created so many blameless casualties. The paradoxes of American success—its stimulation of both dreams and guilt when lost or unrealized, as well as the conflict it created between self-interest and social responsibility—would become dominant themes in Miller’s work. As a high school student Miller was more interested in sports than studies. “Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift , and Rover Boys, ” Miller recalled, “and only verged on literature with some of Dickens. . . . I passed through the public school system unscathed.” After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his job that Miller began reading, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world and his vocation: “A book that changed my life was The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up, I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

In 1934 Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan. There he found a campus engaged by the social issues of the day: “The place was full of speeches, meetings and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues. . . . It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.” At Michigan Miller wrote his first play, despite having seen only two plays years before, to compete for prize money he needed for tuition. Failing in his first attempt he would eventually twice win the Avery Hopwood Award. Winning “made me confident I could go ahead from there. It left me with the belief that the ability to write plays is born into one, and that it is a kind of sport of the mind.” Miller became convinced that “with the exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human could do.” He would embrace the role of the playwright as social conscience and reformer who could help change America, by, as he put it “grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” Two years after graduating in 1938, having moved back to Brooklyn and married his college sweetheart, Miller had completed six plays, all but one of them rejected by producers. The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play examining the ambiguities of success and the money ethic, managed a run of only four performances on Broadway in 1944. Miller went to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, tried his hand at radio scripts, and attempted one more play. “I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.” The play was All My Sons, about a successful manufacturer who sells defective aircraft parts and is made to face the consequences of his crime and his responsibilities. It is Miller’s version of a Henrik Ibsen problem play, linking a family drama to wider social issues. Named one of the top-10 plays of 1947, All My Sons won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award over Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The play’s success allowed Miller to buy property in rural Connecticut where he built a small studio and began work on Death of a Salesman .

This play, subtitled “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,” about the last 24 hours of an aging and failing traveling salesman misguided by the American dream, began, as the playwright recounts in his introduction to his Collected Plays , with an initial image

of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons —a method one might call linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be “brought forward” in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment. . . . I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.

The play took shape by staging the past in the present, not through flashbacks of Willy’s life but by what the playwright called “mobile concurrency of past and present.” Miller recalled beginning

with only one firm piece of knowledge and this was that Loman was to destroy himself. How it would wander before it got to that point I did not know and resolved not to care. I was convinced only that if I could make him remember enough he would kill himself, and the structure of the play was determined by what was needed to draw up his memories like a mass of tangled roots without ends or beginning.

At once realistic in its documentation of American family life and expressionistic in its embodiment of consciousness on stage, Death of a Salesman opens with the 63-year-old Willy Loman’s return to his Brooklyn home, revealing to his worried wife, Linda, that he kept losing control of his car on a selling trip to Boston. Increasingly at the mercy of his memories Willy, in Miller’s analysis, “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Reflecting its protagonist, “The way of telling the tale . . . is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical.” The family’s present—Willy’s increasing mental instability, his failure to earn the commissions he needs to survive, and his disappointment that his sons, Biff and Happy, have failed to live up to expectations—intersects with scenes from the past in which both their dreams and the basis for their disillusionment are exposed. In the present Biff, the onetime star high school athlete with seeming unlimited prospects in his doting father’s estimation, is 34, having returned home from another failed job out west and harboring an unidentified resentment of his father. As Biff confesses, “everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” His brother, Happy, is a deceitful womanizer trapped in a dead-end job who confesses that despite having his own apartment, “a car, and plenty of women . . . still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” The present frustrations of father and sons collide with Willy’s memory when all was youthful promise and family harmony. In a scene in which Biff with the prospect of a college scholarship seems on the brink of attaining all Willy has expected of him, both boys hang on their father’s every word as he exults in his triumphs as a successful salesman:

America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ’cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.

Triumphantly, Willy passes on his secret of success: “Be liked and you will never want.” His advice exposes the fatal fl aw in his life view that defines success by exterior rather than interior values, by appearance and possessions rather than core morals. Even in his confident memory, however, evidence of the undermining of his self-confidence and aspirations occurs as Biff plays with a football he has stolen and father and son ignore the warning of the grind Bernard (who “is liked, but he’s not well liked”) that Biff risks graduating by not studying. Willy’s popularity and prowess as a salesman are undermined by Linda’s calculation of her husband’s declining commissions, prompting Willy to confess that “people don’t seem to take to me.” Invading Willy’s memory is the realization that he is far from the respected and resourceful salesman he has boasted being to his sons as he struggles to meet the payments on the modern appliances that equip the American dream of success. Moreover, to boost his sagging spirits on the road he has been unfaithful to his loving and supportive wife. To protect himself from these hurtful memories Willy is plunged back into the present for a card game with Bernard’s father, Charley. Again the past intrudes in the form of a memory of a rare visit by Willy’s older brother, Ben, who has become rich and whose secrets for success elude Willy. Back in the present Willy is hopeful at Biff’s plan to go see an old employer, Bill Oliver, for the money to start up a Loman Brothers sporting goods line. The act ends with Willy’s memory of Biff’s greatest moment—the high school football championship:

