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Death of a Salesman summary

Name: Death of a Salesman
Rating: 4.3 (22 reviews)
Author: Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

A Play About the Success and Disappointments of the American Dream

4.3 (22 ratings)

17 mins

Topics

US History Capitalism & The Free Market Socialism & Capitalist Critique Literature Culture

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Death of a Salesman
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What’s in it for me? A modern classic about the illusion of the American Dream.

Death of a Salesman is not a funny play. It’s not an action-packed, adrenaline-inducing romp. There aren’t any magnificent sets, props, or visuals. In its two short acts, the most exotic setting is a hotel room in Boston.

So why did this play win the Pulitzer Prize, sell eleven million copies, and spawn ten film adaptations?

Arthur Miller’s most enduring work accomplished these things precisely because of how ordinary it is. The Loman family isn’t fabulously wealthy or talented – they’re normal people, with normal flaws and weaknesses, living in a normal house. This heightens the tragedy of the play, and therefore its power to move us. We’re able to relate to these characters, and so we can understand how modern American culture poisons the mind of Willy Loman and breaks the hearts of his family.

To say Death of a Salesman honors ordinary people and places isn’t to say that it’s boring or pedestrian. As the play progresses, we drift through dreamlike scenes where past and present, truth and lies, and fantasy and reality all merge – mirroring the progressive disorientation of Willy’s mind. The illusions that he constructs to cling onto his twisted notions of the American Dream begin to unravel, and the psychological foundations of his life transform into quicksand. Willy has a choice: accept the reality of his life, or plunge deeper into delusion.

Just how that choice unfolds will be revealed in the course of this Blink. Along the way, we’ll also sketch out the main narrative of the play while explaining its significant themes and talking points.

Part 1: “I’m tired to the death”

Willy Loman, a 63-year-old traveling salesman, arrives home from a business trip exhausted and disheveled. His wife, Linda, is clearly concerned. Willy admits that he kept falling into a daze while driving, almost careening into an embankment. Linda reminds him of when he accidentally drove off a bridge and into a river.

From the outset, Willy’s psychological state is constantly called into question. He’s agitated, unreliable, and often contradicts himself. His two adult sons, Biff and Happy, are visiting. That morning, Willy berated Biff for his laziness and inability to hold down a steady job. Now, he asserts that Biff isn’t lazy in the slightest.

Happy is more successful than Biff, but is distressed that his father has begun talking to himself. Mostly, Willy has conversations with an imaginary Biff, as if his son were actually in the room with him. They reveal Willy’s anger and disappointment in how Biff has chosen to live his life, flitting between menial jobs and drifting from place to place. There’s a chasm between Biff’s adulthood and the values Willy tried to instill in him as a child.

These values are also the ones that Willy lives by. In fact, they obsessively dominate his life, and lie at the very heart of Miller’s play. The salesman believes in a twisted version of the American Dream, where ambition, confidence, and being “well liked” will lead to fabulous success and material wealth.

With a modest house and a modest car, we can clearly see that Willy hasn’t achieved the fame and fortune that his interpretation of the American Dream promised. What’s more, we already see his unsteady mental state, and his willingness to reinterpret reality to suit the moment.

This tension between Willy’s unrealistic aspirations and his actual existence is the driving force behind the entire play – and will lead us to its tragic ending.

Part 2: “I’ll knock ’em dead next week”

We’re now thrust into the first of Willy’s many daydreams, flashbacks, and imaginary escapes. This is a common motif that the play uses. It’s fluid in how it deals with time, and recreates Willy’s fantasies and hallucinations on stage just like it does with the “real” scenes. This helps highlight the hazy, dreamlike consciousness of Willy – we begin to question what’s real, and what’s not.

In this flashback, Biff and Happy are children again, helping to wash their father’s car. Even here, Willy’s negative qualities shine through plain as day. Happy desperately seeks his father’s attention, but Willy favors Biff – and even laughs away his favorite son’s theft of a football. He’s also deeply jealous of the success of his neighbor Charley. Remember, for Willy, success is everything. He mutters to himself that he’ll soon start an even larger company than his neighbor, because he’s more “well liked.” Bigger is better, the approval of others is paramount, and being a self-made man is everything. This is Willy Loman’s American Dream.

