Biff begins to doubt ‘The American Dream’ when he says ‘…it’s me, I’m a bum’ and ‘I’m one dollar an hour’. Biff realizes that life is not always happy and sometimes you just have to settle with what you have got.
Willy still thinks Biff will actually achieve all the aspects of his dream. Biff tries to tell him ‘Pop! I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!’
Willy responds ‘I’m not a dime a dozen I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!’ Willy will not accept this and tries to shut and block out what Biff is saying. He cannot work out that there are an exceptional few that achieve the ‘The American Dream’.
Happy is totally absorbed in his father’s dream, and tries to believe that he will achieve it. Happy tells Biff that he cannot be promoted.
‘All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die.’
He does not appear to be working for promotion and is stuck in a dead end job.
The author uses Bernard, Charley’s son as a story contrast to the two Loman brothers. Willy refers to him as an ‘aneamic’ and says although he gets the best marks at school he is not as popular and does not have the personality of Biff and Happy. But the complete opposite happens when they finish school and get into the big wide world. Bernard becomes part of the Supreme Court.
‘Oh, just a case I got there, Willy.’
Bernard was a hard working school pupil who seemed to have achieved the dream and also got married and had two children. This proves that popularity and a likeable character is not enough for the ‘American Dream’.
Both Biff and Happy have many hopes and dreams dominated by their father Willy.
Biff tries to fulfill his father’s dreams in the beginning. ‘Well, I spent six or seven years after high-school trying to work myself up. Shopping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or the another.’
This repeats the theme of the play that one cannot live by another’s dream.
‘What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week…And now, I get here, and I don’t know what to do with myself.’
Biff is so confused with life because he was brought up to believe that he should be ‘manager’ of a big company and will always be rich and successful. He seems to like his job in the open space but thinks that he should be earning more money than he is.
Happy is like his brother Biff, lost but in a different way. He is thirty-two and is totally absorbed in his father’s dreams and ambitions. Happy continually boasts about his sex life.
‘About five-hundred women would like to know what was said in this room.’ he tells Biff. Happy’s dreams are like his bosses. He should be able to build a large estate and then sell it two months after, because he doesn’t like it and then start to build another.
The two boy’s hopes and dreams come from their father. They were brought up to want the very best and are force-fed the wrong hopes and ambitions from childhood.
The hopes and dreams that the Loman family have, have affected their lives in many different ways. Biff tries to live up to his father’s expectations but seems to realize that he cannot live other hopes. Happy is the only person with a steady job. Even though he is achieving one part of ‘The American Dream’ he is lonely and keeps telling Linda and Willy ‘Am gonna get married Pop.’ He is not content because he still wants everything beyond what his job can provide. He seems to still be absorbed in his father dreams. Willy is all talk and never achieves anything. He blames people for his downfalls in life. The only way he thinks he will resolve all of his problems in life is to commit suicide.
Hopes and ambitions are extremely important for the people in the play as they are always striving for ‘success’.
At the end of the play Biff says at Willy’s funeral ‘He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.’ Willy needed to accept that he could not live his dreams and had to settle with what he had and make the best of the situation.
Willy’s memories affect the main structure of the play. There are many types of stagecraft to show the difference between the past and present.
Lighting is used in the way that in the present times the stage is very dull and gloomy showing misery and unhappiness.
The stage is shown as bright and lively at the points of Willy’s daydreams and hallucinations of the past. Sounds depend on the mood of the occasion, faint and lifeless sounds seem to be in the background when the play is in the present. The tone of the music changes when Willy goes into the past, it appears chirpy and happy. Clouting plays an important role. The clothing also depended on the mood of the character the colours of the dress indicates what temperament they were in.
Willy seems to always be in the past, this is because he feels it’s a refuge from the life that he is really living in and all the problems in it. The flashbacks Willy gets are all describing what happened in the past and show how the other characters were.
‘I got it, Pop. And remember, pal, when I take of my helmet, that touchdown is for you.’
Biff tries to impress his father; this shows that Biff was always the centre of his life at this time. These flashbacks show the sides of the characters in the play that we have not seen before. The flashbacks also show the way Willy has brought up his two sons. Willy brings Biff and Happy up in the hope that they will fulfil ‘The American Dream’, that popularity and good personalities will get them good jobs. This affects them in later life because they still believe that this doctrine will get those good jobs but it can not. Happy depends on the death of others higher ranked than him for promotion rather than his own skills.
The past events are never shown as they actually happened, they are shown the way Willy interprets them. Willy seems to distort the event when Biff finds Willy and ‘The Woman’ in the bedroom in Brooklyn. He does this to try and block out the bad thoughts, and create a past he can hide in from others.
Dreams are so important in the play because they seem to link everything together ‘The American Dream’, Hopes and Ambitions and ‘Daydreams, Fantasies and Memories’.
Throughout this play, Miller is saying to the audience that our society, promotes things to strive for that are way beyond the reaches of that person. Peer pressure is mainly what drives us to want more and the best of everything, getting into debt. Miller says that the characters in the play are affected by the dream, ‘The American Dream’.
Although the play was written over fifty years ago in 1949, it still has relevance today. In the 1950’s, capitalism was taking hold after the Second World War; today commercialism still has a powerful hold in the Western world’s culture. I think Miller is telling us to live our lives according to our own dreams and not others.
