as the voice of the present"(quoted in Brater 124). His father's failure toward Willy invades the present because the moments shown in the play's present-day scenes are those in which the seeds of his abandonment bear fruit. The past which is the source of Willy's failure has begun to invade a present where Willy will, in effect, pass his father's failure and his own down to his sons. This point is made with great strength by Hap's ridiculous and pathetic speech in which he tells Biff at Willy's grave that "I'm gonna show you and everybody else that [Willy Loman] had a good dream . . . the only dream you can have--to come out number-one man" (138-39). Hap has learned nothing from his father's wasted life except to fully absorb the twisted message and hopes that misled his father. Even Biff, who is more aware that his father has made fundamentally wrong choices in his life, sums up Willy's failure as "a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them"--thereby fundamentally accepting, like Hap, the terms in which Willy expressed his own perception of his failure (132).
This is the only response that his family is capable of making to Willy's death and their loss and it is, in the most horrible irony of the play, the sign of his complete failure. Willy failed to find any of the fulfillment that is possible on many different levels in an individual
...