Customer Reviews

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (Barron's Book Notes)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An old, decaying traveling salesman, Willy Loman, has warped reality so incredibly in his mind that his family must present him with nothing but lies to keep him from utter insanity and suicide. He has two sons, Happy and Biff, who have of course been seriously deprived of reality themselves. Both of them know that their lives are not as they should be, and that they are living a lie, but Happy goes along with it. Biff wants to escape from his family, but Willy's need for control opposes Biff's desire for truth. Willy's wife Linda has a concept of reality, but represses it to keep Willy from killing himself. A book about misery should have some kind of hope within it, just as a dark cloud must have a silver lining. Death of a Salesman was great in relating human suffering and the nightmare that can arise from far too much lying, but it exaggerated the negative side of life, and for that reason it did not satisfy me as much as it could have.

I thought that I wasn't going to like reading a story in play form. I have always stayed away from it, but I'm glad I took the chance with a play and with Death of a Salesman. This book was so emotional and really made me feel like I was in the story. My heart felt for Biff when he discovered his father's secret. It was a wonderful story of secrets and forgiveness. Willy just wanted to start new, the garden symbolizing this in the story. It was beautifully written and I enjoyed it very much.

Arthur Miller's _Death of a Salesman_ is classic Americana. It should be read by anyone wanting insight into the citizen-soul. This has always been the raw material of Arthur Miller's art. And it's more than that. _Death of a Salesman_ is an angle on the American Dream from a vantage of mistaken values. Willy Lohman, it seems, was a natural salesman. He could take a piece of truth and spin it into illusion. He could craft a dream with skill and genius and then cement the whole with stern conviction. To the salesman truth does not matter much anyway, it is all an illusion. Willy knows that people WANT to believe. So he tells them. But it rings hollowly within his own family after time. And that's the tragedy of Willy's life. He took the salesman home. You see, Willy knew the truth about himself, but kept it concealed. It only occassionally bared itself to his wife, Linda. This drama of Miller's is not about the death of Willy Lohman, but about the death of that "salesman" within him, that mirage of courage and conceit which sought to camouflage the real man even to his own sons. And that death should have occurred some years earlier when young Biff showed up at Willy's Boston hotel room and shattered his boyhood illusion of the father-hero. Willy, the dreamer of great things, was defeated by his own life. He sought the rainbow's end. It was the one delusion of his own existence, idealized by the chimera of his dead brother Ben who "walked into the jungle at 17 and came out at 21--rich." The secret which eluded Willy was not to be found in that sad disillusionment, nor in the loss of his eldest son's pride, nor even in the final undeniable failure of his own acomplishment. It lay in the simple fact, unbeknownst to Willy, that he was a man loved for who he was, not for who he wanted to be.

The stark reality is haunting. I have a
relative who fits poor Willy's description.
Business can be disasterous on those who don't
succeed. It is really a tragedy that I
recommend to fully pity the loser's point of view.

Enter the cult of the salesman's society. A salesman needs to dream and lives in a completely fake smiling world when meeting his customers. Unluckily this alienation, because to smile on command is an alienation, can invade the salesman's private life and then life becomes a lie, becomes a solitude, becomes hell and blazes. Enter the cult of the urban sprawl. You may have had a nice house in the middle of some open space, but the city grows out and grows up and your house is soon surrounded by skyscrapers and sprawl and you live in a totally dehumanized and cold environment in which sunshine has become a vague recollection fading away with time. Enter the cult of the oedipian tragedy. The father is the dominating boss of the family, the bread winner, the meaning giver, the future designer and definer. The sons are zealots of the father and have to follow him in his tracks, or at least in what they think his tracks are, and trying to preserve his self-esteem and illusions by manipulating his ego as if it were a fragile fresh egg of some endangered bird species. One will accept the model and the other will find out all this is a lie, a fake, an illusion, but this latter will sink in some kind of maniacal depression that will leads him from one failure to another, from one intentional failing procedure to another, just to prove to himself and the world his father is great and he is nothing. And this will go till he finds the courage to look out and step away, once and for all, and become himself, finally free of the lie. Or, because there is always an alternative, till the father decides to step out of life, of his family's life, which will liberate the horizon and the perspective, though it will reveal marvellously how the mother had locked the father into that lie by killing his dreaming power and his enterprising spirit to having a house built, paying for the mortgage, footing the insurance bill and a few others like the refrigerator's, the car's and the washing machine's, etc. The mother (and here the play is extremely misogynistic) is the direct representative of the consumer's society that enslaves us to short-term needs and evacuates all imagination from this life, except when we manage to blow our tops and fly up into the sky of derangement. Enter the cult of private initiative seen as the only excape from this dictatorial ideology. There is always some wild country where you can go and become rich overnight. There is always some profession that can only be reached through hard work and heavy studying and in which only knowledge, competence and performance will count. There is always an outer and an inner frontier that the happy hardworking few will be able to cross and then to come back from enriched and empowered with a vision and a future. But woe to those who do not have that vision, who do not have that personal force, who do not have this special competence, who do not have this particular knowledge that gives them the opportunity to become the leaders of the world, their local world or the global world, or any stage in between these two extremes. What comes out of this play is that those who fail in this world only get what they deserve because they are failing themselves and the world by telling tall tales, by spreading lies, by not seeing that illusions are poisonous to the human mind. And yet how hard it is to be imaginative, competent, self-conscious and self-righteous, compassionate and humane, realistic and strong enough to know how to lie in order to save not one's public image but the truth. And by the way what is the truth in a society that considers the virtuality of an ever-evading potential to be more real than the material reality of an aim killed in our very act of reaching it ?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne