Monday, November 10, 2014

Summary and Analysis of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

SETTING
The play is set in Brooklyn (most likely the 1940s and 50s). Most of the play takes place in Willy Loman's home as well as the back yard. Within the flashbacks, the house is surrounded by a cemetery and the skyline of New York City is visible in the distance. In the present tense, the house is surrounded by suffocating apartment buildings. The play also takes place in various buildings of New York City such as a restaurant and Willy's office building. The era that the play is set in is a developing urban society; rapid urbanization is evident throughout the play.


CHARACTERS

  • Willy Loman: selfish, corrupted, and ambitious salesman who has one goal in life: to be successful through the eyes of capitalism. When he realizes that he has lost all hopes at his goal, he seeks to instead create a legacy through his son, Biff. He is unfaithful to his wife, and encourages corrupt behavior from the people around him, especially his sons. 
  • Linda Loman: submissive and passive aggressive. She knows what is right and what is wrong, but does not defend these ideas when threatened by Willy's actions. She is irresponsible in taking care of her struggling husband and the raising of her own children. Weak and pathetic, the gives into Willy's personal conflicts, only attempting to resolve the issues by casting away her own son in hopes of brushing the problem away.
  • Biff Loman: Biff, like his father, is ambitious and strives to achieve success in his life. However, this Biff's American dream develops throughout his life into one completely different than his father. Before witnessing his father's affair, he lived in the shadow of his father. Along with this, he lost faith in his father's morality as well as faith in the dream that was fostered within him as a child. Constant conflict with his father leads to familial problems and eventually his father's suicide.
  • Happy Loman: sensing, mislead, ignorant, ambitious. Happy is loyal to his family, but incredibly disloyal and promiscuous with women. He strives to please his father by becoming a successful businessman, but is neglected and unappreciated. Happy exemplifies the image of his father, with destructive ambition and blind faith in his father's philosophy, which is that success is dependent on one's social standing in a capitalistic society.
  • Bernard: responsible, however not morally pure, Bernard dedicates himself to helping Biff succeed as a child. With rational thinking, Bernard sees through the clouds of capitalism and achieves success in adulthood (Lawyer who goes to the Supreme Court). 
  • Charley: Mature, responsible, caring, and successfully steady businessman. Charlie is most likely Willy's foil*. Throughout the play, he tries to lend a hand to Willy whenever he needs it, and is virtually the only moral and responsible character in the play.
*We did not really discuss whether or not there is a foil in this play, however, if I were to guess which character it would be, I would bet on Charlie.

