" Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller

Hello readers I'm back with another play by Arthur Miller i.e "Death of a Salesman". So let's dive deep into the play.

About the Author 

Arthur Asher Miller who was bron on October 17, 1915 and died on February 10, 2005 was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are,

1) All My Sons (1947).

2) Death of a Salesman (1949).

3) The Crucible (1953).

4) A View from the Bridge (1955). 

He wrote several screenplays, including The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999.

Background of the play

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is a social critique of the American Dream. The play follows Willy and Biff Loman as they come to realize that the American Dream isn't an attainable goal. Willy, Biff's father is an unsuccessful traveling salesman, and Biff is a simpleminded field worker. As the play progresses, the characters must try to redefine happiness and success for themselves without the pressure of the American Dream. The play relies on motifs such as mythic figures and the notion of being 'well liked' to support many of the themes that deal with the conflicts Willy and Biff face.

Literary Techniques in Death of a Salesman 

Death of a Salesman was written by Arthur Miller in 1948 and produced in 1949. The play is a story about a salesman named Willy Loman, his family, and his desire for the American Dream. He lives with his wife Linda in New York, who tries to convince him to settle down in a job where he does not have to travel so far.

Willy sets unattainable expectations on himself and his two sons, Biff and Happy, who spend the entire play trying to please their father. The play follows Willy's mental twist as he becomes disillusioned with life and keeps reliving events from his past. Linda reveals to her sons that Willy has been trying to end his life and asks them both to try and help her cheer him up.

There are many different literary techniques or literary devices used within "Death of a Salesman". One of the examples of those would be:

Allusions: The characters use many allusions during the play. An allusion refers to a person, place, thing, event, or idea that the writer of a literary work uses that they assume their readers will know. These allusions give the work a lot of meaning within a word or a short phrase. 

Summary of Death of a Salesman

Death of a salesman summary explains the happenings that take place in the story. It is a story about a salesman. Thus, the play addresses essential issues like losing one’s identity, inability to accept change and more. The story is a mixture of remembrance, dreams, conflicts, arguments and more in Willy Loman’s life.

Thus, the death of a salesman summary follows the life of Willy, who is a salesman professionally. He lives with his wife and has two sons. The times are evolving fast and Willy is unable to keep up. He does not like living in his 25-year old home which is surrounded by the apartment building. Moreover, Willy is not doing good at his job and his sons are not as successful as he wishes them to be. Amidst all this stress and tension, he finally commits suicide to help his family lead a better life with the insurance money. The play follows the life of a salesman, Willy Loman, who lives in New York City in the late 1940s.

Willy has a wife, Linda, and two sons, Happy and Biff. Willy does not like to live in his 25-year old home which is now surrounded by apartment buildings. Moreover, Willy cannot focus on driving and violates traffic laws often.  His condition is worsening as he talks to himself more than before. Further, he also stresses about his sons not being successful enough. Although, Happy has a job and lives in his apartment. However, Biff is still struggling and not earning enough.

At work, things are not looking good for Willy either. He has been demoted and thus, earns lesser. To worsen things, he now hallucinates too. He believes he is living in an earlier time of his life. For instance, he talks to his dead brother, Ben. This disturbs his friend, Charley, as well. Further, in the play, we learn how this disturbs his sons as well. They learn about the increase in car accidents from their mother.

Thus, the sons decide to stay closer to their parents. Moreover, they think of starting a family business together. Biff decides to ask his former boss for a loan for this business. This plan makes the family hopeful for the future.
Similarly, Willy also talks to his boss to change his position from a travelling salesman to a floor salesman. However, they end up in an argument when his boss declines and eventually fires Willy.

On the other hand, Biff’s boss avoids him and he realizes he won’t get help from him. The boys were supposed to meet Willy at the restaurant to celebrate the expected success, but it turns out to be bad. The boys leave Willy alone and leave with some girls. This provokes Linda and she scolds them for doing that. 

After a heavy confrontation, they express their feelings for each other emotionally. Finally, Willy decides that the insurance money can be beneficial for his family so he kills himself. At the end of the death of a salesman summary, we see Linda having troubles dealing with her husband’s death. She does not accept his death and keep waiting for him to return from5⅚ his business trip. At last, she is living in a house paid for but no one to share it with. Thus, it shows us the harsh reality of capitalism and its impact.

Death of a Salesman gives a very relevant message in today’s time. It shows us the psychological chaos of the salesman, much similar to most people today, who give in to the capitalist society and let it overpower them.

Themes

The Dangers of Modernity

Death of a Salesman fisrt performed in 1949 on the edge of the 1950s, a decade of outstanding materialism technical advances in America. Many innovations applied specifically to the home: it was in the 50s that the TV and the washing machine became common household objects. Miller expresses an fluctuations toward modern objects and the modern mindset. Although Willy Loman is a deeply flawed character, there is something compelling about his nostalgia. Modernity accounts for the agedness of Willy Loman's career - traveling salesmen are rapidly becoming out-of-date. Significantly, Willy reaches for modern objects, the car and the gas heater, to assist him in his suicide attempts.

Gender Relations

In Death of a Salesman, woman are sharply divided into two categories: Linda and other. The men display a distinct Madonna/whore( holy mother/ prostitute) complex, as they are only able to classify their nurturing and virtuous mother against the other, easier women available (the woman with whom Willy has an affair and Miss Forsythe being two examples). The men curse themselves for being attracted to the whore-like women but is still drawn to them  and, in a complex moment, Happy crying that he cannot find a woman like his mother. Women themselves are two-dimensional characters in this play. They remain firmly outside the male sphere of business, and seem to have no thoughts or desires other than those pertaining to men. Even Linda, the strongest female character, is only obsessed between her husband and her sons, selflessly subordinating herself to serve to assist them in their problems.