Like a young god. Hercules—something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges standing by? And the buyers I brought, and the cheers when he came out—Loman, Loman, Loman! God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!

The second act shatters all prospects, revealing the full truth that Willy has long evaded about himself and his family in a series of crushing blows. Expecting to trade on his 34 years of loyal service to his employer for a nontraveling, salaried position in New York, Willy is forced to beg for a smaller and smaller salary before he is fired outright, prompting one of the great lines of the play: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” Rejecting out of pride a job offer from Charley, Willy meets his son for dinner where Biff reveals that his get-rich scheme has collapsed. Bill Oliver did not remember who he was, kept him waiting for hours, and resentfully Biff has stolen his fountain pen from his desk. Biff now insists that Willy face the truth—that Biff was only a shipping clerk and that Oliver owes him nothing—but Willy refuses to listen, with his need to believe in his son and the future forcing Biff to manufacture a happier version of his meeting and its outcome. Biff’s anger and resentment over the old family lies about his prospects, however, cause Willy to relive the impetus of Biff’s loss of faith in him in one of the tour de force scenes in modern drama. Biff and Happy’s attempt to pick up two women at the restaurant interconnects with Willy’s memory of Biff’s arrival at Willy’s Boston hotel unannounced. There he discovers a partially dressed woman in his father’s room. Having failed his math class and jeopardized his scholarship, Biff has come to his father for help. Willy’s betrayal of Linda, however, exposes the hollowness of Willy’s moral authority and the disjunction between the dreams Willy sells and its reality:

Willy: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.

Biff: You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!

Willy: I gave you an order!

Biff: Don’t touch me, you—liar!

Willy: Apologize for that!

Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!

Willy’s guilt over the collapse of his son’s belief in him leads him to a final redemptive dream. Returning home, symbolically outside planting seeds, he discusses with Ben his scheme to kill himself for the insurance money as a legacy to his family and a final proof of his worth as a provider of his sons’ success. Before realizing this dream Willy must endure a final assault of truth from Biff who confesses to being nothing more than a thief and a bum, incapable of holding down a job—someone who is, like Willy, a “dime a dozen,” no better than any other hopeless striver: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Biff’s fury explodes into a tearful embrace of his father. After Biff departs upstairs the significance of his words and actions are both realized and lost by the chronic dreamer:

Willy, after a long pause, astonished, elevated Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!

Linda: He loves you, Willy!

Happy ,deeply moved Always did, Pop.

Willy: Oh. Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Plays

Doggedly holding onto the dream of his son’s prospects, sustained by his son’s love, Willy finally sets out in his car to carry out his plan, while the scene shifts to his funeral in which Linda tries to understand her husband’s death, and Charley provides the eulogy:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Linda delivers the final, heartbreaking lines over her husband’s grave: “Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free. . . .”

The power and persistence of Death of a Salesman derives from its remarkably intimate view of the dynamic of a family driven by their collective dreams. Critical debate over whether Willy lacks the stature or self-knowledge to qualify as a tragic hero seems beside the point in performance. Few other modern dramas have so powerfully elicited pity and terror in their audiences. Whether Willy is a tragic hero or Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy in any Aristotelian sense, he and his story have become core American myths. Few critics worry over whether Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero, but Gatsby shares with Willy Loman the essential American capacity to dream and to be destroyed by what he dreams. The concluding lines of The Great Gatsby equally serve as a requiem for both men:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Death of a Salesman is that rare thing: a modern play that is both a classic, and a tragedy. Many of the great plays of the twentieth century are comedies, social problem plays, or a combination of the two. Few are tragedies centred on one character who, in a sense, recalls the theatrical tradition that gave us Oedipus, King Lear, and Hamlet.

But how did Miller come to write a modern tragedy? What is Death of a Salesman about, and how should we analyse it? Before we come to these questions, it might be worth briefly recapping the plot of what is, in fact, a fairly simple story.

Death of a Salesman : summary

The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn’t make a sale, he doesn’t get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family’s table. He wants to get a desk job so he doesn’t have to travel around any more: at 62 years of age, he is tired and worn out.

