“Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it”.
The freedom does not only apply to the debts collected over the years, finally paid off, but to his release from his tortured world and hers from the “burden of the masculine ego”. (1) Even Willy can see that “the woman has suffered.” she’s struggled to keep her two sons, one very selfish, the other “very lost” and Willy together, often sacrificing her own talents and energies.
Charley, “the unsentimental, non-dreaming realist”(1) is exposed to be Willy’s only friend. He has become successful in business yet still stays ‘down to earth’, “He’s a man of few words, and they respect him”. He seems to be able to understand and accept Willy’s suicide without bitterness or contempt, requesting that “Nobody dast blame this man”. Charley is possibly a symbol for Christianity within the play, as his main role is to sympathise and try to help Willy without judgement. His poetic speech adds to the reverence of the final speech and stresses Miller’s attempts to make Willy a universal tragic hero. Charley proves to be worthier of the title of the “touch-stone character” in the play than Linda, as he can understand better than anybody the trap that Willy fell into. “A salesman has got to dream boy. It comes with the territory.”
Biff, let down and betrayed by his father “has required a crucial insight into himself”(2). During the course of the play we can see his epiphany from believing himself to being a “big shot” to the realisation that he’s a “dime a dozen”. In a way one might see this as giving up, yet he has learnt from his father that blowing yourself full of hot air and telling lies doesn’t get you anywhere. “I know who I am, kid.” He is therefore accepting defeat, at least in the profession as a businessman, now he too is free and can escape to the west and become the “ageing cowboy” he always wanted to be without the disapproval and criticism from Willy. Through Biff, as at other stages in the play Miller highlights in the Requiem how Willy’s dreams were “All, all, wrong.”. Yet the audience is left wondering how Biff will fund his purer form of the “American dream” which now in its corrupt stage centralises around money, and will Biff ever find happiness?
Happy is Willy’s dream regenerated, enveloped in the unavailing desire to “show some of those pompous, self-important executives that Hap Loman can make the grade” and prove that “Willy Loman did not die in vain”. The harsh reality that Happy refuses to see, but which is blatantly obvious to the audience is that Willy did die in vain and that he himself will never make the grade. We can see the ambiguous mixture of heroism and inevitable failure that’s been evident in Willy throughout the play. He is in ignorance of the dangers and implications of the “American dream” and believing in a capitalist society. Happy’s character is doomed; hopeless.
Each character has been individually personalised to represent the makeup of the American society so that the play is more believable and easier for the audience to identify with. Linda, although seemingly eternally patient, can only cope to a certain point then breaks “Get out of here, both of you, and don’t come back!”. Biff and Happy, are both insecure, Biff due to the pressure always placed on him to be something special in the football field and Happy because he was always placed second best, never gaining the admiration of his father that Biff did. Willys affair, although wrong adds further realism, making them far from the ‘happy family’. They share financial problems, suffer disappointment, guilt and betrayal. They are after all just an average family in America “a country where anyone with ambition and energy can succeed” (3).
The language used by the characters is simple and colloquially American. Slang is used constantly “kid”, “boy” and “Geez” all make the play more genuine. In the Requiem the language is used to create atmosphere, “There were a lot of nice days.” and “He was a happy man with a batch of cement” reminds us of a time when the Lomans where happy and paints a harmonious picture, while Charleys speech sums up Willys life. “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”. Linda’s speech is deeply moving, as the audience feels for her loneliness and her trauma “there’ll be nobody home.”.
The characters have tragic, (and in Willy’s case) fatal dreams, yet these dreams are not unique to the Lomans or as their name would suggest, the “little men”. From the beginning we are aware of the poignant “American dream” transmitted from society. The “dream” has bred rapidly since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and, as with the population, it has grown out of control, not only in their humble household but everywhere, making Willy the “universal hero”.
“Willy is a victim; he didn’t originate this thing. He believes that selling is the greatest thing anybody can do” (4)
The stage directions at the closure echo those of the opening of the play, and remind us that Willy’s predicament is only one of many. “towering angular shapes” and “an angry glow of orange” show Willys world to be suffocating and harsh, the “hard towers of the apartment buildings” intimidate Willys “small, fragile-seeming home”. The flute is also present at the opening and at the curtain, it establishes a beginning and an end, yet suggests that for the rest of the world life goes on as normal, unchanged. It tells of “grass and trees and the horizon” representing freedom, happiness and vitality, which have already passed the Lomans by. Miller also uses the flute to represent Willys father wholm he never knew, a flute salesman, perhaps the seller of dreams.
The Requiem brings together the themes presented in the play, it is the finale in the plot, Willys death is essential in order to stress the concepts Miller makes throughout, those of relationships, business, memory playing a major role and our dependence on society. Miller does not directly criticise American culture or politics yet injects enough evidence of failure so that the audience is left to make up their own mind. For although Willy Loman had the “wrong dreams” the right dreams are never stated, proving Miller dies not claim to have all the answers.
Structuring the play cleverly and successfully, combining and merging the past and present, Miller lets us experience one day and one night in the head of a tortured man, who is “tired to the death”, and shows us how we become products of our past. This final scene is only written in the present tense, showing the audience that Willy’s mind has eventually come to rest. The Requiem concludes the play in a dismal and hopeless tone, reinforcing that the play is an everyday tragedy, that although Willy Loman is dead, his murderer exists and thrives in today’s society and in some way in each of us.