Death of a Salesman (1949). Content and Description

After a trial run in Philadelphia, Death of a Salesman premiered on February 10, 1949, at New York’s Morosco Theatre. Miller’s most successful Broadway play, Salesman had a run of 742 performances. Within a year of its debut, it had found the stage in every major U.S. city. Salesman swept the major American drama awards, garnering Miller his second Tony, Donaldson, and Drama Critics Circle Awards, as well as his first and only Pulitzer Prize.

Though he would go on to write a handful of successful works in his later career, Miller never again matched the critical acclaim he received for Salesman; however, as other works from the mid- 20th century have lost favor with drama critics and theatergoers, Salesman’s luster has yet to fade. According to the Miller scholar Brenda Murphy, “since its premiere, there has never been a time when Death of a Salesman was not being performed somewhere in the world” (70).

In two acts, neither of which contains scene breaks, Death of a Salesman dramatizes the last two days of Willy Loman’s life. With his career and sanity on the decline, Willy, a lifelong traveling salesman, returns to his Brooklyn home “tired to the death,” unable to make his New England sales calls. As his wife, Linda, comforts him, their two adult sons, Biff and Happy, both home for a brief stay, discuss Willy’s unstable mood, odd behavior, and propensity for talking to himself. Seamlessly shifting between past and present, Act 1 fills in the family’s history and develops the play’s principal characters.

Willy, at best a mediocre salesman in his younger days, has become so inept he must borrow money from his neighbor, Charley, to pay his mortgage and monthly life insurance premium. Meanwhile, Linda suppresses fears of financial collapse, wearing a cheerful mask in order to buoy Willy’s fragile self-esteem. Biff, having long ago rejected his father’s yes-man approach to business success, has nothing to show for two decades of working “twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs.” His dreams vanished in high school when he flunked 12th-grade math, nullifying his University of Virginia football scholarship. Conversely, Happy earns a good living in the business world, but neither the money nor his frequent one-night stands satisfy him.

Act 1 rises and falls in a series of waves. Willy oscillates between hope and despair, truth and lies, self-confidence and self-doubt. He boasts that he’s “very well liked” throughout New England, then confesses, “I’m not noticed. . . . I’m fat. I’m very foolish to look at.” As his odds for personal success fade, Willy seeks solace in Biff’s achievements. Willy fondly recalls Biff’s football glory, reveling in his son’s adolescent charisma and popularity. Yet, Biff’s adult failures haunt and confound Willy. In the same breath, he chastises Biff as a “lazy bum,” then lauds his work ethic: “There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.”

The disjunction between Willy’s imagined Biff and the Biff the audience encounters underscores the rift between Willy’s reality and everyone else’s. It also foreshadows Willy’s absurd demise. As all tragic heroes do, Willy gropes for immortality. He wants others to remember him, but as he grows older, he realizes that his middling sales career will not suffice. Thus, he turns to his older son, hoping Biff will continue his legacy. For 16 years Willy has longed for Biff to triumph where Willy failed, to parlay his youthful charm into financial success. Act 1 concludes on a hopeful crescendo, as Biff promises to seek a loan from his former boss in order to start a sporting goods company.

As the curtain rises on Act 2, Willy wakes refreshed, soothed in his hope that Biff will finally settle down in New York. Biff and Happy have already left for the city, and Willy looks forward to a celebratory steak dinner that evening with his sons. Before the three gather at the restaurant, Willy stops by company headquarters to request a local assignment, pleading exhaustion from spending 34 years on the road. Willy’s boss, Howard, wrecks Willy’s optimistic mood, not only rejecting the request, but firing him for lack of production. In need of money, Willy drops by Charley’s office to ask for another loan.

There he meets Bernard— Charley’s son and Biff’s boyhood friend—now a successful lawyer, who reminds Willy of Biff’s failures. Agitated, confused, and despondent, Willy joins Biff and Happy at Frank’s Chop House, the setting for most of Act 2. Having failed to secure a loan for his newfangled business scheme, Biff determines to break family tradition by telling his father the truth. Biff’s meeting with Bill Oliver sparks an epiphany, which he divulges to Happy: “He gave me one look and I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years.”

