Death of a Salesman

Is it Impossible for a Director of The Flashback Scene in The Restaurant, pages 73-93 of ‘Death of a Salesman’ to Show Willy as a Tragic Hero? Discuss. In Your Answer You Must Discuss how the Scene Could be Played and Base Your Answer on Textual Analysis of Character, Plot and Stage Direction Commenting on The Context of The Play.

The play ‘Death of a Salesman’ was written in 1949 by Arthur Miller and is one of his most successful plays. At Millers’ time, America was deemed to be a ‘land of opportunity’ and all Americans had the right to be successful. However his father’s prosperous living as a clothing manufacturer had been ruined by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The play examines the cost of blind faith in the American Dream, closely related with the theme of manifest destiny. There was much belief in the American Dream, and this would be achieved through hard work, courage and determination by every American.

‘Death of a Salesman’ is based around the main protagonist, Willy Loman an elderly man. He is an insecure, self deluding travelling salesman. Mr Loman is “past sixty years of age” and “dressed quietly”, nonetheless he is a man with “massive dreams”, a “mercurial nature” and “turbulent longings within him”. He never comes to terms with reality for the reason that he is lost in an illusion and false hopes, for example Willy cannot see who he and his sons, Biff and Happy, are and he just believes that they are great men who have what it takes to beat the business world and be successful. However, he is mistaken. In reality, Willy and sons are not, and cannot ever be successful.

Mr Loman is unable to see through his own delusions of the American Dream, which he perceives as the ability to become ‘great’ by obtaining enormous material wealth without any apparent effort, to ‘wander into the jungle’ and ‘walk out’ a few years later unspeakably ‘rich’. As a result to this, he is trapped in distortion of the American Dream promoted by a capitalist, materialistic modern society.

In the play, although Willy does seem to show love and care towards his wife, Linda and two sons, he often becomes confused and angry unnecessarily. He shows trouble distinguishing his past and present, or his ideal life and reality. Due to this, many parts of the play are transcribed to the audience by the insertion of flashbacks, which show us some of the most significant moments in Willy’s confused life that have happened in his past. These flashbacks, each of which do somehow relate to the present, show an inability for Willy to see his reality.

The flashback Willy experiences in the Restaurant scene, which I will be studying, is extremely significant in view of the fact that at this point, the illusions Biff has about Willy and his lies, come to an end. The use of this flashback depicts Willy’s affair with the Woman and Biff then comes to know about it.

By using this scene, this essay will discuss whether Willy is that of a tragic hero or not. In Shakespearean tragedy, ‘tragic heroes will be men of rank, and the calamities that befall them will be unusual and exceptionally disastrous in themselves’ (taken from http://global.cscc.edu/engl/264/TragedyLex.htm). In other words, Shakespearean tragic heroes should be of noble birth, have a fatal flaw, learn from their mistakes and lastly due to their flaw, this will lead to their downfall.

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However, the initial idea of the tragic hero had originated in Greek tragedy and it was outlined by Aristotle, who once said ‘a tragic hero must be one of noble character and must fall from power and happiness’ (taken from http:// www.ccd.rightchoice.org/lit115/poetics.html). In Arthur Miller’s ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, Miller argues that the common man could also be regarded to that as a very highly placed king and noble man. If this is the case and that the common man could be a tragic hero, I should be able to answer a simple question: Can Willy Loman be considered to ...

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To begin the first part of this essay, it is impossible to represent Willy as a tragic hero in the traditional sense. As I mentioned above, there are patterns into which Shakespearean or Aristotelian tragic heroes should fit into, and clearly Willy does not fit into these principles in one important way- he is not of noble birth or aristocracy. Willy is just a common man. According to the Collins English Dictionary, the word noble has three meanings: 1showing or having high moral qualities, 2impressive and magnificent, and 3member of the nobility (which again, according to the Collins English Dictionary, means either 1quality of being noble or 2a class of people holding titles and high social rank).

‘Oedipus Rex’, a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, and ‘The Oresteia’, a trilogy of tragedies written by Aeschylus, both contain protagonists whom are of aristocracy and nobility. This too follows in Shakespearean tragedies. In ‘Romeo and Juliet’ both protagonists originate from high, aristocratic upper class families, as do the protagonists in ‘Macbeth’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Richard II’ and ‘King Lear’.

