Willy is a sixty-three year old salesman who after thirty-six years of service to the Firm has been placed on straight commission. His wife is Linda, and she is devoted to Willy in the extreme. Willy and Linda have two sons Biff and Happy. Biff is the older son and in high school he was a star, but as an adult has only found work doing odd jobs. The younger son, Happy lives in Biff's shadow and feels rejected by Willy. Some of the other characters are their neighbours Charley and Bernard. Charley lends Willy money each month and his son Bernard was Biff's friend who became a successful lawyer. All these characters are important because they are people we come to know. Everyone has someone they know who left town and became successful like Bernard, and every town has a high school hero that fizzles as an adult. The serious magnitude is the play could be about anyone. Every person on this planet could have the same problems Willy has, and that scares us to the core.
On the other hand, Willy also is emotionally involved with Biff because his son's success or failure is also his. By becoming rich and influential, the handsome, personable Biff was slated to provide Willy's victorious reply to all not sufficiently impressed with his own modest advancement. By making his fortune in the business world, Biff would prove that Willy had been right in turning down Ben's adventurous challenge to head for Alaska. He would also outshine the sensible, plodding Charley and Bernard, thus establishing once and for all Willy's theory that having personality and being "well liked" were the great requisites for preminence. Losing his own job, Willy is naturally unhappy. But if he can still purchase success for Biff with the insurance money, he personally will yet have won. "I always knew one way or another we were gonna make it, Biff and I!"
Actually, Willy's attitude toward Biff is complex. On the one hand, there is a strong personal attachment. He wants Biff to love him. He remembers yearningly the fondness shown for him by Biff as a boy, and he still craves this. At this point, however, relations are strained. Although Willy shies away from remembering so painful an episode, he knows in his heart that the Boston affair left the boy bitterly disillusioned. Feeling some sense of guilt, Willy fears that all of Biff's later difficulties may have been really attempts to get revenge. Biff has failed, in other words, mainly to "spite" Willy. Although outwardly resenting such alleged vindictiveness. Willy still wants to get back the old comradeship, even if he has to buy it dearly. "Why can't I give him something," he asks the spectral Ben, "and not have him hate me?" And his great final moment of joy and triumph occurs when he can exclaim,"Isn't that remarkable? Biff - he likes me!"
More importantly, Biff is extremely disturbed by his father’s later behaviour, including talking to himself, imagining conversations with various people and reacting to his memories of his children as though they were happening at that particular moment. Willy’s job also falls apart from the beginning of the play towards the end. He had been making enough money to support his family, but through his philandering and lackluster sales, he ends up losing his job, eventually. Willy and his family live in a house, which for an unknown number of years still has a mortgage to be paid off and so, until his death, the family was not even secure in their own home once Willy was fired from his job as salesman. Finally, the family car, a symbol of pride within the Loman household, was destroyed when Willy committed suicide. This was the last example of Willy’s destruction of all that was once important to him. Willy Loman, in this regard, follows Aristotle’s suggestion that the tragic hero has “…a change of fortune… from prosperity to misfortune….”
A tragic hero. Is Willy Loman a tragic hero? Does Willy learn from his mistakes? What about those around him? In Miller's play Death of a salesman there are loads of unanswered questions. My opinion is that Willy Loman is not a tragic hero throughout the entire play. He seems to be lost, helpless and he is cheating on his wife with this other women. He seems to be unreal, as he has everything: a house, a car, a job, two sons whom he adores, and a supportive, caring wife, everything that any man could ever want. He never comes to term with reality. Willy Loman has everything a man could possibly want but still he tries and goes for more than he can handle. To me this does not sound like a hero!!
I think he's a tragic character. He doesn't fall under the guidelines of tragic character. Firstly Miller's play "Death of a Salesman" Doesn't actually qualify as a "tragedy", even if it is modern. It more falls under the literature of the absurd, or a tragic comedy. Willy Loman is a flat character, he is unchanging throughout the entire play. A tragic character would realize his flaws as their undoing by the end. Willy Loman doesn't qualify as a tragic character/hero. He is an anti-hero. Willy Loman may be a sad character, but he doesn't qualify as a tragic man. Willy does have some wisdom in his little head, but as Miller wanted to show, he was a product of his upbringing, and transferred that to his family. eg. Happy always wanting to be liked by his father because he was starved for attention, the same as Willy with his father. So in my opinion I would say that Willy was a tragic, fool, visionary, and a flop.