He is married to Linda. Their son, Biff, is in his thirties and usually unemployed, drifting from one temporary job to another, much to Willy’s displeasure. Willy’s younger son, Happy, has a steady job along and his own home, and is therefore a success by Willy’s standards.

However, Happy, despite his name, isn’t happy with the life he has, and would quite like to give up his job and go and work on a ranch out West. Willy, meanwhile, is similarly dreaming, but in his case of the past, rather than the future: he thinks back to when Biff and Happy were small children and Willy was a success as a salesman.

The Lomans’ neighbour, Charley, offers Willy a job to help make ends meet, but Willy starts to reminisce about his recently deceased brother, Uncle Ben, who was an adventurer (and young Willy’s hero). Linda tells her sons to pay their father some respect, even though he isn’t himself a ‘great man’.

It emerges that Willy has been claiming to work as a salesman but has lately been borrowing money as he can’t actually find work. His plan is to take his own life so his family will receive life insurance money and he will be able, with his death, to do what he cannot do for them while alive: provide for them. Biff agrees reluctantly to go back to his former boss and ask for a job so he can contribute to the family housekeeping.

Meanwhile, Willy asks his boss, Howard, for his desk job and an advance on his next pay packet, but Howard sacks Willy. Willy then goes to Charley and asks for a loan. That night, at dinner, Willy and Biff argue (Biff failed to get his own former job back when his old boss didn’t even recognise him), and it turns out that Biff once walked in on his father with another woman.

Willy goes home, plants some seeds, and then – hearing his brother Ben calling for him to join him – he drives off and kills himself. At his funeral, only the family are present, despite Willy’s prediction that his funeral would be a big affair.

Death of a Salesman : analysis

Miller’s family had been relatively prosperous during the playwright’s childhood, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious. This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen in much of his work for the theatre.

Death of a Salesman represented a decisive change of direction for the young playwright. His previous success as a playwright, All My Sons , was a social drama heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen, but with his next play, Miller wished to attempt something new. The mixture of hard-hitting social realism and dreamlike sequences make Death of a Salesman an innovative and bold break with previous theatre, both by Miller and more widely.

In his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which Miller wrote to justify his artistic decision to make an ordinary American man the subject of a theatrical tragedy, Miller argued that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes.

As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

Death of a Salesman is an example of this ethos: Loman, who cheated on his wife and lied to his family about his lack of work and his reliance on friends who lent him money, makes his last gesture a tragic but selfless act, which will ensure his family have money to survive when he is gone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Miller is somehow endorsing the hero’s final and decisive act. The emphasis should always be on the word ‘tragedy’: Loman’s death is a tragedy brought about partly by his own actions, but also by the desperate straits that he is plunged into through the harsh and unforgiving world of sales, where once he is unable to earn money, he needs some other means of acquiring it so he can put food on the table for his family.

But contrary to what we might expect, there is something positive and even affirmative about tragedy, as Arthur Miller views the art form.

For Miller, in ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, theatrical tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life, but there is something affirmative about the events leading up to this final act, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man – a man willing to take a moral stand and evaluate himself justly – in the way that it has.

Does Willy Loman deserve to be pushed to take his own life just so his family can pay the bills? No, so there must be something within society that is at fault. Capitalism’s dog-eat-dog attitude is at least partly responsible, since it leads weary and worn-out men like Willy to dream of paying off their mortgage and having enough money, while simultaneously making the achievement of that task as difficult as possible. When a younger and better salesman comes along, men like Willy are almost always doomed.

But by placing this in front of the audience and dramatising it for them, Miller invites his audience to question the wrongs within modern American society. Thus people will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve it. The hero’s death is individually tragic but collectively offers society hope.

So it may be counter-intuitive to describe a tragedy like Death of a Salesman as ‘optimistic’, but in a sense, this is exactly what it is. Miller takes the classical idea of the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , and updates this for a modern audience, too: the hero’s tragic flaw is redefined as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society.

There is something noble in his flaw, even though it will lead to his own destruction. So really, the flaw is not within the individual or hero as much as in society itself.

A key context for Death of a Salesman , like many great works of American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, is the American Dream: that notion that the United States is a land of opportunity where anyone can make a success of their life and wind up stinking rich. Miller’s weaving of dream sequences in amongst the sordid and unsatisfactory reality of the Lomans’ lives deftly contrasts the American dream with the American reality.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman”

This is a very insightful and convincing appreciation. What it misses is any idea that Miller’s being Jewish may have had a hand in helping him to see why the American dream and its popularity-cult needed to be criticized. The word “cult” in “populairty-cult” says it all, because “The Death of a Saleman” is at its core a play about idolatry, the Ol,d Testament theme against which its prophets railed the most.