PLOT

  • Willy arrives home early from a work trip. Linda fusses over him as he comments on how Biff has not been satisfactory in adulthood. Biff and Happy separate discuss the discontent of the family. Biff points out how he and Willy do not get along and how he strives to work outdoors in the west rather than become a salesman like his father.
  • Later that night, Willy is alone downstairs and remembers returning from a business trip in the past. Here, Biff and Bernard are shown as contrasting to each other, and Willy reveals to Linda that he only made enough commission to pay his bills.
  • Because Willy was being loud, Charley comes over to see what is going on. They both sit down to play cards, and during which Willy has a conversation with his diseased brother, Ben. Here it is exposed that Willy has regret for never going to Alaska with Ben when he had the chance. Charley offers him a job, but he refuses.
  • Linda discusses Willy's deteriorating mental state with her boys, and Biff decides to try to become a salesman to please his father. He plans to go to Bill Oliver, his former employer, to borrow money to start of a business with Happy. Willy gives Biff bad advice for his meeting
  • The next morning, Willy goes to Howard Wagner. his boss, to ask for a job in the city so he wouldn't have to commute to Boston any longer. Howard fires Willy. Willy then goes to Charley to borrow money and meets Bernard once again, who is now a successful lawyer. Willy draws comparison between Biff and Bernard, with regrets.
  • Willy meets Biff and Happy at a restaurant for dinner. Willy tells of loosing his job and Biff confesses to being pushed aside by Bill Oliver and to stealing his pen in response. While Willy is in the bathroom, his sons leave without him with some women. In the bathroom, Willy recollects of Biff catching him having an affair, and how that moment marked the change in Biff's aspirations and relationship with his father.
  • Willy returns home and tries to plant seeds in the back yard while discussing with his brother how the $20,000 in life insurance money would help his family. Inside, Linda scolds her sons for abandoning Willy in the restaurant. Willy comes inside and Biff has a climatic moment on intervention with his father in stating that neither of them will ever be more than "a dime a dozen" and that his father should give up on the dream that he had created for them both. 
  • At the end of Biff's argument and sentimental expression, Willy decides finally that Biff is after-all going to be a good man, and everything that he had worked hard for was worth it. His parenting was in fact complete, and even thought he had not been successful himself, he had a clear and simple way to map out his son's promising future: his suicide. He kills himself by crashing his car.
  • Only his family, Charley and Bernard attend Willy's funeral. Here, Happy promises to become successful in the image of his father's dreams, Biff declares that Willy died for nothing and Charley elegizes that Willy died a death of a salesman (which is by far opposite of the death of a salesman that Willy glorifies earlier in the play). Linda says goodbye to Willy and tells "him" that the house is paid off. They did not get the life insurance money.
POINT OF VIEW
Arthur Miller originated from New York City, which is also the setting of the play, and being a man who openly acknowledged the American society wrote Death of a Salesman in light of his criticisms. Death of a Salesman was written after World War II, during a time of great contradiction and social tensions, and the beginnings of what would be the Cold War. Americans were constantly faced with excessive propaganda to prevent communism, but also belonged to a society dominated by a conservative middle class who sought to spread social conformity. In addition to this, Arthur Miller was also influenced greatly by his uncle who was a salesman, and recognized how the American Dream caused him to be blinded with ambition and inherently a failure of society.

TONE & IMAGERY
Death of a Salesman is tragic in nature, although meant to be hopeful by Arthur Miller. From start to finish, the play is filled with depressing circumstance and disappointment, but in the end exemplifies the good that can come from failure, where a lesson is learned from. In the play, visual imagery is used to show the difference between present and past tenses, where in the past the backyard was surrounded with orange elm tree leaves, and in the present tense the backyard is surrounded by repressive buildings.

IMPORTANT QUOTES

  • "Why boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. [He laughs] And by God I was rich."
    • Ben says this to Willy's boys when he visits in a flashback. This is important because Ben represented the American presence in indigenous lands and how the spread of capitalism was inherently corrupted. Ben most likely made his profit in said jungle off of the backs of the natives who lived there; Natives in that era who had no rights and deprived of their resources to the dominating white man. This is also important because it shows how the American dream that was centered around capitalism and outward success was romanticized by the American people even though it was corrupt in nature.
  • "when he died--- and by the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, going into Boston--- when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral."
    • Willy says this to Howard when asking for a job in New York, he brings up the death of Dave Singleman. This is important because it defines what Willy dreams for himself as a salesman. He never does accomplish as much, only five people show up at his funeral. Willy believed that in order to be successful, you needed to have many many people like you and know your name.
MOTIFS

  1. Whistling: Throughout the play, Willy and Linda refer to whistling as a sign of immaturity, and advise Biff to refrain from doing so in times of acting professional. In contrast to this belief, characters such as Bernard, Howard, and Charley all whistle, and are considered well off and professional in the business world. This shows how Willy's social philosophy is fundamentally flawed even in the most minute of details.
  2. Stockings: In this time era, stockings were internationally know to be a way to pay for a woman's services, an act most commonly found on the war front of WWII. When Willy gives his mistress stockings, even though she was not a prostitute, he was conforming to and sustaining the cultural significance of the exchange. Biff is aware of this and reacts dramatically to seeing his father give the woman his mother's stockings (this probably being the most scarring feature of the scene). Willy also shows guilt for his infidelity every time he sees Linda mending her own stockings.
  3. Father figures: Willy's father was a traveling salesman of some sort, and his absence during his childhood probably contributed greatly to Willy's depiction of the American dream in his adulthood. Passing on this role as an influential father figure, Willy sought to make Biff into an image of himself. Ironically, the son that was neglected, Happy, ended up with the same life goals as Willy after his death, and the son that Willy had worked so hard on, would end up going out into the world seeking his own dream much as Ben did as a young adult. Here we can draw parallels between the father figures of each generation, and predict how the smothering parenthood over the eldest, most promising child evidently leads to that child's nonconformity as well as the opposite effect on the younger, more neglected child.*