Reality starts to seep into Willy’s flashback. We’re half in the present, half in the past. While still in a trance-like state, he tells Linda that he made $1,200 on his most recent business trip. Linda questions him, though, and he quickly buckles. He actually only made $70, which barely covers the family’s bills. But he’s adamant that he would’ve broken sales records if three stores hadn’t been closed for an inventory check! He’ll “knock ‘em dead” next week, he proclaims.

Abruptly, we’re pulled into a daydream. Willy is sitting in a Boston hotel room with his mistress, watching her try on new stockings he’s gifted her. All of a sudden, we’re back in the present day, in the Loman household. Willy sees Linda mending a pair of stockings – just like the ones he gave to his mistress. In a confused mixture of anger, guilt, and humiliation (after all, mending stockings provides embarrassing evidence that Willy hasn’t achieved his American Dream), he starts shouting at his wife.

Quick as a flash, we’re inside Willy’s hallucinations again – he’s being haunted by the ghosts of his past. This time, it’s his brother Ben, who achieved everything Willy couldn’t by venturing out and finding his fortune in an African diamond mind at the age of just 21. Ben is a cool, calm, and confident figure – the complete opposite of the erratic Willy. He tells Willy how their father traveled to Alaska to sell flutes during the gold rush.

We realize that Willy doesn’t just live under the oppressive weight of his own ambition and fantasy; he also lives in the shadow of his father and brother who achieved their masculine, entrepreneurial American Dreams.

Part 3: “I don’t want you to represent us”

The final scene of the first act is critical. We find Willy shouting on his front lawn, and his deranged cries wake Linda and Biff. Linda reveals to Biff that Willy lost his guaranteed salary recently – he now works only on commission. What’s more, Willy borrows $50 per week from Charley, the successful neighbor he is poisonously jealous of, and tells Linda that it’s his salary. But she knows better.

She also knows the truth about Willy’s road “accidents” – they’re actually suicide attempts. She even found a rubber hose in the garage from when he attempted to hang himself.

Biff tries to help Willy out of his confused state, but Willy grows angrier and declares he’s a “big-shot” salesman. Happy tells Willy that he and Biff are thinking of going into business together, and that Biff plans to ask an old employer for a loan. The thought of his two sons fulfilling the American Dream and becoming successful businessmen brightens Willy up, and the family goes to bed. Before they fall asleep, Linda pressures Willy to ask his boss, Howard, for a nontraveling sales job.

When Willy arrives at his office the next morning, however, everything goes wrong. He cuts a fawning and subservient figure, desperately trying to impress his boss who has no patience for him. When Willy asks for a nontraveling job, Howard says there aren’t any vacancies.

Despairing, Willy explains his family’s financial situation in painful detail, practically begging Howard to change his mind. But the boss is unmoved by Willy’s plight, and then fires him on the spot after he begins frantically shouting. Howard tells Willy that he doesn’t want him to “represent us.”

After the false dawn of Happy and Biff’s business venture, which seemed to perk Willy up, things are now quickly unraveling for the salesman.

Part 4: “I don’t want your goddam job”

Willy is still physically in Howard’s office, but his anguished mind has transported him to other places and times. After another “visit” from Ben’s ghost, where the successful younger brother asks Willy to manage a logging mill he has purchased, we flow into a memory involving Biff, Happy, and their childhood friend Bernard. It’s clear that both Happy and Bernard look up to Biff – they even argue over who should be allowed to carry Biff’s football helmet.

Back in the Loman household, an adult Bernard stops by. He is a successful and humble lawyer – he’s arguing a case in the Supreme Court later, but doesn’t mention it. Willy, full of pomp and grandeur, boasts to Bernard that Biff is working on a big business deal in town. Almost breaking down, Willy asks Bernard why Biff’s life went so terribly wrong. Bernard explains that Biff was never the same after he visited Willy in Boston. When he asks Willy what happened there, Willy flies into a rage and deflects the question.

