Death of a Salesman Essay

Finally, Willy failed greatly at achieving the American Dream. People have come to the United States hoping for a life of happiness and success, at the same time, hoping to take pride in what they do and enjoy it. Willy did not achieve the American Dream. He had no pride in what he did, although he hid these emotions. I believe he was so embarrassed because he could not make a single sale or earn a single dollar that he began borrowing fifty dollars a week from Charley, and then pretended it was his salary. He lied to his family and to himself. He did not allow himself to do what he truly wanted to do because he believed that it was more remarkable to be supposedly successful. He therefore failed miserably at the true American Dream, exchanging it for an unattainable fantasy.

Willy spends more time then not contradicting his words. The advice he gives his sons, he hardly lives by. The example he strives to set for his boys appalls a hard-working laborer. Yet after

In Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman’s life seems to be slowly deteriorating. It is clear that Willy’s predicament is of his own doing, and that his own foolish pride and ignorance lead to his downfall. Willy’s self-destruction involved the uniting of several aspects of his life and his lack of grasping reality in each, consisting of, his relationship with his wife, his relationship and manner in which he brought up his children, Biff and Happy, and lastly his inability to productively earn a living and in doing so, failure to achieve his “American Dream”.

When venturing through Willy’s acts the audience might react negatively due to his choices and with what he does. Throughout the story , Willy’s dreams of him being a prosperous salesman had got in the way of reality. He tend to believe that money is truly the key of happiness and to life. Although his family were doing financially unwell,didn’t believe so and would often dream about the past.

The story ‘Death of a Salesman’ written by Miller focuses on a man doing all he can to allow him and his family to live the American dream. Throughout the story it is shown how the Loman’s struggle with finding happiness and also with becoming successful. Throughout their entire lives many problems come their way resulting in a devastating death caused by foolishness and the drive to be successful. Ever since he and his wife, Linda, met she has been living a sad and miserable life, because she has been trying support his unachievable goals. Also by him being naïve put his children’s lives in jeopardy and also made them lose sight of who they really were. Miller uses the Loman family to show how feeling the need to appear a certain way to the public and trying to live a life that is not really yours can turn into an American nightmare.

In 1949, the forlorn life of Willy Loman is introduced in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. At this time the American Dream was something everyone craved during the peak of suburbia. The American Dream was the golden standard of living like Donna Reed, all wrapped up with a white picket fence. To Willy Loman, The American Dream was not the golden standard, but the only standard. His wife Linda dutifully greeting him as he came home from a successful day as a salesman, and sits down to dinner with his sons Biff, the former football star and now successful salesman that takes after his father, and Happy, a husband and father of three who lives a humble life. This idea infested Willy’s mind to such an extent that reality was swept away.

Due to the fantasy world that Willy lived in, mostly caused by the American Dream, he pursued his career in sales. Based on the success of Dave Singleman, his mentor. His bad career choice caused most of his dissatisfaction with life. His sales career simply conflicted with his natural abilities and talents. I believe that he knew he should have been working in a different field, but his obsession with the American Dream would not allow him to realize that. When Willy dreamt of working with his hands he was the happiest. “Yeah. He was a happy man with a batch of cement. He was so wonderful with his hands. He had all the wrong dreams All, all, wrong.” According to the idea of the America Dream, manual labor did not comply. Sadly enough, Willy measured his self worth by the standards of the American Dream.

Willy a sixty three year old man with a wife and two kids and he works as a traveling salesman. Willy has an image of America that is very controversial because he believes that America is the land of the free and the land of the opportunity but throughout the play you start to realize that it seems a different way. Willy’s life starts to fall apart and you start to see less and less opportunity for Willy. Willy definitely tries to live up to his land of the opportunity belief by the way that he approaches situations like talking to his boss and asking for a job change into a different department or the way dreams of his future by being known by everyone and having everybody like him and attend his funeral when he dies. Willy does not wanna be the only one living his american Willy tries to