Biff’s proclamation resonates on two levels, not only indicting his family’s fallacious communication habits, but also revealing the hollow foundation on which the American dream is built. In this context, “dream” is stripped of its optimistic, idealistic connotations. Instead, the term signifies unreality, the depletion of meaning, and the inability to escape the past. Sensing that Biff’s insight negates his own life, Willy refuses to listen, losing himself in another reverie. He recalls an evening 15 years earlier when Biff traveled to Boston to confess flunking out of school only to discover Willy with a mistress. The incident clarifies Willy’s paternal inadequacy and explains Biff’s demoralized demeanor.

The play’s action builds toward an event that has already occurred, an episode illuminating the central characters’ motives and convictions. In a creative twist, Miller inverts conventional dramatic progression, in which time unfolds linearly, unleashing a climactic accumulation of past events. Conversely, Salesman's present action—that is, the final 24 hours of Willy’s life—climaxes in a scene set a decade and a half in the past. Biff’s adolescent insight—that his father is a “phony little fake”—is the logical precursor of his present epiphany, namely, that he too has led a phony, fake existence.

The scene occurs in Willy’s mind, making the epiphany Willy’s as well as Biff’s. Willy’s daydream prepares the audience for the play’s inevitable confrontation, Biff’s last-ditch effort to force his father to “hear the truth.” With the declaration “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you,” Biff begs Willy to “take that phony dream and burn it,” a plea with a twofold meaning: Just as he wants Willy to free the family from the shackles of the American dream, Biff yearns for Willy to escape the waking dreams that dominate his life and embrace tangible, present reality.

On one level, Biff’s appeal moves Willy, who exclaims, “Isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!” On a deeper level, however, Willy misses Biff’s point, retreating almost immediately into fantasy, telling his imaginary brother how Biff, when given the $20,000 life insurance payout, will become a magnificent success. Shortly thereafter, Willy drives wildly into the night, presumably to commit suicide. After Act 2, a short requiem documents the Loman family’s grief. Set at Willy’s graveside, the final scene closes on a sentimental note as Linda tells her dead husband, “I made the last payment on the house today. . . . And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. . . . We’re free.”

Although Miller had employed elements of realism in his early plays, Death of a Salesman was his first original contribution to the form. A term denoting any literary work about the everyday existence of lower-class people, realism, according to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, usually focuses on “the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence” (Harman 428). Unlike Miller’s previous play, All My Sons—a paean to the renowned realist Henrik Ibsen—Death of a Salesman stretches the boundaries of traditional realism. As his surname indicates, Willy is a low man.

With their unadorned speech and working-class struggles, the Loman family’s life exemplifies the realistic subject. Yet, Salesman departs from “immediate, here and now” storytelling. Instead, oscillating between past and present, between external action and internal thought, the play prompts audiences to reconsider what “realistic” means. Through the Lomans’ story, Miller demonstrates how memory and reflection are as “real” as tangible stimuli. Were the audience not privy to Willy’s consciousness, Salesman could not have succeeded in exposing what Miller considered the American dream’s “real” consequences.

Salesman fuses several thematic issues, but none is more crucial than the control American cultural values exert on individuals’ psyches. Willy’s hopes and fears are social creations. Principles embodied within the American mythos—self-reliance, economic salvation, individual freedom—create Willy’s identity. Cleft from these values, Willy is an empty shell. In the final confrontation, Biff eviscerates not only everything Willy considers meaningful, but also the distinction between American “reality” and American mythology.

Immediately after Salesman’s premier, critics began debating the play’s tragic merits. Traditional conceptions of tragedy limit the form to stories about noble characters undone by fate or inherent psychological flaws. In Poetics, Aristotle hypothesized that by viewing tragedies, audiences experienced an emotional cleansing of pity and fear. Thomas Hardy called tragedy the “worthy encompassed by the inevitable.” Salesman is plainly tragic in the colloquial sense: The Loman family suffers several personal misfortunes, including the needless death of its patriarch. Some scholars, however, suggest that Willy lacks the nobility and “worthiness” to assume the hero’s mantle; therefore, his story is not a tragedy in the strict sense. Angst-ridden and petty, Willy hardly fits the mold of Oedipus or Othello. His “low” status raises the question of whether his demise brings about a cartharsis or sentimental pathos. Is his anguish universal or isolated? Miller never meant for Willy to fit the classic archetype.

Modernity, he contends, renders the requirement of regality moot: “If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it would follow that the problems of those with rank were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the domain from another no longer raises our passions, nor are our concepts of justice what they were to the mind of an Elizabethan king” (Theater Essays 5).

