Willy believes that money leads to popularity, which leads to success, which leads to more money:
WILLY: Can you imagine that magnificence with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket!
He does not seem to realise that he cannot actually enter this circle of existence because he has neither money, success nor popularity. However he does spend his entire life boasting about how brilliant and successful he is, even though he quite obviously is not. Willy has always pushed his sons throughout their lives to be successful and popular, but perhaps this continual pressure, from someone who was actually the opposite of what they were being encouraged to be, confused them:
BIFF: I’m not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you.
After all, they had always looked up to him as being brilliant during their childhood, then he tells them to do something that they have got used to him not being and perhaps they do not know what to think of their father anymore. He tries as hard as he can to bring them up well, however he fails, by telling them that they were brilliant when perhaps they were not as good as they thought:
WILLY: That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises.
More proof that Willy’s life is governed by the American Dream is the way in which he prefers style to substance. For example the instance during his sons’ childhood when he had come back from a trip and presented them with a punching bag:
WILLY: It’s got Gene Tunney’s signature on it!
This shows that Willy thinks it makes the punching bag much more superior to other punching bags because it bears the pen marks that are the signature of a famous person on it, which is obviously untrue. Another example of Willy preferring style to substance is that he prefers Biff’s popularity to Bernard’s intelligence and academic studies:
WILLY: …Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. …Be liked and you will never want.
However Bernard does end up becoming highly successful, therefore proving Willy’s ideas about popularity and success wrong.
Linda is also affected by the dream, mainly due to Willy’s obsession with it. She realises over time that Willy is kept going by his dreams, and he reliance of his family on him, and she sticks by him throughout everything, never leaving him no matter what he puts her through and she complements him and tells him how great he is:
LINDA: He works for a company for 36 years… opens up unheard-of territories… and now in his old age they take his salary away.
Linda has lived the nightmare side of the ‘Dream’. However she refuses to let it affect her. This is because the fact that she both wants to keep her family happy and together, and also she is scared of the prospect of living on her own without Willy – she would have even less money than she does now and she would be most lonely. She has spent her whole life with Willy and the thought of anything different seems terrifying to her. This is because she is scared of change.
In some ways, the harsh way in which Miller depicts the dream is fair. It has, if not in all ways then at least in some, turned into more of a nightmare than a dream. The obvious example from the play to support this is that things grew so bad, The Dream caused Willy to take his own life. He obviously took an in-depth (or so he thought) look at his own life and realised that it fell a long way short of the ambitions he had been living by throughout his life:
WILLY: Ben, nothing’s working out. I don’t know what to do.
To him, it seems that he has let everyone else down by not fulfilling the American Dream, earning money, success and respect. He cannot afford to provide his family with things such as Howard’s wire recorder and he feels guilty both about this and about his affair. It would seem that the American Dream has clouded his vision, perhaps preying on his mind so regularly and persistently that it drives him towards insanity when he cannot comprehend that there is any option other than suicide. Alternatively, Willy’s suicide may be a way of living the Dream – both for him and for Biff. After all (according to him) Biff would be much more successful with the money from Willy’s life insurance behind him. Willy is also encouraged to commit suicide by Ben, one of the few people whom he could (in a way) talk to:
WILLY: …When the mail comes he’ll be ahead of Bernard again!
BEN: A perfect proposition all round.
Another bad factor of the dream is that the false hopes it creates are potentially dangerous because they lead to depression. Willy’s desperation to succeed caused by the Dream, leads him to make a fool out of himself by begging for his job back and talking to himself in public. He feels he had to talk to himself (or, as he sees it, to Ben) because he has nobody else to talk to about his failure in life. He cannot confide his feelings in Linda, as he did not want to concern her. Neither could he talk to Biff or Happy, as they both think that he is insane:
HAPPY: Something’s – happened to him. He – talks to himself.
Willy had no other real friends, anyone else he could have spoken to about his problems were all successful enough to find Willy’s situation funny, and perhaps look down on him forever, diminishing his much sought-after popularity. Also, the Dream has a bad effect when it brakes many of the few relationship bonds within the Loman family. It happened at the point in the play when Biff manages to see through Willy’s claims of brilliance: when he discovers the affair:
BIFF: Don’t touch me, you – liar!
Biff becomes angry and shouts at his father, due to the fact that he has had to go through the painful experience of questioning his entire life including Willy’s success and his love for Biff’s mother:
BIFF: You - you gave her Mama’s stockings!
Linda feels extremely aggravated by the fact that Biff had shouted at her darling husband – she feels angry at Biff, and causes a major family argument by shouting at Biff. She is so angry because she refuses to admit that Willy is not quite the great man that she has been telling herself he is, for the past 36 years. If Willy did not feel that he had to pretend to be successful, Biff may not have been made to feel so betrayed when he discovers Willy’s failure. Without Willy’s obsession with the American Dream, the breaking of barely existent family bonds could have been avoided.
