The American Century: Literature since 1945 681the dream clings to the place,” we are told, “a dream rising out of reality.” This is also
a tale of domestic realism in which Miller uses elements of expressionism and
symbolism to transmute the story into a tragedy. The dialogue is realistic vernacular,
the idiom of a society that pursues images, illusion rather than fact, tawdry dreams
rather than terrible reality. But the “exploded house” in cross-section that appears in
Act One and supplies the setting for most of the play prepares us for a revelatory
intimacy. We, the audience, are drawn into the family combustion, the crisis in the
Loman household. We are drawn into the collapsing consciousness of Willy, in
particular, into the past as an explanation of the present. And with the help of a rich
tapestry of symbols (the symbols of success and successful father figures that haunt
Willy, for instance), we are invited to see this drama as the tragic crisis of a society as
well as one of one unremarkable but representative man.
Good American that he is, Willy believes that success is his birthright. “And that’s
the wonder, the wonder of this country,” he declares, “that a man can end with
diamonds here on the basis of being liked.” He can never give up this belief, or its
corollary that, in the land of opportunity that is America, failure can only be the
fault of the individual. Despite his glimmering, growing sense of separation from
the success ethic, he still judges himself in its terms. As Miller himself has put it,
Willy is “constantly haunted by the hollowness of all he had placed his faith in”
but nevertheless, at the end, he stakes “his very life on the ultimate assertion” of that
faith – not least because, in terms of belief, he has nowhere else to go. His wife Linda
watches helplessly as he tears himself apart. All she can do is care and ask others to
care: “attention,” she declares, “attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
His son, Happy, can only surrender to the same ethic. “He had a good dream,” he
says of his father at the end. “It’s the only dream you can have – to come out
number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.”
Willy’s other son, Biff, is different. Biff senses that he does not want what the world
calls success. But, unfortunately, he cannot articulate, or properly know, what he
does want. “I don’t know – what I’m supposed to want,” he confesses. All he can say
to Willy, in a desperate declaration of personal love and social resistance, is “Pop! I’m
a dime a dozen, and so are you!” “Pop, I’m nothing,” he then adds, “I’m just what
I am, that’s all.” Listening to Biff, Willy learns the value of love. Tragically, and typi-
cally, however, he then translates love into the only values he knows, the values of a
salesman. What he gives Biff in return is the gift of himself, or rather his worth as an
economic unit, a social commodity. Willy kills himself so that his family can have the
insurance money and Biff, he hopes, can get a new start in life. “He had the wrong
dreams. All, all, wrong,” Biff observes of his father, as he stands beside his graveside.
The tragedy of Willy Loman was that, and that he was tormentingly, tremulously
aware of that. And, Miller makes it clear, it is the tragedy of a society as well.
The challenge that Willy Loman never quite meets, to know and name himself, is
also the challenge that confronts John Proctor, the central character in The Crucible
(1953), and Eddie Carbone, the protagonist in A View from the Bridge (1955; revised
1956). As in Death of a Salesman, too, that challenge is a personal one rooted in a
social landscape: people in Miller’s plays, and especially the earlier ones, areGGray_c05.indd 681ray_c 05 .indd 681 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM