American Literature

In Arthur Millers play Death of a Salesman, audiences view the final day of Willy Lomans life.  Willy is a failed salesman who is crushed by the economic realities of his failures to perform, and takes those concerns out on his wife and two children by lashing out at them.  On top of this, Lomannow 63 years oldis experiencing the blurring of his past life with his present one, providing him (as well as audiences) a heartbreaking look at a family whose lives were once full of potential.  Implicit in the titular death of Loman is Millers criticism of the American dreamLoman is unable to access higher-order emotional responses to the needs of his family because he sees himself as being unable to meet their physical needs through money.  Even when Loman or his sons do experience meager moments of success, Loman tortures himself by comparing them to the greater achievements of others his minors sales successes pale compared to his brother discovering diamonds in Africa, for instance.  And even as his older sons plot a business venture that may well be more successful than any of his, Loman is still scolding them for the perceived failures of the past.  In this sense, Miller shows Loman to be an archetypal beingan everyman figure whose failed life and successful suicide could be the fate of anyone.

Certainly, modern economic woes seem to bear out Millers concerns as being accurate.  Individuals are reliant upon various forms of propertythe much maligned appliances in Death of a Salesman are a good example of that.  They do not represent vanity purchases, but represent certain utilities that enable the Loman family to a live a solidly lower-middle class lifestyle.  In a post- Great Depression world, the American dream is tied into property and financial success the so-called white picket fences demarcating ones own piece of this shared dream.  As Loman is told in the play, them things dont mean anything. You named him Howard, but you cant sell that. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that youre a salesman, and you dont know that (Miller 75).  However, Miller shows that this lifestyle is ultimately toxic property is perceived as a necessary precursor to happiness, and money is a necessary precursor to property.  As the appliance bills and mortgage payments pile up, more money is necessary, causing an endless cycle of misery.  It is no coincidence that Loman is chasing the ghost of the previously successful salesman (Dave Singleman) who inspired Loman into his career choiceas Danqing points out, when he is young, he finds his own hero and tries to become the hero in this own existence (Danqing 29).  Danqing notes that all of Lomans happy memories are dated before the Great Depression, which had an adverse and, in Millers eye, irreversible effect on the nature of the American dream As the Great Depression deepened, the American Dream had become a nightmare. What was once the land of opportunity was now the land of desperation. What was once the land of hope and optimism had become the land of despair. The American people were questioning all the maxims on which they had based their lives - democracy, capitalism, individualism (Danqing 26-27).  Just as Loman is chasing the ghost of a man who is gone and a man that can never truly be recreated, Miller is illustrating the American dream as something that died during the Great Depressionwhile younger characters have moved on and embraced technology and change, Loman is still chasing that ghost.  As Miller tells us, weve been talking in a dream for fifteen years (Miller 81).  The brutal irony is that the closest he comes to embracing the American dream is by taking his own life he buys the freedom for his family (from their debt, and perhaps even from himself) with his death that he never could in life, joining the American dream where Miller has squarely situated it the graveyard.

Millers explication of the American dreams corrupting influence on culture can be seen through Lomans home, as well.  As Thompson points out, the symbolic importance of the main setting in Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman, explaining how the small home of Willy and Linda Lomanonce situated on the green fringes of suburbia and blessed with shade trees, a backyard garden, and plenty of open space for two rambunctious sonshas become palisaded by ruthless urban sprawl, so much so that the aging couple now live in the sterilizing shadows of high-rise apartment buildings, trapped, cornered, enveloped (Thompson 244)
Thompson paints an engaging (if depressing) picture of the Loman household as being under siege by the forces of progress.  The apartments bullying his suburban lifestyle are as puzzling to Loman as the wire receiver in his young bosss office, because they represent the forces of modernity.  In short, they represent what America had to become in order to stave off The Great Depression.  Loman, of course, refused to ever change, and is situated in the pasta metaphorical fact made abundantly clear by the ghosts of his past visiting him with the same clarity that the haunting spirits visit Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.  Of course, the tragedy of Death of a Salesman is that it is far too late for Loman to change his life.  He can never truly envision his future because he can never stop envisioning his past.  He experiences this as a moment of clarity at the end of the play Why am I trying to become what I dont 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 (Miller 105).  The tragedy is that with a vision stuck in the past, Loman can never truly know who he is, and his family is perpetually waiting for his moment of actualization.

Millers cautionary tale of Lomans life is as apt today as it was then, if not more so.  The story of chasing the wrong dreams into financial and familial ruin strikes an all-too-familiar chord for individuals whose economy renders even one pratfall as potentially fatal, both to individuals and to the families that rely on them.  Unfortunately, history has illustrated Millers jaded views on the American dream as absolutely correct.

While the abstractions of that dream (such as the boundlessness of opportunity, and the ability to raise ones self from meager poverty to the status of a business tycoon) remain firmly in place as a guiding principle to the masses, the realities of it (the money and education necessary to actualize the vast majority of opportunities and dreams, for instance) remain as heartbreaking to modern individuals as it was to Willy Loman.  It is always possible to restructure that dream into something more accommodating, but considering the jingoism that is inevitably tied into the American dream (one cannot ignore the specifically national character of that dream, after all), such a move is often seen as settling for something lesser than could be done.  Again, Lomans actions and fate haunt modernity in a way that seems a cruel parody of Shakespeares Macbeth.  In that work, Macbeth was undone by the prophecy of his own greatness.  In modern American culture, every child is given their own prophecy of greatness, from the lowest school teacher to the highest office in the land.  Yet individuals still seem mortified when they see the greasy impact of lives flung from their would-be heights onto the unyielding concrete of brutal economic reality.