“What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! I’m thirty-four years old, I oughta be makin’ my future.”
Biff is unafraid, like his father to admit when his life isn’t going to plan. Biff is able to realise that his current job is no high flying job, unlike Willy who claims he is “vital in New England”. Yet the reality is, is that Willy is just another cog in society. I feel that Willy has been a large influence on the way Biff feels about work and money. It is evident that Biff always wants to please his father, and he realises that the only way to achieve that is to become a high earning sales man, the dream his father has longed for in his own life. Willy sees Biff as an underachiever, while Biff sees himself as trapped in Willy's ambitious fantasies. He wants to remember Biff as the bright hope for the future. However, during Willy’s fantasy we find that Willy does nothing to deter young Biff's compulsive thieving habit. In fact, he encourages it by laughing at Biff's theft of the football.
As an adult, Biff has never held a steady job, and his regular stealing from employers seems to be the reason for this failing. Willy places tremendous pressure on Biff to fulfil the American Dream for him, a dream Willy has never been able to achieve. Biff feels a sense of incompetence because Willy is pressuring him to pursue a career similar to his own. However Biff would rather work in the open air on a ranch than enter business and make a fortune, and he believes that Willy's natural inclination is the same, like his father's before him.
However shares none of the issues of longing dreams to fulfil the American Dream that Biff and Willy do. Happy encompasses all of Willy's worst traits and embodies the lie of the happy American Dream. Happy is a difficult character to empathise with. He has lived in the shadow of the inflated expectations of his brother, there is no escape from the Dream's lies. Happy's diseased condition is hopeless—he lacks the spark of self-knowledge. He does not possess a hint of the latent thirst for knowledge that proves Biff's salvation. Happy is a destined to be swallowed up by the force of ambition that fuels his insatiable sex drive.
Willy's relationship with Happy is less than perfect and it is evident that he favours Biff. Happy tries several times to gain Willy's attention and approval but fails.
I feel that Happy's adult life clearly bears the marks of this favouritism as he doesn't express resentment toward Biff; rather, he re-creates the behaviour of the high-school-aged Biff by sleeping with many women as a way of revenge on his work colleagues. Due to the fact that in the past, Willy showed great admiration for Biff's success with the girls and his ability to get away with theft. So as an adult, Happy competes with more successful men by sleeping with their women—he thus performs a sort of theft and achieves sexual greatness.