As an audience, from the flashback Willy undergoes in the Restaurant, we learn that he is having an affair with The Woman in the Boston hotel room and therefore he is cheating on his wife, Linda.

‘Come on inside, drummer boy. It’s silly to be dressing in the middle of the night.’ (Act Two. Page 88. The Woman)

Then once knocking is heard, Willy orders The Woman to ‘stay in the bathroom’ as he ‘thinks there’s a law in Massachusetts about it’ (‘it’ being adultery) and he finds Biff standing at the door. Biff has come to tell his dad that he ‘flunked math’ and does not have ‘enough credits to graduate’. Just as Willy promises his son that he will speak to Birnbaum, and Biff is about to leave the Hotel room, he discovers The Woman and knows instantly that Willy has been having an affair. Biff becomes increasingly more saddened knowing that Willy has given The Woman ‘Mama’s stockings!’

‘Where’s my stockings? You promised me stockings, Willy!’ (Act Two. Page 90. The Woman)

It is at this point that Willy’s mercurial nature becomes evident. He threatens to abuse his son if he does not follow his orders to apologise, before Biff refers to his father as a ‘fake, a phoney little fake!’ However it is not only just at this moment in the scene where Willy does not coincide to being that of a tragic hero by abusing his son. In reality, when Willy and his sons are in the Restaurant talking about Biffs meeting with Bill Oliver, Willy presumes that Biff spites him, so he then ‘strikes him’ and carries on downgrading his son by calling him a ’rotten little louse!’

In addition to this, the fact that Willy previously in the play did not want Linda ‘mending stockings in this house’ and then ordered her to ‘throw them out’, but now he has promised The Woman stockings shows us the foreshadowing of the flashback, let alone of his peculiar obsession with Linda’s stockings, which alone symbolise Willy’s sexual disloyalty and deceitfulness.

From what it is evident by Willy’s actions in the Hotel room and his physical abusing on Biff, he is not acting of noble stature. Willy shows himself to be an indecent and cruel man by engaging in such activities especially by cheating on his ever-supportive and loving wife. Furthermore these actions are highly un-noble and it would not be situations a man of nobility would take part in.

Willy can also be characterised again by not being noble and showing traits of a tragic hero elsewhere in the play, when he contemplates suicide. He tries this by a means of two ways. On page 41, Linda realises Willy’s ‘been trying to kill himself’ as a woman saw Willy in his car and ‘he wasn’t driving fast at all and that he didn’t skid.’ He ‘deliberately smashed into the railing of a little bridge, and it was only the shallowness of the water that saved him’. The other way in which Linda comes to know about Willy’s suicidal attempt was when she ‘was looking for a fuse. The light blew out,’ and she ‘went down the cellar. And behind the fuse box – it happened to fall out – was a length of rubber pipe – just short.’ It is this rubber pipe that symbolises Willy’s desperate suicidal attempts.

Willy shows himself to be a liar throughout the play. When he and Howard are having a conversation, Willy claims that in 1928 he ‘had a big year’. He ‘averaged a hundred and seventy dollars a week in commissions’. Howard knows this is a lie and that Willy ‘never averaged’ this amount and that he was never a good salesman. One other example to show that Willy is lying in the play can be identified in the flashback earlier on in the play. When Willy comes home from work, he tells a younger Linda that he ‘was sellin’ thousands and thousands’. Willy notifies Linda of his successes and then he is notified by Linda of their bills that need to be paid. This scene again shows a typical lie that Willy is telling. He has resorted to Charley by asking him to lend him some money. For Willy, this is one of his greatest weaknesses as he can never come to terms with his unsuccessfulness.

In general, Willy portrays many fatal flaws, not just one. He is disloyal, wilful, short tempered, proud, and has false pride, all of which lead to his downfall.