However, there are ways in which the American Dream has not mutated into a hideous monster of catastrophe. For example, it is the Dream itself that keeps Willy going throughout thirty-six years of fairly unsuccessful work, in the hope that one-day he will achieve his ultimate goal. The American Dream gives him the drive to continue with both life and work even when he knows he is ‘in a race with the junkyard’. The Dream is also good in the way it gives Willy some idea about how to try bring up his children, otherwise they may have grown up with less ambition and less reason to live. Also, the Dream strengthens the Loman family relationships, especially during the boys’ childhood. For example, Linda falls more in love with Willy everyday; neither Willy nor Linda will leave each other ‘til death do them part’ which is a strong, hard-to-come-by relationship. This love however is more questionable than it may seem. Willy was drives and is away from his family for weeks at a time and due to his loneliness, he has an affair:
WILLY: I was awful lonesome.
Moreover, The Woman brought out Willy’s more egotistical side:
THE WOMAN: I chose you
Willy’s aim in life is that people should notice him, and The Woman made him feel as though he was satisfying the Dream in a way that he cannot with Linda. After all, he would have proposed to her - thus meaning that he had chosen her, not vice-versa. The Woman made him feel very needed – not ‘lonesome’ at all.
Yet, during their childhood, Biff and Happy both feel very proud of their father, they see him as a role model most excellent and they would do anything for him:
HAPPY: We’ll carry your bags, Pop!
Arthur Miller’s use of lighting, music and stage directions in the play can add to the feeling of the American Dream. For example the set on which the play is performed is very simple and contains very little clutter. This could indicate that Miller is trying to make the play more about the events surrounding Willy and his search for meaning, rather than the economy and the rest if the people around him. It could also symbolise the Loman Family’s lack of material belongings. Random appearances of Ben, the flute music and The Woman, could suggest the fact that, in Willy’s mind, time is not really a factor. The only difference he feels between the past and the present is that in the present he can touch, taste and control some things, whereas, in the past, he has no control at all and can only helplessly watch what happens to him and those around him. The use of music is mainly to set the mood. In the opening stage direction ‘a melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon’ is used to express a feeling rather than a place. It is the feeling of the American, Capitalist Dream that the flute is trying to get across; through its connection to Willy’s wandering, flute-seller father, the music recreates the pioneering spirit to move into unknown countryside and build a living there from nothing in a land of freedom. The flute only seems to play when Willy is imagining a happier life in the past. Perhaps this is because the flute is and instrument particularly associated with nostalgia. This could perhaps be a reference to Willy’s life before he became haunted by the American Dream; the times when he travelled into unknown towns with his father, selling flutes. These were happier times for Willy, as he feels more comfortable in open spaces with plentiful air circulating, and it is understandable that he may look back on them fondly.
This scene of freedom is completely different from the setting of the play – a claustrophobic jumble of over-built apartment houses with every available tree cut down for building and fire wood, and not a blade of grass to be seen:
LINDA: Things can’t grow out there. There is no light.
Light, too is used to create feeling. For example, the apartments are surrounded by ‘an angry glow of orange’. This represents the anger of everyone in the city who are not as successful as they would like; who are deprived of promise; who, like Biff and Willy, are annoyed about their way of life.
The audience’s reaction to the Dream is almost one of horror – it is fairly distressing to have a central character in any play, film or television program to be suddenly killed off. The title of the play tells us that Willy is going to die, so any slight optimism which may try to infiltrate the plot is undercut by the grim knowledge that he will, sooner or later, be destroyed. The audience recognises the fact that the Dream is destroying the Loman family. They can see the worse parts of Willy’s dream the moment that the play begins – when Willy drags himself exhaustedly through the front door in the middle of the night mumbling about cheese. This first impression lingers throughout the play, somehow overriding the parts of the Dream that are actually good.
The play uses many phases associated with the stereotypical American, such as ‘Gee, Pop!’, which help to portray and reflect the American Dream. The play would be somehow irrelevant if people speaking in, for example, strong Scottish accents performed it. The play does promote stereotyping. It is unlikely that everybody living in America at the time the play was set killed themselves over not fulfilling their own dreams, and those of their families.
However, searching for the Dream and fulfilling it is very important to Willy. He feels he must provide for his family, be a good role model and husband, and perhaps to live up to the standards of his own role model – Ben. Also, he may be trying to rebel against his own poor up bringing. His Father leaves him as a child in order to persue wealth, Willy may feel strong pangs of dislike, possibly even hatred for his father. Therefore, he would want to do everything he can to be the complete opposite of his father, for example living in a city when he really loved the open space.
To conclude, I believe that, although the American Dream does have some good points as well as the bad ones, there are more of the bad ones. After all, it was the Dream that caused an innocent man to lose his life. Therefore, I do not think that Death of a Salesman is a particularly hash critique of the American Dream.