the following work was written for my american literature course during the second semester of my freshman year. it is a literature analysis focusing on the characterization of willy loman, the main character in the play, death of a salesman. this essay shows my level of skill since the intro-level english courses I took the semester prior.

Willy Loman’s Comfort Trap

The American Dream is what many people strive to achieve through hard work and persistence.  A house that is paid off, a good job in business, a wife, and two and a half children is the perfect white picket fence life that has been sought after and is still being sought after today.  In Arthur Miller’s famous play, Death of a Salesman, the central theme of the play is the American Dream and how it can be skewed and being ruin to those who misunderstand it.  Death of a Salesman follows Willy Loman and his dysfunctional family in the present and in the past through Willy’s memories in his endeavors to achieve the success he saw in his father as a salesman, his brother, and his other colleagues.  The characterization of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller portrays the ruin a misinterpreted American Dream can bring.

In Death of a Salesman, the American Dream is described in a few different ways by the means of different characters’ definition of success, but not all interpretations are sound.  To Willy Loman, success includes financial stability and being generally liked for his charisma.  He compares himself to his deceased brother Ben, who had proudly achieved his American dream by mining diamonds in an African mine in Alaska.  In Willy’s memories, Ben states twice with pride and enthusiasm that he “walked into the jungle” (1253, 1255) and was rich when he walked out.  Inspired by Ben’s monumental success, Willy also wants to feel the fulfilment and happiness Ben seemed to experience as quickly as Ben experienced it.  Willy does not acknowledge that Ben’s instant success is not common and instead runs with the idea that he can achieve the same. To allow himself to feel an air of importance, Willy takes pride in his position as a well-liked salesman.  He and Ben recount how their father was a salesman who sold flutes before he went to Alaska to follow the Gold Rush.  Willy admires his father, calling him “rugged, well-liked, all-around” (1253), and concludes that people’s contacts and connections are what will push him to success.

Moreover, Willy also compares his sons to Bernard, his nephew, who “gets the best marks in school” (1246) because of hard work and dedication.  However, Bernard lacks any kind of buzzing social life that Willy considers a vital aspect of a successful man.  Willy believes the American Dream is achieved through who one knows and how well he can appear before others.  After all, “the man who makes an appearance … never want[s]” (1246) in his mind.  Because of all the importance Willy puts on charisma and personality, he openly tells his wife Linda that he does not want his boys to become like Bernard, whom he describes as “a worm” (1249).  In the end, his poor parenting blows Biff’s head up and becomes the reason Biff grows up to be dissatisfied and unable to hold a job because he “could never stand taking orders from anybody” (1294).

Because of Willy’s corrupted version of the American Dream, he ruins his family and his life as a whole.  His sons, Biff and Happy are wholly miserable as indicated by their conversation in their childhood bedroom during Act I.  The two boys reminisce about their childhoods and share their personal dreams with each other.  Biff and Happy agree they “would like to find a girl—steady, somebody with substance” (1242).  They then entertain the idea of working on a farm and doing away with the business life, though both know their father would fight against such a decision.  When Happy questions Biff on whether the farm life had treated him well, Biff states, “I oughta be makin’ a fortune.  That’s why I came running home” (1214).  Biff tells Happy that he did enjoy working on the farm.  However, it was the pressure to be financially successful that drove him back home, and by the end of the story, he realizes he would rather choose happiness over a salesman’s success.  Biff blames his father for his dissatisfied life and his career troubles, and questions Happy’s contentedness by asking, “You’re making money, aren’t you?” (1241).  Happy admits that he is not happy either, eliciting agreement from Biff that Willy’s dream affected their whole lives and decisions for the worse. 

The effects of Willy’s misinterpreted American Dream not only affect his sons, but it eventually led to the death of his own dreams.  In Act I, Willy grumbles over the house payments and fact that his sons do not care to stay in the house, stating, “Work a lifetime to pay off a house.  You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it” (1237).  The audience discovers later in the Act that Willy dreamed of working at home and being successful in his home life and at his job as a salesman.  However, his notion that to be successful was based solely on charisma and connection sullied his goals, and soon he was more focused on getting recognition in the workplace more than he was on taking care to work hard, which is the central idea of the American Dream.  Willy’s irrational behavior causes his family to go into debt and causes Linda to worry and stress over his decisions.  However, she continues to support him, and more than once, she tells Biff to let Willy live in his disillusionment.  Because of Willy’s fragile mental state, Linda lives in fear that he might do something too rash, and she takes care around him to be gentle as a result.  Linda’s cautious way around Willy takes a toll on her as Biff points out when he notices her hair greying though she is not even sixty years of age (1256), though Linda dismisses the comment and says she simply stopped hiding her hair color.  The burden of Willy’s flawed American Dream weighs on Linda until Willy’s eventual death.

Linda’s wariness around his father is another point of anger for Biff on top of his own failures he blames Willy for and Willy’s refusal to listen to Biff’s concerns and criticisms.  Toward the end of Act II, Biff finally boils over and explodes before his family, shouting for Willy to wake up from his disillusionment and realize that he is “practically full of it!  We all are!” (1294).  Biff yells at his father in a last-ditch attempt to make him realize how badly Willy’s encouragements and ill-founded advice supported Biff’s pride and the issue with taking orders he experienced before leaving to become a farmhand.  Faced with the terror of his reality, Biff’s words push Willy past his breaking point.  Willy’s spirit shatters, and he becomes wholly irrational, bids his family goodnight, and commits suicide.

At the end of the play, Willy stays true to his dream and kills himself for life insurance money, believing he could at least leave his family with that much and believing he would be praised at his funeral for doing what he could for his family.  However, at the funeral, while there is indeed a mournful tone amongst the very few family members that came, Linda remarks quietly and with relief that she, Biff, and Happy are “free and clear” (1298), which contains a double meaning.  Through Willy’s passing, the Lomans are free from their house payments and they are liberated from Willy’s corrupted dream and Biff and Happy are free to chase their own and make their own.  Though the American Dream is a good thing, any good thing can turn sour because of misconception.  Because of Willy’s poor interpretation of how to achieve success and his refusal to accept the reality of his faults, he ends up distressing and ruining the people around him.  In the end, Willy still clung to what he thought was a good dream, and death was his consequence.

Works Cited

Miller, Arthur.  Death of a Salesman. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8^th ed.  Edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. Norton, 2013. Pages 1235-1298.