To Willy Loman the main protagonist,his version of the American Dream is to become successful on being well liked alone.Willy believes being well liked is the key to success opposed to being productive.Throughout Willy’s life he is forced to deny reality in order to achieve it. Instead of acknowledging that he is not a well-known success, Willy retreats into the past and chooses to relive

Willy Loman, the central character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, is a man whose fall from the top of the capitalistic totem pole results in a resounding crash, both literally and metaphorically. As a man immersed in the memories of the past and controlled by his fears of the future, Willy Loman views himself as a victim of bad luck, bearing little blame for his interminable pitfalls. However, it was not an ill-fated destiny that drove Willy to devastate his own life as well as the lives of those he loved; it was his distorted set of values.

The success attained by Willy?s role models, his father, Dave Singleman, and Ben, is what he envisions to be the American Dream. He only visualizes the end product, being successful, and not the process they may have gone through to achieve that success. Willy?s father sold flutes and made that his living. In an encounter with his thoughts of the past, Willy listens to Ben, his brother, who refers to their father by saying, "Great Inventor, Father. With one gadget he made more in a week than a man like you could make in a lifetime" (49). Willy assumes that by being a salesman, like his father was, he is automatically guaranteed success, and that it wasn?t something that he would have to work for. Material success, such as money, luxury, and wealth, and popularity are his goals and his definition of success. On the other hand, self-fulfillment and happiness through hard work is not. By only focusing on the outer appearance of the American Dream, Willy ignores the

He then gouges out his eyes and wonders of into the desert (#4). Willy Loman is the son of a middle-class man. He has been working as a traveling salesman for the last forty years. This is not the life of nobility. Nobility is someone that is of a high social class. A nobleman could also be a person in a position of high authority. Willy Loman was a peon of the firm that he was selling for. At one point, he may have been respected, but that time has come and gone. Willy Loman was not endowed with a tragic flaw. His failure in life came from the pretensions of the American dream. All he wants in life was to support his family and see his sons be productive in life. This is at time in American society when many people essentially worked themselves to death. Society cannot be a character flaw, because it represents everyone, not just a tragic flaw in a single man (#1). One could argue that Willy Loman’s tragic flaw was his pride. This was one of Willy’s flaws, but it does not cause his death. His pride kept him from accepting the job that Charlie offered, but it did not keep him from borrowing money from him. The excessive pride flaw did not cause Willy Loman’s death. The cause of Willies death was his desire to provide for his family. This was the American dream at its worst (#1). Willy never realizes that he made a few irreversible mistakes. The first mistake was how he raises his sons.

In the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Willy is both sympathized with and looked down upon throughout the story. Willy is a very complex character with problems and faults that gain both sympathy and also turn the reader off to him. Willy Loman is both the protagonist and the antagonist, gaining sympathy from the reader only to lose it moments later.

What is the "American Dream?" How does one define success? Many people hold different views on how to obtain true happiness. One common view is the accomplishment of something yearned. A majority of individuals desire love, compassion, and a family. On the other hand, there are those concerned with self-image, material items, and the fact that money can indeed buy true happiness. In Arthur Miller's play DEATH OF A SALESMAN [published by Ted Buchholz (1993)]--the story of a sixty-three year old man named Willy Loman striving to achieve the "American Dream" and his family who suffer as a cause--contains many examples of trying to achieve material success. Willy's

The story Death of a Salesman begins in the home of Willy Loman in Boston. Willy, the protagonist of the play, is constantly tortured by his desire for success and his failure to achieve it. The play as a whole is a summary of his life and the last two days of it. At the beginning of this narrative writing, Willy is left to reflect wistfully on his past endeavors and mistakes he has made in his lifetime. The Death of A Salesman was made in 1949, a time where becoming a successful salesman and providing for family was billed as the “American Dream” Needless to say this was the dream of a young Willy just joining the business world. From a young age, Willy had become accustomed to seeing success around him as his brother Ben had struck a fortune by the age of twenty two through diamond mining in Africa. His obsession for success eventually drove him crazy as he couldn’t stand watching his brother become rich and not being able to replicate his success in sales. Willy