Death of a Salesman. 'Explore the relationship between Willy and his sons'

Throughout literature and drama, the cipher is used repeatedly. For example in the old English ‘Mystery Plays’, Everyman was a cipher used to represent the common man,

“Indeed, playwrights still use situations in their plays (The Goat, Glengarry Glen Ross, Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman) as a cipher with which to examine human frailty, relationships and identity, in just such a manner as Shepard and Arthur Miller do - indeed, as great playwrights across the western world have done, from Johnson to Ibsen and back to the Greeks” ( Millard)                       

It is in keeping with dramatic tradition that Miller presents the audience with Loman family.

The Loman family is headed by Willy, the husband and father. Even the family name is symbolic.  They are low middle class, low-men.  

Although not a naturalistic representation of real events, the plot is outlined in a series of events and characterisations that the audience of the 1940’s could identify with. The audience meets Willy at the end of his salesman career, ostensibly only hours before he commits suicide.  The entire piece is viewed over one evening and one day. The play is shown in a series of flashbacks and hallucinatory scenes from Willy’s life.  A modern audience could identify immediately that Willy is suffering from acute depression, but in 1940’s America he would just be viewed as ‘losing it’.

It is not accidental that Willy should be cast as a travelling salesman.  The idea of travelling from place to place selling your wares demonstrates the old America. Willy is an antique in a new and progressive world. The new America has no place for people like him. The new progressive throw away society, simply casts off without conscience what it doesn’t want. Willy has been made redundant. Making a mockery of everything he ever believed in. Willy is then reduced to borrowing money from his neighbour Charley, Miller uses as a character contrast to Willy. Charley and his son Bernard stand for decent morals, they believe in hard work and education rather than looks and reputation.

Miller labours the issue of modernity killing humanity, to the point that Willy has tried unsuccessfully in the past to commit suicide by using modern appliances, eventually driving off and to kill himself in the car. Willy has come to a point that he feels he is worth more dead than a live, that the money from his insurance policy is worth more than a human life. His worship of money has literally killed him. The audience sees that the heartlessness of modern progress has killed old values.

 It could be argued that Miller’s characterisation of Willy, exemplifies the Aristotleon virtues of the tragic hero. Willy is not of noble birth and has more than one character flaw such as greed and lust.  However, perhaps Miller has challenged the idea of the classical tragic hero, and in Miller’s eyes, all men are noble no matter from which social class they are born into. To Miller, the cipher of Willy was a noble man because he worked hard towards his dream, even if it was somewhat misguided and superficial, and ultimately his only flaw was that of self delusion.

Willy has clung to the idea of the American Dream. He believes in the superficial edicts of acquired reputation, good looks and consumerism. Everything that he believes in is without substance. His religion is that of financial worship and status in the vain hope that he can claw his way up the social ladder towards being upper-middle class.  Essentially ‘money is barren’, (Calvin) and therefore Willy’s dreams are empty and shallow.

It is with these characteristics that Willy and his wife Linda has unsuccessfully raised two sons; Happy and Biff. Even the names are symbolic! Both names are onomatopoeic in sound. Happy/Hap gives the audience an image of one the seven dwarves, slightly stupid and grinning. Biff is a short, strong sounding name. Both sons are in their thirty’s, with Biff being older than Happy by two years. They are both staying in the family home for the night.

Viewing the play on face value an audience could simply decide that Willy’s values have seeped into his sons’ consciousnesses, however Miller is using Biff and Happy to demonstrate two extremes of attitude.

It was Oscar Wilde, who said, “Children begin by loving their parents, after a while they judge them, rarely do they forgive them’

In the case of the Loman sons, this is very true.

Happy is egotistical, vain, materialistic and deceitful. He is the dark side of the American Dream. He is everything Willy aspires to be and Miller is showing the audience how truly horrific those values are.  Happy is a womaniser and stunted emotionally. Even though he has his own apartment and a reasonably successful job, he still seeks approval and recognition from his father. Although he as achieved the American Dream that he has been infused with, he is still deeply unhappy;

Happy: “My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women, and still, god damit, I'm lonely."(‘Death of a Salesman’ Act 1, Page12)

Because social pressures require Willy to concentrate on work above all else, his sons are ignored. Willy is an exploited wage slave. Therefore it is left to the mother, Linda to raise the boys.  Linda was cold and distant as a mother. Her only interest in life being her husband, because of this Happy has found it difficult to form emotional bonds with women. He remains childlike. He does not have meaningful relationships with anyone.  It could even be said that Happy suffers from an Oedipal Complex.  He perhaps loves his mother obsessively because she was not emotionally available to him as a child, and despises his father in almost to an almost Sophocleian extent. Hap cannot settle down with one woman and even says to Biff,

        Biff: “Nah I’d like to a girl – steady, somebody with substance’

        Happy: “That’s what I long for”

        Biff: “Go on! You’d never come home”

Happy: “I would! Somebody with character, with resistance! Like Mom, Y’know” (Ibid, Page 13)

Even though Happy is everything his father has taught him to be, Willy largely ignores his second son.

            Happy: “I’m losing weight, you notice, Pop?”

Willy:    ‘Jumping rope is good too’ (Ibid, page 17)

All Happy wanted was a little praise from his father, and Willy is so egocentric, that he is unable to respond or reassure his son. This leads the adult Happy to have to lie about his career;

                  Biff: "You big blow, are you the assistant buyer? You're one of the two assistants         to the assistant, aren't you?"

        Happy: Well I'm practically-

        Biff: You're practically full of it!"(Ibid, page 101)

Not only is Happy a liar, he eventually betrays and denies his father in the restaurant saying,

Happy:” That’s not my father. He’s just a guy” (Ibid, page 87)

Then Happy subsequently leaves his father having a breakdown in the toilet.

Miller expertly shows the audience how cruel and heartless someone becomes if they adhere to a life of shallowness and self fulfilment.

Biff is everything Willy and Happy are not. He had opted out of the dream. He appears to have spent certain amount of his time in prison for stealing. He has completely rejected Willy’s aspirational view of the world. How ironic perhaps, that through a thief such as Biff, Miller chooses to raise the Marxist discussion that ‘acquisitory materialism is theft’.   Although he loves his father, he hates the man that Willy is. He scorns and pities everything Willy believes in. To the extent that he has moved away from Yonkers, New York and lives and works as a farm hand.

Once again Miller is showing how although Biff is tortured he has some dignity through working on the land, by doing honest and dignified work. Miller shows us that if one rejects the superficial ideals of capitalism, then you can find dignity in hard work and as such revel in self actualisation.

Willy cannot understand or accept Biff’s rejection of capitalist values. As a child Willy worshipped Biff, because of his athletic abilities and good looks. He lavished all his praise on Biff and preached the American Dream at him daily, to the point of ignoring the need for academic achievement. Unlike his brother and father Biff Loman feels compelled to seek the truth about himself. He is Willy's pride and joy, being the first-born; Biff is the personification of all of Willy's dreams, he would be respected and "well liked".

However, Biff’s interpretation of Willy’s teachings has been askew.  Not only does he fail his Maths paper in high school and thus fail to secure his place in college, he has long grown accustomed to stealing, and because of this habit subsequently lost many of the jobs he had. To the point when he tries to meet with an ex-boss to secure a business loan he reverts to type in a state of panic and steals a fountain pen from his desk.

Biff’s relationship with Willy has become tortured over the years. It was Biff who witnessed his father’s adultery, and although his life was already spiralling out of control before that point, this one realisation that his father was a liar and an adulterer and therefore everything his father had taught him was worthless and a lie. He has become in Biff’s words:

“You Fake! You phoney little fake! You fake!”(Ibid, page 92)

 Biff blames his father for his own failures but at the same time has grown to understand that Willy has lived his life with false hope and those, like his father, who buy into this fraudulent delusion are at best misguided. It is Biff, who in Shakespearean style, at the restaurant who says:

“You’ve just seen a prince walk by. A fine, troubled prince. A hard-working, unappreciated prince” (Ibid, page 86)

Biff understands that he can not longer lay the blame for his life solely at the feet of his father. His father is just a product of American society.

The play still holds relevance today, some sixty years since its first performance.

The American dream is still built on lies and debt. Unfortunately Miller could not possibly have foreseen how destructive that dream was to become on a global scale. Where American values are forced into our consciousness by the means of mass media and even more aggressively through their foreign policies.

In this play Arthur Miller added expressionism to realism which enabled us to see into the minds of characters and thereby interpret the play in a realistic and relevant way.

In Requiem when Linda speaks the line; ‘We’re free…we’re free’ (Ibid , Pg 108) Miller is most definitely speaking of the cycle of life, that all things must be free to live and die, leaving nothing behind, just like Willy Loman.

(Word Count 2302)

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