In place of cosmic forces, social conditions—in this case, unreasonable expectations encoded in the American dream—create inevitable tragic consequences. Harold Bloom, a prominent American literary critic, adjudicates a compromise. Willy, he contends, sustains the “aesthetic dignity” inherent in all tragic heroes, and although he does not have “the authentic dignity of the protagonist . . . his sincere pathos does have authentic aesthetic dignity, because he does not die the death of a salesman. He dies the death of a father, perhaps not the universal father, but a father central enough to touch anguish of the universal” (7).

If universal appeal is the mark of tragedy, then Salesman’s best case may be empirical. In its 1983 Beijing run, Chinese audience members wept openly. Brenda Murphy describes an even more remarkable example of the play’s ability to capture disparate imaginations: “Death of a Salesman has been played before a native audience in a small Arctic village with the same villagers returning night after night to witness the performance in a language they did not understand” (106). Regardless of whether Salesman is a “real” tragedy or not, it continues to inspire audiences, even those who have never experienced the pressures of the American dream.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Develop a list of qualities embodied in the “American dream.” Discuss each character’s reactions to and ideas about this dream. What does it mean to each character? What does it mean to you? Is it an attainable ideal for everyone or a hollow ruse that damages individuals’ psyches, distracting them from more meaningful existences?

2. Although Happy never expresses ill will toward his father for favoring Biff, Biff is clearly the prodigal son. Yet, with his career choices and preference for felicitous deception over uncomfortable truth, Happy bears a sharper resemblance to his father than does Biff. Discuss the effect of Willy’s parenting style on Happy and Biff. Why does Biff rebel against his father’s wishes? Why is Happy content to follow in Willy’s footsteps? With your own experiences in mind, discuss the influence parents exert over their children’s futures. How much freedom should parents give their children to choose their own destinies?

3. After reading (or viewing a performance of) Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons, discuss similarities and differences between it and Death of a Salesman. Consider such subcomparisons as the following:

(a) Compare Joe Keller with Willy Loman. Do they commit suicide for the same reason(s)? What are the dilemmas each man faces? What overlap between their predicaments do you recognize? Does either character resonate as an “everyman,” or are their stories exclusive to their particular situations?

(b) Compare Miller’s use of structure as a developmental tool, keeping in mind Miller’s conviction that every “catastrophe was the story of how the birds came home to roost. . . , that a play without a past is a mere shadow of a play” (Theater Essays 548). How does the past reveal its effect on the present in each play? Which method of structural development is more conducive to making the past-present relationship evident: the linear progression of All My Sons or the collage of overlapping memories, the blending of external action with internal consciousness in Death of a Salesman?

(c) Miller attributed his Broadway breakthrough to a “simple shift of relationships. . . , a shift which did not and could not solve the problem of [his earlier plays], but . . . made at least two . . . plays that followed possible, and a great deal else besides” (Theater Essays 126). The two plays are All My Sons and Death of a Salesman; they were “made possible” by Miller’s realization that he was unconsciously preoccupied with “the father-son relationship.” Both plays depict a father whose two sons follow disparate courses. Compare the triangular relationship of father, older son, and younger son in both plays. How does the father-son relationship contribute to the tragedy of each story? When children become disillusioned with their parental models, is tragedy an inevitable outcome?

4. Why does Death of a Salesman continue to resonate with contemporary audiences? In an interview with Mathew Roudane, Miller hypothesized that the play has “more or less the same effect everywhere there is a dominating technology” (Theater Essays 420). What does Miller mean by a dominating technology? What is the dominating technology in Willy’s time? In our time?

5. Discuss the tragic merits of Death ofa Salesman. Does Willy Loman’s story precipitate a catharsis of pity and fear, or does it merely elicit sentimental compassion for a single broken man? In order to answer this question, read Aristotle’s section on tragedy in Poetics and Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Does Death of a Salesman warrant a reconsideration of Aristotle’s definition?

6. The opening stage directions of Death of a Salesman are among the most famous in American drama. The published version of the play begins, “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.” Miller’s lyrical language contrasts with traditional stage directions, which in Shakespeare’s time were typically limited to two or three words. What, if anything, do Miller’s directions contribute to the play? How do they set the mood? Does the music add to or detract from Miller’s tragic intentions?