Having discussed why Willy Loman cannot be considered to be a tragic hero, I will now discuss why he can be referred to as a tragic hero. From Willy’s death, I know that it was attributable to his flaws. This suggests that he is a tragic hero, as Shakespearean tragic heroes too died because of their faults. Such examples include ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The reason for his death was for him to think that Biff would be left with ‘twenty thousand dollars on the barrelhead’, enough for him to set himself up some business. And in doing so, he believes that his death is of a noble cause. He believes that by sacrificing himself, this is in the best interest of his family. Willy dies for his dignity, which meets Miller’s definition of a tragic hero. However, since Linda ‘made the last payment on the house’, it is arguable that Willy’s death was for no cause and especially since, in the end, no life insurance money was available for suicide. It is this climax in the play, which makes this Willy’s tragedy, as well as the fact that hardly anybody turned up to his funeral. As Willy contemplates his final act of suicide towards the closing stages of the play, he believed that Biff would realise how important and famous his father was by thinking his funeral will be like that of Dave Singleman, as ‘when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral.’ This is shown on page 97 when Willy is discussing the proposition with Ben.

‘Because he thinks I’m nothing, see, and so he spites me. But the funeral – Ben, that funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire!’ (Act Two. Page 97. Willy)

Willy is depicted as a man of nobility on page 86 by Biff, and at this point in the play, his status is raised to that of an aristocrat. Biff tries to impress his lady friend, Miss Forsythe, by stating to her that she has ‘just seen a prince walk by. A fine, troubled prince. A hard-working, unappreciated prince.’ This is important, seeing that in a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, the hero is always a nobleman or a prince or part of the aristocracy. But here, Miller cleverly makes it seem as though a hero can be any man, just as Willy is, when he is referred to as a ‘prince’.

In the play, Willy tries to plant seeds for the future. In doing so he hopes to prove the worth of his labour, both as a salesman and a father, but also that something will come of his death.

‘I’ve got to get some seeds, right away. Nothing’s planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground.’

Since tragedy is usually about an audience having sympathy for a character, we sympathise a lot about Willy in the way that he is disillusioned about Biff and also about the American Dream that everything can be successful. Here, we are made to feel sorry for Willy and his false hopes. However, Willy does show genuine love for his family by repudiating Ben’s offer to go to Alaska as he needs ‘a man to look after things,’ for him. Willy, here, shows himself to remain noble to his family and so he is a tragic hero.

In Volker Schlöndorff’s 1985 production of the play, Dustin Hoffman takes the role of Willy Loman. As Dustin acts as a very aggressive character playing Willy, I feel that he does have a major part in the audience’s decision. His aggression when he is acting is extremely good and in doing so, as an audience we forget we are watching the movie, and I felt that everything almost seemed real. The way Willy gets involved in his delusions, most of them about him becoming a 'failure' in life and what he did wrong, really enhances a different perspective. Also, the way that the movie is done in the style like a play with basic backgrounds really makes an audience pay attention to the acting. Nonetheless Willy is played as a downtrodden and lost man. His facial expressions and voice are conveyed with strong emphasis. This is important for an audience, as we get a gist of their character. For example, if I was directing the Restaurant scene and let Dustin Hoffman talk in a relative calm manner, then the audience would not know which character was being interpreted. This would not match that character of Will Loman. I would film Dustin so that he seems confused and generally so that his voice fluctuates.

By using all the given arguments, I think Willy can be portrayed as a tragic hero. I believe, although he may not fit into an Aristotelian or Shakespearean view of a tragic hero, Willy still is a diligent man and it is his life and death which are tragic. He is haunted by the fact that, even though he wants to make an impression on his sons by giving them a strong foundation to build themselves up a business and he wants to be well remembered, in reality, he is unable to do any of these. Willy has arrived to face the absurdity of life and this is the reason why ‘attention must be finally paid to such a person.’ On page 39, Linda says ‘a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.’ This supports the idea that a tragic hero does not no longer need to be a man of high moral stature or have the authority or largeness of a king but he can be an ordinary ‘Lowman’ to be significant to an audience.

As ‘Death of a Salesman’ criticises the moral and social standards of contemporary America, it is not purely a play based on the particular plight of one man. It presents Willy as a victim of the deterioration of the ‘American Dream’.

Simran Singh Kooner

11HA

English - 20th