Arthur Miller's 1949 award-winning play Death of a Salesman is a tale of failure brought about by the worship of the wrong kind of success. The protagonist, Willy Loman, is the salesman of the title, and his fatal flaw is his worship of the materialistic values of American society; the hunger for success that he never achieves rules his life so completely that he is blind to the realities of his life. The major theme of the play is the Loman family's inability to differentiate between reality and illusion, especially Willy.
Willy's failure in the business world has caused him to live a life of deceit because he does not want his two sons or wife to know how unsuccessful he really is. He has worked hard all his life and believes he has nothing to show for it, not just material success, but also respect and love. His wife Linda is the one exception. Willy also cannot admit his failure to himself, and so he practices self-deceit. During the course of the play, Willy is more and more possessed by illusions and hallucinations, so much so that it almost seems like the beginning of dementia, or at least a nervous breakdown. Even after he loses his job, he cannot admit that his idealization of the success promised by the American dream is wrong. He forces his dream on his sons, Biff and Happy, especially Biff. Willy believes he can overcome the forces leveled against him by the success of Biff. But Biff has come to see that the promise of the American Dream is false. He pleads with his father, ôWill you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?ö (101). Willy, however, is incapable of destroying his dream, and so his dream eventually destroys him.
The geographical setting of the play is a middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, mostly the Loman's house and yard, and in places in New York and Boson traveled to by Willy.
But the real setting is in WillyÆs mind. The play is structured into three parts: ...