Willy is portrayed as an idol-worshipper, whereas his friend, Charely, and Charley’s son, Bernard, are both seen as devotees of the “true” God, in whose religion the human being is always endowed with dignity and always seen as an end in himself, never as a means to some other end. The play, in fact, asks a very Jewish question. If the true God and the false god both require sacrifice, how can you ever know which is which? And its tragedy supplies us with Miller’s answer: those who worship idols discover in the end that THEY are the sacrifice!

Miller, like Philip Roth later on, was a Jewish-American inheritor of the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition, a tradition in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremia en Ezekiel continually used their verbal art to expose Israel’s stinking moral corruption, foreseeing nothing but doom if it continued in irs idolatrous ways. Change ancient Israel to America, change the average Israelite of that time to Willy Loman now: both wind up destroying themsevles for the very same reason: with all the good will in they world, they have no self-knowledge and spend their whole lives worshipping a false god, deluded in the belief that they are worshipping the true one.

Their mistake in both cases only becomes apparent when it is time to offer the sacrifice, but by then, of course, it is always too late!

Perfect analysis, particularly when viewed in regards to recent events, involving American involvement with Israel dogma

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Death of a Salesman

Arthur miller.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Death of a Salesman: Introduction

Death of a salesman: plot summary, death of a salesman: detailed summary & analysis, death of a salesman: themes, death of a salesman: quotes, death of a salesman: characters, death of a salesman: symbols, death of a salesman: literary devices, death of a salesman: theme wheel, brief biography of arthur miller.

Historical Context of Death of a Salesman

Other books related to death of a salesman.

• Full Title: Death of a Salesman
• When Written: 1948
• Where Written: Roxbury, Connecticut
• When Published: The Broadway premiere was February 10, 1949. The play was published in 1949 by Viking Press.
• Literary Period: Social Realism
• Genre: Dramatic stage play
• Setting: New York and Boston in 1948.
• Climax: Biff's speech to Willy at the end of Act Two.
• Antagonist: Howard Wagner; the American Dream that allows Willy and his sons to delude themselves.

Extra Credit for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Simpson: Beleaguered, overweight family man Willy Loman has been the genesis not only of live-action domestic sitcoms like All in the Family and Married with Children , but animated satires like The Family Guy and The Simpsons , both of which have made knowing reference to Death of a Salesman in various episodes.

Salesman in Beijing: In 1983, the People's Art Theatre in Beijing wanted to put on a Chinese-language production of Death of a Salesman . Arthur Miller flew to Beijing and spent six weeks directing the cast, though he only spoke two words of Chinese. He documented his experiences in the book Salesman in Beijing , published in 1984 with photographs by his wife, Inge Morath.

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Death of a Salesman

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Death of a Salesman

Sympathy for willy loman anonymous 11th grade.

Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a domestic tragedy that centres around the dysfunctional Loman family, most notably Willy Loman, a failed salesman so captivated by the American Dream and his desire to be a good father that it ultimately leads to his suicide. However, Miller’s tragic character is quite different from the idea of tragedy that Aristotle put forward. Aristotle claimed that tragic figures had to be noble and high achieving, which Willy is most certainly not. Despite this definition of a tragic hero, Miller himself says: ‘the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy as a great man’1, an echo of Linda’s words towards the middle of the play.

The decision to make Willy an everyday man instead of somebody of a higher status, as Aristotle suggested, means many people, particularly those who can draw on aspects of Willy’s life, can easily relate to Willy and therefore it is much easier to feel sympathy for him. Furthermore, Miller identifies the villain not as a person, but the society the tragic hero is a part of. To say that Willy is a ‘congenital madman’, however, is untrue. Miller never introduces the audience to any relations of Willy’s during the course of the play with the exception of Ben, and even then...

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Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay

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Is Willy Loman a tragic hero? Why did he kill himself? Find here the answers! This essay focuses on the essay Tragedy and the Common Man in which Artur Miller gave the reasons why Willy Loman should be considered a pathetically tragic character.

Introduction

• Willy Loman Is a Tragic Hero

Works Cited

A tragic hero is person who usually appears in romantic literature. To make it clear, it should be mentioned that the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is created in Romanticism genre as the main character has visions which divide his life into two parts, real where Willy Loman and his sons are unable to achieve success in sales, and unreal, where everything is great. Willy Loman’s family got used that he talks to himself and do not react to this anymore.