Willy, with a house, a car, a job, two sons whom he adores, and a supportive, caring wife, seems to have everything that any man could ever want. He manages, however, to alienate himself from these things that he loves near the end of the play as he slips into a self-induced state of altered reality.
Willy, being “…lonely…terribly lonely” has an affair with a woman during his marriage to Linda. Even though she is not aware of this, or makes no mention of it, he is destroying his greatest source of support. Linda is the only one in the Loman family who seems to never give up on Willy, be it that she does not realize his shortcomings or chooses to ignore them, she remains faithful in every sense to her husband. His relationship with Biff and Happy also becomes strained throughout their lives. Because Biff was the older son and football star he made his father proud, and Happy was left without the praise that he needed and deserved, as he was always second best. Biff also was the one who caught his father having an affair with the woman, causing friction between himself and Willy.
In a sense there are two Willy Lomans in this play. There is the present broken, exhausted man in his sixties, soon to end his life. And there is the more confident, vigorous Willy of some fifteen years before, who appears in the flashbacks. One actor portrays both, readily shifting from one representation to the other. To some extent, of course, the personality remains constant. The younger Willy, although given to boastful blustering, does admit misgivings to Linda and loneliness to Biff. And the shattered older man, in turn, occasionally reverts to his former manner of jaunty optimism. Yet the changes are great and significant. The earlier Willy could never have been the idol of his teen-aged sons had he behaved in the perverse, distracted fashion of his older self.
Willy seems to have learned at the end of the play that Biff loves him and forgives him for his earlier mistake in the affair with the other women. However, he has misunderstood Biff's cry of fustration and despair and subsequent tears as an expression of love (Act Two). Linda certainly learns nothing from his death and fails to understand his actions. Happy vows at his gravside that he will continue to try to realise his farther's dream-the atithesis of intellectual progress.
Death of a Salesman's catharsis comes at the end. After Biff, Happy and Willy meet for dinner, Biff tells his father what happened. Willy refuses to listen to Ben as he talks of his failure and the fact he stole a pen. After he is left in the restaurant by both his sons Willy realizes Biff is right. They are all a bunch of nobodies. Willy then leaves the restaurant. He buys seeds and plants them in his backyard and drives off in his car to kill himself. Willy dies with nothing, he has no money, no work and no loyalty from his children.
From the catharsis to the tragic hero and serious magnitude Death of a Salesman has all of Aristotle's Conditions of a Tragedy.
In my eyes Willy Loman is not a hero as I saw him at the beginning of the play, but when he was young and had his two young sons he may have been a hero then. But now he seems to be lost, helpless. He seems to be unreal, he never comes to term with reality. He lives in his dreams. He derives all his pleasures from the past which he starts to convince himself all is well. Willys role models are the great sales man of a bygone age who sold their personalities first and their goods second. These heroes are out of place in the modern business world where ruthless aggression gains results. Pride is central to Willy's character: pride in being a successful salesman, pride in his sons and pride in being independent-he refuses Charley's help when he has lost his job and needs it the most. Although Willy is never able to attain his ideals and his life is a massive self-deception he still retains his hopes. Even as he contemplates suicide, he is hopeful that the insurance money payable on his death will give Biff the start he needs in life.
A tragic hero is known to be the protagonist who causes his own downfall, is seen as greater than the average man, and is aware of his misfortune. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman Willy Loman is the protagonist. Willy Loman illustrates significant characteristics of a tragic hero. Willy Loman achieves “recognition.” Willy, like Aristotle’s description of the tragic hero, moves “from ignorance to knowledge”(Aristotle 190). Willy is ignorant of his significance. He is unaware that his son Biff really loves him, but wife Linda helps Willy realize the truth. When Willy knows that his life insurance money will help his family live comfortably, he states that he is “worth more dead than alive”(Miller 98). He then sacrifices himself for them. Although he is a common man, Willy has the requisite stature to be heroic. According to Arthur Miller, the tragic hero has “alternatives of a magnitude to have materially changed the course of his life”(Miller 33). Willy strives to obtain the American Dream by becoming successful in the business world. Willy envies people like Ben and Howard who have achieved the American Dream. Willy also wants to have a successful family life as a father and husband. Unfortunately, Willy was out of town on business for a large part of his son’s lives. These business trips were also the cause of his secret affair with a woman in Boston. The success that Willy tries so hard to achieve in the business world is what causes his failure to obtain success in his personal life. Willy Loman illustrates significant characteristics of a tragic hero. Many decisions made by Willy cause his downfall. Through his actions and the course of events it becomes clear that Willy Loman is a modern tragic hero.
