In this essay I am going to try to show Miller's view on success and how he uses Willy Lowman to show it.

This capitalist system of free enterprise and big business also has rewards. He is "worked out" and in the ruthless world of business there is no room for sentiment: if he cant do the work then he is no good to the firm and he must go.

Although Willy is painfully a victim of this system, his loyalties demand that he continues to serve it and he is bewildered at his lack of success. I think this is reflected in modern society with many reliable, hard-working people not being recognised by the people who make the difference. He has to hide behind a smoke screen of lies and pretence to disguise the fact to others and himself that he has failed. Salesman were at the cutting edge of the American dream - the original self-made men who sold not their goods, but their personalities.

Equally powerful in this concept is the 'great out-doors' moving to the country, -plenty of space, rural living close to nature. Here a different sort of dream can be realised, but one which strikes a wistful note on Biff: "We don't belong in this nuthouse of a city. We should be mixing cement on some open plain....."

The pioneer combines these two visions. Ben is the idol for thi8s, Willy, still in his world where his no failure doesn't realise that Bens route is the right one. He tries to use Bens goals as his but with the wrong tactics to reach them.

Willy, at 60, looks at what he has achieved and sees very little. Lacking Ben's ruthlessness, he failed to grasp the opportunity that Ben offered him. I think it is one of the saddest moments of the play when Miller makes us aware that no-one attended Willy's funeral.

This I think shows in society that people see less of the heart and human values and more of what is on paper. People will move on to the next source when the first expires.

Willy has served the system loyally and now that he is in his declining years he is rejected by it in the coldest way. The moment in the play when he is planting seeds in his back garden in a last futile effort to salvage something from the wreckage of his life.

Unlike in Shakespeare plays, Willy Loman the hero of the play

does not die of a character flaw but only by the society that he inhabits relating back to the reality of the American dream and the very few shining stars it creates. Willy Loman does not fit into this category. I think Willy Loman being an average man shows how these problems can happen to anyone and who can support a system which can outcast them when they most need it. Miller felt "It matters not at all whether a modern concerns itself with a grocer or a president, whether the hero falls from a great hight or a small one. What matters is the ' the intensity of the human passion to supass his given bounds and 'the questions whose answers define humanity and the right way to live'. Shakespeares's heroes wre motivated by high passions such as lust, greed and amition but Miller suggests that these are no more important or admirable than Willy's determination to be well liked.

We all know what it feels like to strive to succeed. W all know how bitter the taste of failure is. We may be reluctant to confess how much material success means to us, we may even be ashamed of it, but it is often an inescapable part of all our daily lives.

Does Willy Loman learn from his mistakes? What about those around him? Willy seems to have learned at the end of the play that Biff loves him and forgives him for his earlier mistake in his affair. However, he has misunderstood Biff's cry of frustration and dipair ans tears as expression of love. Linda learns very little nothing from his death and fails to understand his actions.

Willy dies, as heroes most times than not do, but his death affirms the beliefs to which he has clung and which have destroyed him. He commits suicide in order to secure a substantial insurance payment for Biff because he believes that the only true value of a man's worth is how much he is liked and how much he has. He believes this money will set Biff up in business, opening doors for him and enabling him to persuade people to his way of thinking. It is tragic that a man's death should make him a sacrifice on the altar of the belief which has failed him. His mind was closed to the obvious signs of his failure. It is debatable whether he was a tragic hero or whether the is a tragedy concerning what the play is trying to say. To conclude, Miller wrote: " I set out not to write a tragedy but to show the truth as I saw it."

By Ross miles