There is a statement that Willy Loman is a tragic hero according to Arthur Miller’s definition of what a tragic hero is in his famous essay Tragedy and the Common Man . To make the situation clear, we are going to discuss the main features which confirm the statement and make Willy a tragic hero.

Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?

The essay Tragedy and the Common Man written by Arthur Miller presents the main characteristics of a tragic hero in romantic literature. One of the main features is the referencing of a hero to a common person. Miller states that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (Miller ‘Tragedy’ 1461).

Willy Loman is a simple person who used to work as a salesman, but due to age and health problems he wants to settle less active life. This is the first argument which proves that Willy Loman is a tragic hero.

Arthur Miller also believes that a hero becomes tragic when he is “ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity” (Miller ‘Tragedy’ 1462).

This is exactly what has happened with Willy when he got to know that all he was trying to reach (to make his children be successful by means of making them good salespeople) was ruined, he did not manage to achieve this goal. Thus, he understands that he is not a person, that he has not fulfilled his life goal. “Nothing is planted. I do not have a thing in the ground” (Miller ‘Death of a Salesman’ 122).

Saying these words, Willy means that all his life is spent in vain and there are no results of it. Willy understands that salesman is not the best profession and his desire to sacrifice his life for the benefit of his family is nothing but the desire to save his dignity and do not declare in public that all he has been planning was ruined. This is the second argument in support of the idea that Willy Loman is a tragic hero.

Arthur Miller is sure that one of the main characteristics of a tragic hero in the play is the understanding of the difference between real and unreal worlds. He says, “The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” (Miller ‘Tragedy’ 1463).

The main character is a tragic hero as he has been torn away from the world of illusion where his sons are successful salespeople and has been put in the reality where they have failed to become wealthy and have nothing to do.

He realizes that he was a bad father, except for the imaginary world where he was the best. The tragedy of the hero is characterized by the fact that he was torn from his imaginary world and put in cruel reality where his dreams were not realized. This is the third argument in support of the fact that Willy was a tragic hero.

Reading an essay Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller, it is possible to state that concluding statement about a tragic hero is exactly what can be seen in Willy Loman, a character of his play Death of a Salesman .

The author writes that the main essence of a tragic hero is “intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity” (Miller ‘Tragedy’ 1464). This is the main characteristic feature which shows Willy as a tragedy character, as searching for something in his life, he has failed to become a personality.

To sum it up, it should be mentioned that the ideas Arthur Miller presents in his essay Tragedy and the Common Man are perfectly reflected in his play Death of a Salesman . The main character of the play, Willy Loman, is a tragic hero as it is stated in the author’s essay.

All the reasons the author provides in the essay are confirmed by the character’s description in the play. It seems that the author tried to reflect all this ideas about a tragic hero in Willy Loman to show the reader that such characters exist.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman . New York, NY: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man .” Discovering Literature . Eds. Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. 1461-1464. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 22). Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/willy-loman-is-a-tragic-hero-according-to-arthur-millers-essay-tragedy-and-the-common-man/

"Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay." IvyPanda , 22 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/willy-loman-is-a-tragic-hero-according-to-arthur-millers-essay-tragedy-and-the-common-man/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay'. 22 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay." May 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/willy-loman-is-a-tragic-hero-according-to-arthur-millers-essay-tragedy-and-the-common-man/.

1. IvyPanda . "Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay." May 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/willy-loman-is-a-tragic-hero-according-to-arthur-millers-essay-tragedy-and-the-common-man/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Willy Loman as a Tragic Hero: Character Analysis Essay." May 22, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/willy-loman-is-a-tragic-hero-according-to-arthur-millers-essay-tragedy-and-the-common-man/.

Death of a Salesman

Introduction.

Death of a Salesman  by Arthur Miller, is written in 1949, is a modern tragedy and is considered both the masterpiece of the playwright and foundation of modern American drama. The play is awarded various honors and awards that also includes the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary

Moreover, the company has taken away his salary so that he works on a straight commission. On his return to home, Linda, Willy wife, ease him and motivates him to ask the master of the company, Howard Wagner, for a place in in the New York office where he his salary will be guaranteed without traveling.

Ultimately, Charley, Willy’s neighbor, enters from the next door. While playing play cards and talking to Charley, Willy imagines himself talking to his elder brother, Ben. Ben once invited Willy to Alaska and ask him to join him in order to make his fortune. Willy moves outside the kitchen, after Charley leaves home, and is still caught up in his imagined conversation with his elder brother.

Death of a Salesman Characters Analysis

Willy loman, happy loman.