*We did not really discuss this idea during class, but I would like to throw it out on the table.

THEME
Prioritizing success over moral values will harm others and cause personal failure.
In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman constantly puts aside moral values to achieve what he believes is the perfect American Dream. Willy pushes every member of his family to the breaking point for his own personal benefit. He pushes Biff into a career that he doesn't belong in, resulting in resentment and tension between the two. Happy is run ragged from trying to please his father in place of his brother but is consistently neglected, and never realizes or learns from his father's mistakes as Biff does. Willy suppresses and abuses Linda through emotional exhaustion and infidelity (Linda never knows of the affair, but it does in fact affect their relationship). In his death, Willy leaves his family with no more hope than when he was alive, which is ironic because he committed suicide for the sole purpose of making their life better. Conclusively, Willy never achieved his personal american dream, and all his efforts were worthless in the end due to the ultimate failure of his sons so successfully achieve his dream as he had hoped.

3 comments:

  1. Abby,
    This is incredibly long which might make it difficult to study over quickly, but to each their own I guess. Your discussion of each character is pretty extensive, so I don't think you missed anything there. However, the plot summary is a little long. I'm not sure you'll end up needing that much specific information about the play in the AP exam in May. In your point of view discussion, I'm a little unclear as to what you meant when you say that Arthur Miller "openly acknowledged the American society". Do you mean he openly denounces it? Also, I don't think you exactly nailed the imagery section. You reference how Willy's surroundings change over time, from trees to buildings, but I think this lends itself more to symbolism than imagery. I did enjoy your theme, however, and your description of how certain plot points add to it. Good job!

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  2. Abby,

    I agree with Alex in that your analysis is long, but that's not necessarily bad. As long as it works for you as your own study tool, then it's fine. In fact, it covers more details in a more thorough manner than if it were shorter, so while it's definitely long, it's not necessarily bad.

    That being said, I think you could do without the extensive plot summary as well. You probably don't need to know every detail for the AP exam, and as long as you know the general idea of what happens, then you're good.

    A few questions: Why is Bernard not morally pure? Of all the characters, I thought he and Charley were the best in terms of morality, character, etc.

    Going off of what Alex said about imagery, I think you could work on that a little more. What we should all remember is that we should take all of our DIDLS analyses and stuff from the written play itself, rather than the movie rendition. I don't remember Miller ever writing about orange elm trees in the play, and the director of the movie probably added that as his own touch. So you'll have to remember to separate images from the movie from what's written in the actual play. Also, you could probably elaborate on how tone is conveyed through specific DIDLS aspects. How is the depressingness/hopefulness represented by Miller's choices in DIDLS?

    Otherwise, this is a very thorough analysis and I think you'll be covered come time for the AP exam. Nice job!

    Nora

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  3. Abby,

    First of all I completely agree with what Alex and Nora said. Your plot summary is way too long, and it shouldn't include every single minute detail of the play, it should be a general overview and highlight key areas of the play. Your plot summary should not give away every single thing that happened in the play but simply the main and most important and vital areas.


    Another thing is that your area about imagery is incorrect, I'm not sure if you got confused on the definition of imagery or what exactly happened there but imagery is words that the author uses especially well so that a specific image is created in your mind. It is not images of nature how you seemed to imply.

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