Death of a salesman

Hi, everyone! Today I will be writing about my thoughts on Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”.

First of all, while I was reading “Death of a salesman” I could not stop thinking about the movie called “The pursuit of happiness”. Although they have different storylines, both of them evoke the idea of the American dream as the meaning of happiness. For Willy, the point of living is working. Even though he is old he doesn’t want to give up and become obsolete. He works and works because he has to earn money so he can provide the bread to his family and pay the debts they have.

As we analyzed in class, there is this association of happiness with having a ‘happy’ family. But what is a happy family? An ideal family is the one with 2 parents, with at least a son and of course a dog (I am not a fan of cats, so...) this play also criticized the view of family as an institution that assures happiness. The incapacity of Willy to see that having his family living all under the same roof didn’t make things better it’s a clear representation of families standing together just for the status.

Willy believes that by giving all to work he is being the best man. But, obviously, he is not.  He is the only one that believes he is doing an excellent job. However his sons have already realized he is being consumed by this dream. Nevertheless, Linda, is always supporting him, defending him, and asking her sons to be comprehensive with their father.

Linda knows why he is like this. He is blinded by this dream, and she understands that he cannot do it alone. I think that Linda plays a very important role in this play. She is the main support for Willy. She doesn’t get mad at him even when he is being harsh. Her sons also told her that Willy was always sweeping the floor with her, but she argues that his husband has always being respectful with her. I can see some traces of chauvinism here, not only from Willy’s part, but also from Linda. From the beginning till the end of this play she is always pleasing her husband, preparing him food, the clothes, and being by his side when Biff would talk behind his back.

But I know she is worried about Willy. After all, he has tried to kill himself.  And I appreciate that she is worried. Sometimes we are extremely enclosed in the idea that a woman serving a man is being controlled by the man.  But as I read the play, I was thinking all the time that Linda was not being forced to stay by his side. I think she really meant it

We can see that Willy is tired of going after something unreachable. He has tried all his life to achieve a status, but he hasn’t been able to do so. He is so sick of it, he wants to die. However I feel like he also wants to survive at some points. It feels like he has some unsolved issues with his sons. As we know, his sons used to love him, adore him because he was like superman for them when they were little kids.

What happened? Well, they grew up. And I think that, in a way, this has happened to a lot of us. When we get older we realize things we don’t want to. We start developing our own way of thinking and we face reality, we see that our super heroes when we were young are not heroes-like anymore. Not because we don’t love them anymore, but because the idealized image we had about them starts to fade.  It can happen the other way round as well. As we get older, we start thinking as adults and as our parents could have thought. We can understand them better. We can see why they did certain things. For example, we understand that our parents weren’t home, not because they didn’t want to spend time with us, but because they wanted us to have better lives.  

Here I would like to refer to Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”. Although we might not be in the same situation as the speaker in this poem, we all had to face difficult ‘phases’ in our life. Parts of life that we didn’t like, and we want to forget, because they hurt us. As we became adults we start understanding what we didn’t care as children. We see life with new’ eyes. And we decide we are going to live life the way we want, based on the beliefs we form as adults. However, we are always going back to what our parents have told us while growing. It is not that we don’t have our own perspective on life, but I believe that we want to keep certain aspects of our parents beliefs as a way of remembering what they are, or were. I feel that this happened to the speaker in “Daddy” who discovers her father was not a good person to everyone; however she marries a man that was similar to him.

As final thoughts I would like to say that “Death of a salesman” made me reflect on what happiness and success means not only for me, but also for us as a society. Sometimes think that society considers irrelevant or banal things as indicators of success, but I also consider that the definition of success is not the same for everybody.

I would like to know your opinion; do we need to change society’s perception of success? Leave a comment below!