The death of a salesman rotates around Willy, who is the father to Biff and Happy, and a husband to Linda. It is an average family whose dreams seem to differ, and Willy develops a personal conflict in his own life. The death of a salesman is a tragic story where Willy tries hard,but he does not achieve his dreams.His needs are not met; hence, leading to his death. Willy’s life rotates around failures, and he feels a failure knows him best since nothing he tries succeeds. He feels tiered working as a salesman because his job does not help him achieve his dreams. When he leaves his job expecting to get another one, he eventually loses the job he has at hand. In addition, He also misses the loan when Biff went to talk to his boss to get a business loan so that he could start a business and make their life better. This situation causes the situation to be worse for Willy after he heard about the news. He is full of hallucinations and visions that do not come true, and this cause disturbance to the rest of his family.
His failures make him more frustrated, hoping that his life would change for better only to find the worst, and later,starts thinking of committing suicide. What Willy thought was that after Biff’s education, he should eventually get a good job and make himself rich, but that is not what Biff becomes.Therefore, he believes that Biff is the real cause of all those problems in the family, and even the mother thinks he is the one stressing his father because of the career choice. The author explores how dreams of different members of this family differ.There is a difference among the New York family’s dreams that seem to vary; hence, stressing other members of the group (Miller et al., 3). America is a materialistic society where there are socio-economic statuses that define an individual. Willy tries hard to raise his dreams to reach higher social class, but his life is full of disappointments and everything he tries fails. This situation happens until he decides to take a tragic action of committing suicide so that the life insurance compensation could help make the family better. He tries to hide his average life from reality and tries to hide his disappointments and disillusionment in his own vision of success (Miller et al., 6).
Willy is not a tragic hero because he is taking away his life since he thinks it would lead to a success of his son is not realistic; there could have been other ways of getting money to invest in a project. For instance, selling a household property or getting another job alternatively. Nevertheless, he would still commit suicide only to show how cowardice, he is instead of facing the world and changing his life. Nevertheless, he does not act as a role model to his family members since this is not the only way to solve problems (Miller et al., 10).
What stresses him is not death as assumed;it is important to note that he was a hero because of what he did, but a coward who runs away from problems instead of confronting them as a man and the head of the family. After all, even the son might not use that money to change the life of the family through the business, instead he can decide to mishandle the money on his own and that would be a big blow. It is because of Capitalism in American that really affects Willy, and his rejection to live in reality is what caused all the disillusionment and loss of life. The author tries to use Willy as a symbol of the families in America, which is full of materialism, and capitalism (Miller et al., 9).
Willy is only a conflict to himself since nobody is interested in his life, he tries to imagine the way people view him, and change his real being. He does not live in reality and accept the fact that he is an average person.He thinks that being rich is very easy, especially for his son Biff, who he thought he would be rich, as well as a successful person in the family.However, he feels that Biff only wastes his time and talents on things that don not make him rich (Miller et al., 23).
Willy’s tragic mistake was to think that it is easy to become wealthy, and making a difference to his life to be stress-free, yet everything goes through different steps. Nevertheless, his greatest mistake was to think that death would make things better, though he does not know if Biff would ever be responsible to bring up his family using the life insurance money (Miller et al., 12).
Work Cited
Miller, Arthur, and Enoch Brater. Death of a Salesman. London: Methuen Drama, 2010. Print.
