‘Death of a Salesman’: The Tragedy of the American Dream

A review of ‘Death of a Salesman’, by Arthur Miller; Viking Press, 1949.

We like to think that we have out-evolved our need for reassuring stories, those little myths that get us through the day. Yet even science, set in opposition to myth, depends on unprovable beliefs: that truth is worth seeking, that the world is knowable, that knowledge leads to progress. We need myths because we need meanings. We need to give form to the chaos of our lives. Life is suffering, longing, win, loss; and myth makes patterns of this disorder, with tales that tell us not what happens, but what always happens. At the level of the group, our myths binds us together.

The American Dream is one such myth. So goes the story: everyone, rich or poor, can fulfil their dreams through hard work and determination. This has been the subject of quite a few works of art, from The Pursuit of Happyness to The Great Gatsby to Of Mice and Men to Citizen Kane. But perhaps Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman provides the most interesting discussion of the idea.

The story goes like this. Willy Loman, sixty-three, has been selling all of his life. What he sells is unimportant. What matters is that he sells, and he sells well because he is ‘well-liked’. Charm, he thinks, is the key to success. But success has never come. He is tired, driving hundreds of miles for dwindling commissions, often talking to himself, and losing the thread of time. His wife, Linda, watches on in despair. She soothes him, bears his outbursts, and keeps the household stitched together despite knowing, deep down, there is no happy ending.

Willy Loman, sixty-three, has been selling all of his life. What he sells is unimportant. What matters is that he sells.

Their sons’ situation isn’t much better. Biff was once a high school football star, but something broke in him some time ago. Now, he drifts: working odd jobs, unable to believe in the dream that drives his father. Happy, the younger of the pair, is more like Willy: full of ambition, boasting of women and money he does not really have. When Biff comes home after years away, it sets off a much-needed reckoning. Willy’s illusions can no longer hold. His mind slips further into the past, and he revisits the days when the boys were young and hope was still rooted in reality. But the past is the past.

So Willy’s grip on reality loosens, and the wall dividing then and now starts to crumble. Willy talks to his long-dead brother, Ben, a man who walked into the jungle and came out rich. ‘The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it!’ cries Willy. ‘Walked into a jungle, and comes out, at the age of twenty-one, and he’s rich! The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress!’ But there is no lesson here. For all his talk of knowing just what one needs to do to ‘make it’, Willy has never made it, and has never in fact been sure of where is was going. The play rolls forward towards its foreseeable end like a slow, grinding machine. The final blow is tragic, but ordinary.

Critics tend to call Miller’s play an attack on the American Dream. It is more than that, and in any case more of a study of the Dream than an attack on it. It is about a man who cannot see beyond the narrow grounds on which he has staked his worth. He has chosen a hierarchy to climb but cannot climb it. Willy is not just defeated by capitalism: he is consumed by his own faith in it. He has spent his life selling not just goods but himself, thinking personality and charisma will bring him success. He does not understand why, after all those handshakes and smiles, the world has abandoned him. The system has changed; the old laws of loyalty have crumbled. A younger, sharper breed of salesman has replaced the Willy Lomans of the world. But Willy does not adapt. He carries on as he always has and grows resentful.

Linda is intensely loyal to him. She pleads with her sons to respect their father:

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Respect is good, but it isn’t everything. There are more practical considerations to bear in mind. Biff, heedful of that, tries to shatter his father’s illusions, to shake him out of the dream-world in which he now lives constantly. But Willy is in too deep. He cannot bear the thought of being ordinary. He clings to the belief that success is just around the corner, that one big gesture will set the world right.

The genius of the Miller lies not in his commentary on the American Dream, but in how he blurs past and present, dream and reality. Scenes flow into each other like fragments of thought, stitched together by Willy’s unravelling mind. The dialogue is natural, but layered with meaning. Small, everyday phrases are freighted with the weight of whole lives. The play is repetitive as echoes of past conversations resound with a new desperation. And though it all there is a slow, suffocating inevitability. Things, we know, just won’t end well. The tragedy is that we see it coming and Willy doesn’t, or won’t.

The genius of the Miller lies not in his commentary on the American Dream, but in how he blurs past and present.

Is Willy a tragic hero? Now there is a question. Perhaps he is too ‘small’, too ‘insignificant’. One could argue this is Miller’s point. Willy is not a king, nor a man of great stature. He is an ordinary man, one of millions, ground down by a system that promised him more than it could give. His flaw is more blind faith than hubris: belief without realism. He chugs along like an old car that we all know is about to conk out on an unremarkable side road.

As you can probably tell, reader, the play is relentlessly gloomy. There is no real comfort to take from the thing. Even its humour, found in Willy’s bluster and Happy’s womanising, is sad. The point, I suppose, is in part that not all myths are equal, and if they help up in one way they may ruin us in another. The stories Willy tells himself—about success, about worth, about manhood—do not serve him or those around him. Does he have any choice but to go on believing them? Is there any other way to be in America? That is a question Miller ponders. We all need to live for something.

Death of a Salesman not a play of sweeping romance or grand action. That might put you off. But its themes are timeless, concerned with meaning-making as such as much as with the American Dream and the capitalist project, of which Miller, who had communist sympathies, was deeply sceptical. If you have ever felt like you are taking part in a race without finish line, then Willy Loman’s story is, to some extent, yours. Hence timeless. Hence why it endures.