Next, Willy visits his successful neighbor, Charley, to collect his weekly loan. After learning that Willy unsuccessfully asked his boss for a nontraveling job, Charley reminds Willy that he’d offered him this type of job and Willy refused! Blinded by pride and jealousy, Willy again refuses Charley’s offer, breaks down, and admits that his boss fired him today. He confesses that he always thought the key to success was being “well liked,” and Charley asks who liked J. P. Morgan?! Willy leaves the office in tears.

In the next scene, we find Biff and Happy in a restaurant. Biff’s in shock – he just waited six hours to see his old boss and ask about a loan for his and Happy’s business idea. When they finally met, though, his old boss didn’t even remember Biff. Somehow, Willy’s lies, fantasies, and exaggerations about Biff had led his son to believe that he’d been a successful salesman for his old employer. But, in reality, Biff had just been a lowly shipping clerk. He left the meeting without a penny.

Willy arrives at the restaurant, shouting that he has just been fired. He puts pressure on his sons, telling them he needs some good news for Linda. Despite this, Biff tries to tell his father the truth about the loan. Willy flies into a delirious rage, ranting about how Biff failed math as a child. Happy and Biff leave Willy in the restaurant.

Suddenly, we’re again inside Willy’s daydream-flashbacks – in the Boston hotel room with Willy and his mistress. There’s a knock on the door, and it’s Biff. Willy tries to spin a feeble web of lies about how the woman is a customer staying in the hotel room next to his, but Biff sees through the facade and sits crying on his suitcase. Now we know what changed Biff from a popular, sporty, promising child into an aimless drifter.

Part 5: “A dime a dozen”

We’re now at the climax of the play, and it’s all high drama from here on out.

When Biff and Happy return to the Loman home, their mother flies into a rage at them for abandoning their sick father in a restaurant. How could they be so callous, so cruel? This is typical of Linda throughout the play: she is a deep reservoir of patience, and loves her husband unconditionally. It’s this unconditional love that makes Willy’s fantasies and delusions so tragic – his family would love him no matter how unsuccessful he is, but he simply can’t accept the reality of his life and his failure to live up to the American Dream.

Outside in the garden, Willy is hallucinating again. He’s having an imaginary conversation with his brother, Ben. He’s talking excitedly about a guaranteed $20,000 business deal. Ben is more skeptical, and says that Biff would hate him for it.

At this moment, we’re jerked back to reality. Biff is confronting Willy in the garden, and they have a fierce argument. Biff says he’s leaving and won’t speak to his father again; Willy asserts that Biff is failing in life, and is blaming those failures on him. Biff snaps, and admits that he can’t hold down a steady job because he’s a compulsive thief – when he disappeared for three months, he was actually in prison for stealing a suit. Biff blames his father for indoctrinating him with ideas of self-importance and success, which has made it impossible for him to take orders.

Willy is still trying to get his family to prop up his house of cards. But when his sons tell him again – this time in front of Linda – that their business loan won’t materialize, the fabrication collapses. Biff tries to get Willy to accept how normal and everyday their lives are, how the Lomans aren’t meant for great things, how they’re “a dime a dozen.” But it’s no use reasoning with Willy, and the argument is left unresolved.

That night, half-asleep, they hear Willy’s car roar into life and speed away. He’s off to secure the $20,000 business deal he was discussing with Ben’s ghost. Of course, it’s not really a “deal.” Willy is committing suicide, once and for all, so that his family can collect his life insurance premium.

In the end, Willy Loman, searching for the American Dream, achieved nothing in life but the death of a salesman.

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What is Death of a Salesman about?

Death of a Salesman (1949) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest plays. A poignant critique of the promises and pitfalls of capitalism and the American Dream, it follows the salesman Willy Loman, his increasingly tense relationships with his family and colleagues, and his tragic, hallucinatory descent into fantasy and madness.

Who should read Death of a Salesman?

Budding playwrights and theater enthusiasts
People curious about the dangers of unbridled capitalism
Anyone interested in modern drama

About the Author

Arthur Miller was an American playwright who had an enormous influence on postwar drama through his plays Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge. He was deeply critical of the cutthroat ambition and greedy consumerism which he saw developing in modern America, and at the height of Cold War paranoia was forced to testify before the US government’s anti-communist committee.

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