He, son of Charley, is a successful lawyer who argues cases before the Supreme Court. His success is an indictment for Biff and Happy.

Linda Loman

Howard wagner.

The unnamed character in the play with whom Biff caught his father in a hotel room and due to this discovery he refuses to join the summer school for further studies.

Themes in Death of a Salesman

Failure of the american dream.

Willy Loman is also facing this kind of creed behind the American dream in his life. Willy had a natural capability in the field of carpentry, but the craze of earning more money and a bright future made him choose the field of business with an occupation of a salesman. He spent the mature and productive period of his life doing hard work in hopes of having a comfortable and settled life in a later part of life.

Crumpled by absolute defeat and great desperateness Willy planned suicide. When his miserable itch overwhelmed him, he committed suicide.

Fake existence

Nature versus city, morality versus immortality, death of a salesman literary analysis.

The play  Death of a Salesman  is also subtitled as “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem”. According to the subtitle, the play is divided into two acts and each act is further divided into conversations- the present conversation and the conversation from the past- that are intermingled. The play covers an evening and the day following, however, the action is intermittent with past memories and flashbacks, mostly 17 years back.

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Willy Loman – a Tragic Hero in The Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

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A sledgehammer of a play: LaPaglia mesmerises in Perth premiere of Death of a Salesman

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Death of a Salesman

Crown Theatre Perth

Linda (Alison Whyte) is all too aware of the decline of Willy (Anthony LaPaglia) as she placates and defends him. Credit: Brett Boardman

My eyebrows darted skywards when I learned Neil Armfield’s production of Arthur Miller’s mid-century classic about the dreams and delusions of a burnt-out Brooklyn travelling salesman would be playing not at The Maj or Regal, but a coin-toss from Perth’s gambling ground zero.

All I could think of was Anthony LaPaglia’s Willy Loman telling tall tales about life on the road and betting his future on his golden-boy former-athlete son Biff within earshot of punters playing the pokies and huddling around blackjack tables with dreams of hitting the jackpot. It felt too close for comfort.

But when the tears started to flow I realised Crown Theatre was the perfect venue for Miller’s heartbreaking, haunting dissection of the American dream; Death of Salesman is one of those rare works of art capable of both entrancing critics and touching the hearts of audiences who shy away from hoity-toity arts palaces.

Indeed, Crown punters should abandon the gaming tables for a night and see Death of a Salesman because Armfield’s production is an absolute knock-out, a stunningly well-acted family drama that bores so deeply into the trauma and tragedy of a family of battlers that it resonates beyond the social and political concerns of the 1950s into our own turbulent times.

Astutely, Armfield and his designer Dale Ferguson have reinforced the play’s universality and its dream-like narrative by stripping away the naturalistic setting we associate with the play and returning it to Miller’s original minimalist conception — he believed that the play unfolded “inside of Willy’s skull” — and setting the drama in front of and on the bleachers in Ebbet’s Field, a former Major League baseball stadium in Brooklyn and the site of a legendary football game played by Biff.

Instead of Willy’s wife Linda (Alison Whyte), sons Biff (Josh Helman) and Happy (Ben O’Toole) and the rest of the cast shuffling on and offstage as embattled Willy drifts back and forth in time, they retreat to the bleachers and bear witness to the unravelling of a man struggling to come to terms with his ordinariness – “I’m not a dime a dozen!” – and the failure of his once promising Adonis-like son.

“Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person,” exclaims Linda in one the play’s most famous speeches, and this is exactly what the cast do as they watch Willy returning from his last sales trip and facing not just redundancy, but the truth about Biff, who has come home after failing to make anything of himself.

Keeping the actors on stage all the time also reminds us Miller’s play is not just a tragedy of a little man who toiled his whole life only to be thrown on the scrapheap. It is about intergenerational trauma caused by Willy’s failures and the cold, hard reality of American capitalism.

Anthony LaPaglia stars in Death of a Salesman. Credit: Jeff Busby

While Death of a Salesman is ultimately centred on the relationship between Willy and Biff, whose broad shoulders carry the hopes of the Loman family, Armfield has amplified the relationship between Willy and his long-suffering wife, who knows her husband is deeply flawed but understands his torment.

“His name was never in the paper,” says Linda. “He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.”

LaPaglia is rightly getting raves for his Willy — he finds the Loman sweet spot between dreaming and despair, grandstanding and physical and emotional collapse — but it’s to Whyte we must pay attention because she is breathtaking, a mix of hyper-sensitivity and steeliness that would be needed to prop up a doomed dreamer like Willy.

