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The play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller describes the last twenty-four hours of Willy Loman’s life and consists of a set of memoires, dreams, and arguments. It makes many people respond to the problems of the main character as they deal with human dilemmas and failure to accept changes within oneself and society. The purpose of this paper is to find out what Willy believed to be the key to successful selling and to identify whether Willy fits the typical profile of a successful salesman as presented in this course. The themes of the play will be pointed out, as well as the involvement of Willy’s brother Ben will be specified.
The play is concentrated on the description of Willy Loman’s character and destiny. He is a person who desires to reach success and constantly tries to attract attention. Willy believes that the key to the successful selling is to be attractive and good-looking in other people’s eyes, claiming that being smart is not enough (Miller 21). Personally, I cannot agree with him because it is a well-known fact that being good-looking can attract some people only until they become more familiar with an individual. Thus, they would judge this individual mostly by his or her intellect and actions afterwards.
The bitter truth is that Willy does not fit the typical profile of the successful salesman, no matter how desperately he tried to become one in the course of his life. In his desire to have a clean white-collar job he spent thirty-four years working for the company the boss of which ignored his experience, never respected him and fired him when he became less productive. As a result, he had spent his life making successful sales only in his dreams and had to commit suicide trying to acquire insurance for his family.
Although Willy was a salesman, I do not believe that Arthur Miller wrote mostly about sales. As some researchers state, “the complexity of Miller’s play has allowed it not just to endure sixty years, but to flourish as different productions emphasize different aspects of the text, different themes, and different values” (Hays 2-3). It is believed that the play deals mostly with denial, contradiction, and analysis of order and disorder. It is a major opinion that Willy in his self-contradictions and belief in slogans and advertisements represents America itself. The American nation is believed to be the nation of contradictions, being presented as puritanical, hard-working and peaceful, but still engaging in wars, using sex in the advertisements and struggling for personal success (Hays 6). The main character makes a lot of contradictory statements throughout the play.
As it is understood after reading the play, it is Willy’s older brother Ben who fits the model of a successful man and thus constantly appears in Willy’s memoirs. Ben left the city when he was young to explore other continents, and he finally made his fortune in diamond mining in Africa working for himself. Ben might symbolize everything Willy wanted to reach, but never could because of his loyalty to the company that tended to despise him as a salesman.
After covering the main questions stated in the beginning of this paper, it becomes obvious that Willy Loman failed to reach success in life because of a mistaken loyalty to his company, lack of self-esteem and wrong set of values. These mistaken values led him to the failure and death. Even his dreams about splendid funeral never came true because almost no one attended it.
Works Cited
Hays, Peter L. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Miller, Arthur. The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays. Penguin, 2015.
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