Madness

Madness is a dangerous theme for many artists, whose creativity can put them on the edge of what is socially acceptable. Miller, however, treats the quite ordinary subject of the nuclear family, so his interposition of the theme of madness is surprising. Madness reflects the greatest technical innovation of Death of a Salesman, its seamless hops back and forth in time. The audience or reader quickly realizes, however, that this is based on Willy's confused perspective. Willy's madness and reliability as a narrator become more and more of an issue as his hallucinations gain strength. The reader must decide for themselves how concrete of a character Ben is, for example, or even how reliable the plot and narrative structure are, when told from the perspective of someone as on the edge as Willy Loman.

Cult of Personality

One of Miller's techniques throughout the play is to familiarize certain characters by having them repeat the same key line over and over. Willy's most common line is that businessmen must be well-liked, rather than merely liked, and his business strategy is based entirely on the idea of a cult of personality. He believes that it is not what a person is able to accomplish, but who he knows and how he treats them that will get a man ahead in the world. This viewpoint is tragically undermined not only by Willy's failure, but also by that of his sons, who assumed that they could make their way in life using only their charms and good looks, rather than any more solid talents.

Nostalgia or regret

The dominant emotion throughout this play is nostalgia, flushed with regret. All of the Lomans feel that they have made mistakes or wrong choices. The technical aspects of the play feed this emotion by making seamless transitions back and forth from happier, earlier times in the play. Youth is more suited to the American dream, and Willy's business ideas do not seem as sad or as bankrupt when he has an entire lifetime ahead of him to prove their merit. Biff looks back nostalgic for a time that he was a high school athletic hero, and, more importantly, for a time when he did not know that his father was a fake and a cheat, and still idolized him.

Opportunity

Tied up intimately with the idea of the American dream is the concept of opportunity. America claims to be the land of opportunity, of social mobility. Even the poorest man should be able to move upward in life through his own hard work. Miller complicates this idea of opportunity by linking it to time, and illustrating that new opportunity does not occur over and over again. Bernard has made the most of his opportunities; by studying hard in school, he has risen through the ranks of his profession and is now preparing to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. Biff, on the other hand, while technically given the same opportunities as Bernard, has ruined his prospects by a decision that he made at the age of eighteen. There seems to be no going back for Biff, after he made the fatal decision not to finish high school.

Nature versus Man-Made Environment

Although Willy Loman feels driven to be a success as a salesman, he has another conflicting longing that appears throughout the play. He loves nature and the country life. In fact, traveling allows Willy to feel a sense of freedom and participation in the natural world, although he is just driving through it. When Willy is feeling at his worst, he wishes for fresh air, a garden, and the outdoor life. Yet his sense that real success comes from working in a man-made environment keeps him chained to his life in New York City and a job in which he cannot achieve personal or financial success.

Biff also loves nature and faces the same inner conflict as his father. He loves working on a farm in the West, but he has been so reconditioned by his father's ideas about the American Dream and business success that he cannot embrace what he clearly enjoys. Unable to settle into a satisfying career, Biff moves back and forth between the freedom of the country and the confinement of the city, for a time subscribing to a dream of owning a sporting goods store with Happy.

Symbols

Stocking

During his affair with The Woman, Willy gives her the intimate gift of stockings. Biff's outburst at discovering Willy with The Woman, "You gave her Mama's stockings!", fixes the stockings in Willy's mind as a symbol of his betrayal. He has let his wife down emotionally, and he is draining the family's already strained financial resources toward his ego-stroking affair.

Seeds

"I don't have a thing in the ground!" Willy complaints after both his sons leaves him in Act 2. The sons he has cultivated with his own values have grown to disappoint him, none of his financial hopes have borne fruit, and he is desperate to have some tangible result of a lifetime of work. By planting vegetable seeds, he is attempting to begin anew. But as Linda gently reminds him, the surrounding buildings don't provide enough light for a garden. Willy's attempt to plant the vegetable seeds at night further reinforces the futility of his efforts.

Flute

The flute music that drifts through the play represents the single faint link Willy has with his father and with the natural world. The elder Loman made flutes, and was apparently able to make a good living by simply traveling around the country and selling them. This anticipates Willy's career as a salesman, but also his underused talent for building things with his hands, which might have been a more fulfilling job. The flute music is the sound of the road Willy didn't take.

Diamonds

To Willy, diamonds represent noticeable wealth and, hence, both validation of one’s labor (and life) and the ability to pass material goods on to one’s offspring, two things that Willy desperately craves. Correlatively, diamonds, the discovery of which made Ben a fortune, symbolize Willy’s failure as a salesman. Despite Willy’s belief in the American Dream, a belief unwavering to the extent that he passed up the opportunity to go with Ben to Alaska, the Dream’s promise of financial security has slip away from Willy. At the end of the play, Ben encourages Willy to enter the “jungle” finally and retrieve this elusive diamond—that is, to kill himself for insurance money in order to make his life meaningful.

Conclusion

Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" remains a timeless and poignant critique of the American Dream, exploring the devastating effects of societal expectations and personal delusions. Through the tragic life of Willy Loman, Miller delves into themes of modernity, gender relations, madness, and the cult of personality, all while highlighting the stark contrast between nature and the man-made environment. The play’s rich use of literary techniques, such as allusions and symbolism, deepens the emotional impact and underscores the characters' struggles. Ultimately, "Death of a Salesman" serves as a powerful reminder of the human cost of unattainable dreams and the relentless pressures of a capitalist society. Its exploration of identity, success, and failure continues to resonate with audiences, making it a seminal work in American theater.

Below I'm sharing some videos which would be helpful in grasping the play's sense.

I hope this would be beneficent,

Thank you.