And she and LaPaglia gives us one of the most beautiful and believable married couples ever seen on a Perth stage, delivering dialogue with the force we expect of practiced theatre actors and relating to each other with the subtlety and understatement of skilled screen performers. It is a reminder that Death of a Salesman is not just the tragedy of an average man destined to be average but a wrenching study of a marriage.

And Armfield found the perfect Biff in Helman, a man-mountain whose failure to achieve is made that much more tragic and moving because of his size. When Biff finally declares to Willy that he’s nothing, the contrast between the promise of his physique and the reality of his non-achievement, it uncorked so many tears I thought I might have to leave the Crown by canoe.

While the four leads are so riveting it made me forget I was watching a play in an auditorium built for musicals and not drama — 2300 people watching a 75-year-old serious drama in a resort complex is hard to get your head around — the rest of the cast are uniformly splendid.

In the final moments, Linda says that after decades of toil she has finally paid off their home. It’s a line that will resonate with Perth audiences who will be working as long and hard as Willy to pay off their homes as our version of the American dream is crumbling during the current cost of living crisis.

Audiences will cry as much as I did during the Perth run of this sledgehammer of a play, but it might not just be for Willy. There is a little Loman in all of us.

Death of Salesman is on until August 29.

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GWB Entertainment: Death of a Salesman

20 august @ 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm aest.

Read the  Limelight review.

Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winner Anthony Lapaglia stars in the critically acclaimed smash hit production of Death of a Salesman  arriving in Perth for 17 performances only from 15 August 2024.

Hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century – Arthur Miller’s  Death of a Salesman  is directed by the acclaimed Neil Armfield ( Cloudstreet, The Secret River, The Diary of a Madman, Exit the King ).

Lauded for his critically acclaimed performance in  A View from the Bridge   on Broadway, Anthony Lapaglia returns to the world of Arthur Miller as Willy Loman, joined by a company of some of Australia’s finest actors including Helpmann Award and Silver Logie winner Alison Whyte ( Faith Healer, The Dressmaker, Frontline ). Josh Helman ( Mad Max – Fury Road, X-Men ) and Ben O’Toole ( Hacksaw Ridge ) deliver break-out stage performances as Biff and Happy Loman. Death of a Salesman  is simply one of the most profound and moving works on the pursuit of success and the post-war American Dream.

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Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN at Crown Theatre

Arthur Miller classic shows just why it endures long past its setting

It may be difficult to explain how a play so firmly set 75 years and half a world away can find success today, but DEATH OF A SALESMAN does just that. The play is brought to life by a single set and a brilliant cast who relentlessly hit with their performances, led by a simply outstanding Anthony LaPaglia . There is an air of enduring relevance to the play, and the many qualities of this performance will ensure it stays with you for a long time.

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DEATH OF A SALESMAN is rooted deeply in the time it is set. The American Dream- a term itself only coined in 1931- was, in the eyes of playwright Arthur Miller , dead. The ideals of the roaring 20s met an abrupt end in 1929’s Great Depression, and the country had barely dragged itself up to its knees before it found itself inexorably bound to World War II. By 1949, when the play was written, Arthur Miller was already intimately familiar with both the highest highs one could dream of, and the lowest lows. He knew countless people reaching the end of their tethers, and he portrayed them singularly in Willy Loman. Miller himself would unlikely have imagined his play written in anger at that specific time would still find relevance going forward, and yet, even in 2024, there is an inescapable and poignant connection to now.

Anthony LaPaglia stars as Willy Loman, the titular salesman and the central focus of the beleaguered characters. LaPaglia is simply outstanding, and whilst he may be well known to Australians for his many movie performances, his work onstage persona seems to hit harder. LaPaglia carries his character with an unmistakeable frailty, dragging himself along and wearing himself out frequently. The unavoidable conclusion is that someone like Loman is quite unable to work, and yet he has crafted his own identity so tightly to his work that he is unable to separate the two. With not much else altered to make the bring DEATH OF A SALESMAN to modern times, the balance of the cast speak with strong Brooklyn accents, yet LaPaglia gives his character a less sharp, more central New York accent, which means that (by no accident I’m sure) Loman’s diatribes hark to a contemporary American prone to exaggerate and paint fantastical ideals rather than deal with reality. Anthony LaPaglia ’s Loman doesn’t dominate the stage but pretends like he ought to, and when portrayed so genuine and raw, it is impossible to not see, as Arthur Miller intended, a hefty dose of normal person in the main character.

