The American Dream in Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire
Leon Nepomniatshy
American Literature II
December 9th, 2002
The American Dream in Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire
The American Dream is a central aspect of the plot of the two plays in question. It serves as both the motivation for Stanley’s behavior in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Willy Loman’s vision that his son Biff refused to uphold in Death of a Salesman.
In Miller’s play, Willy turned his vision of the American dream into more of a culture. He sincerely believes that the key indicators of success are how much money and brand-name appliances you have, how “well-liked” you are, and how hard you worked to achieve all you’ve got. His two sons, Happy and more so Biff, are victims of their father’s failed vision and his efforts to make himself look good despite his obvious failure (through lying and inflating facts). Biff’s view of the American Dream is different from that of Willy’s – he wants to define success for himself, and not let success define him, as it did to his father, as his words “I’ve always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I’ve done was waste my life” (Baym 2118) indicate. Perhaps, this difference was brought about when Biff found out about his father’s affair back at the age of 17, and exclaimed “You fake! You phony little fake!” (Baym 2166) at both his father and the American Dream. It may explain why “From the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to him” (Baym 2152), because it was then that he realized that the American Dream his father was such a proponent of is as phony as his father is – and since then, Biff has been trying to follow something he didn’t believe in anymore, which obviously didn’t work out. Now, Biff’s dream rejects the amount of money he makes, how well liked he is, or what brand his refrigerator is as objectives. It only relies on whether he likes what he does or not. “Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!” (Baym 172) – That is Biff, and that is his own American Dream, placed somewhere out west and not in the concrete jungle of the city.