As the long suffering Linda Loman is the inimitable Alison Whyte. Whyte’s portrayal of the housewife forced to pick up the pieces of a crumbling family unit and desperately try to keep them together is plain for the audience to see, with each carefully crafter line and look delivered to full effect. Whyte’s genius is her ability to avoid many of the mid-century housewife tropes. At no point is her character ignorant to what is happening around her, and in fact her struggle is knowing exactly what is going on within her family and fighting it anyway.

As the man Willy always wanted to be is Anthony Phelan as Ben Loman. Ben is a man whose life was full of adventure and money, drifting in and out of Willy’s memories throughout the narrative to remind Willy of what he could have had. Anthony Phelan ’s wise yet distant voice fits the part perfectly, and his aloofness to the plight of his brother and family uses just one character to paint the picture of Willy’s family during his own upbringing in the way only a very talented actor can.

As Willy’s son Biff is Josh Helman , who perfectly and tragically portrays the catalyst for the whole family having to confront what and who they really are. As a football star sand the one on whom the family’s fortunes rely as the play goes on, Helman brings the vulnerability and weakness to the fore, and whilst his story is tied to the plot, the steady march towards Biff having to admit he can’t be who his father wants him to be is painted in stunning depth by Josh Helman . As Harold ‘Happy’ Loman is Ben O’Toole. O’Toole wonderfully shows why his character is nicknamed happy, beginning as a part of the ideal unit but decaying to show that Happy is yet another character blissfully ignorant to the reality of life .

As the ever-loving neighbour Charley is Marco Chiappi . Chiappi has a difficult task that he meets with aplomb, on one hand being the successful neighbour to heavily contrast with Willy’s life, but also bringing the sparse parts of humour the narrative allows. Chiappi’s character refuses to be worn down by Willy’s persistent refusal to accept a job as much as he needs it, as well as the fact Willy is almost never kind to his kindly neighbour. The genuine love and warmth the character meets this with will bring a smile to your face. As Charley’s son Bernard is is Tom Stokes. Bernard begins as the archetypal post-war nerd, himself trying to keep the Loman’s together when they seem to refuse to do it themselves. Bernard grows and becomes successful- the only actual success we ever see in the show- and indeed it is his pressing Willy for answers as to how the family did fall apart that begins Willy’s descent into sadness and having to confront life. Stokes’ delivery of this critical scene illustrates the dynamic between the two perfectly whilst also highlighting just how different things are for the neighbouring families.

Dale Ferguson ’s set is unchanging throughout the show, showing the bleachers at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, which in the narrative is the scene of what should have been the Loman family’s greatest triumph but instead serves as the point where everything began to go wrong. Whilst the singular scene doesn’t quite fit into the places it’s meant to become, the imagery is striking; upon the bleachers sit all of the people who form a part of Willy’s life, and they all at various points descend to spend time with him before leaving him and ascending from his mind. Neil Armfield ’s expertly uses the front of stage as a blank canvas to illustrate the many scenes of the play, and he perfectly utilises each characters strengths to paint the full picture. Sophie Woodward (co-designing with Dale Ferguson ) makes costumes that add to each character perfectly and almost alone illustrate the time in which the play is set.

At the risk of spoiling the show (if the title hans't already), DEATH OF A SALESMAN is not a happy show. No character triumphs above, and there is no uplifting rebound from the despair of the finale. Indeed, the post-show buzz that I love to revel in and will often use as a gauge of an audience’s enjoyment of a show is almost non-existent. This shows, however, just how thoroughly and firmly the cast pull you in, and how they all portray so perfectly the family scene. The way Willy is aloof to his actual situation, how Linda desperately tries to keep the family together in the face of everything, how Biff thinks he can still pretend to be someone else and how Happy removes himself from the family set as it suits all sound almost non-sensical, and yet the cast illustrate it in a way that makes it all seem perfectly normal. Much of the play's themes and Arthur Miller ’s beliefs only becoming apparent when one is given time to reflect on it, as the presentation of it firmly ensures that you feel Willy is the thoroughly regular person Miller wanted to show him as. Overall, DEATH OF A SALESMAN is the art of theatre at its finest, with the parts brought together exquisitely to force you to think about where you are, but to also consider where other people are.

DEATH OF A SALESMAN is at Crown Theatre until August 29th. Tickets and more information from  Death of a Salesman Australia.

Pictures thanks to Jeff Busby.

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Death Of A Salesman travels to Crown Theatre Perth with Alison Whyte as Linda Loman

Main Image: Death Of A Salesman cast from left, Josh Helman, Anthony LaPaglia, Ben O'Toole and Alison Whyte. Credit: Daniel Boud

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