What to do when there's nothing left for you

Life is a series of events; we adapt ourselves to the different scenarios, the different people, and different situations. We grow up and as we grow we learn, we find our own way in life, we decide what we want and what we don’t want, and every decision we make has its consequences.

Death of a Salesman is a play about a middle class family whose characters are more complex than what we can see at the beginning, we get to see the last days of William Loman, and we get to know the members of his family and the shadows that each one of them has, as a short description of each of them I would say that William is a depressed man beaten by the world, frustrated of the life he made, frustrated because all that he dreamed of never came true, and at this point he is tired of living. Linda is the woman who’s always been there for his husband, the perfect housewife that can’t stand the weight of his husband losing himself, on her shoulders, but she tries every day until the moment of his suicide. Biff, at first I thought he was a complete failure, and although he is, in a way, he ended up being the one I think has the best values, he respects his mother even though she doesn’t treats him well, and blames him all the time for the state of his father, he faces his brother Happy when he realizes that he could do something for his father, economically but he doesn’t, and he forgives his father for what he did to his mother and humiliates himself in one of the last scenes, for love. Happy is the boy who was always in the shadow of his brother, he became more successful than his brother and he doesn’t care about his father at all, I think that’s because his father always ignored him while he was a kid and kept on ignoring his success when he grew up.

William, an old man in an ever changing world, an old man who can’t find his place in the world he’s living in, and worst, he can’t find happiness in the family he built. We slowly discover through the play, Death of a Salesman, who William is, what his dreams were, his frustrations, his mistakes, etc.

Unlike what William would have wanted he’s not a well liked character for the readers, but I think that it’s easy to understand why he behaves the way he does. His memories always bring back the moments in which he made the worst decisions, the moments that remind him how different life would have been if he had made other decisions. The realization of all this sunk him in depressing feelings that took him into this irreversible state, death.

The past is highly important for William, because in the past his life was a successful life and he is so attached to keep his life as close as it was in the past, except that everyone and everything around him changed, we see this even in the smallest details of the dialogues in the play, for example the following dialogue:

LINDA (trying to bring him out of it): Willy, dear, I got a new kind of American-type cheese today. It’s whipped.

WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?

LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change...

WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?

LINDA (with a covering laugh): I thought it would be a surprise.

WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?

LINDA (with infinite patience): They’re all open, dear.

WILLY: The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.

There we not only see that he doesn’t like change, but also we see that he misses the past in which he didn’t felt boxed by the buildings around his house, he misses the times when the sun shone over his house. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that is not going as he expected.

The title of the play says it all and spoils too, William is dead before he kills himself, his dreams are buried, at some moments it seems to be a chance to keep on dreaming but everything goes from bad to worse, the job he thought was the most beautiful job in the world has betrayed him, he can’t sell anymore, people don’t like him anymore, nobody knows him anymore, and he can’t even bring money home, he’s not receiving an appropriate payment and he has to borrow money from his friend Charlie all the time, as I said before William was dead before he killed himself. The final decision was inevitable, his last day was a disaster, he got fired, he humiliated himself not to get fired, his son disappointed him again, and he remembered when he cheated on his wife. 

The Woman alike the other characters that came from the past, tormented him. She took him back to the moment he failed his son, to the moment he destroyed the life of Biff and although he never admits it, he knows he’s guilty of the failure his son became. 

Suicide presents itself in the form of characters inviting him to different moments that will take him to death, and he attempted many times to commit it. The same happens in the poem of Anne Sexton, Wanting to Die

…and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison

Death came to William delicately always as a memory, always kind at the beginning but with the intention to open old wounds until William had no more chance than listen to the voices and follow them. In the poem Anne also talks about many attempts to commit suicide, but what did William had left if there was not even a William anymore? Being a Salesman was all he was and in the world he lived in, he couldn’t be himself anymore, there was no room for an old salesman, he was a dreamer with no more dreams. Not even his death gave him back some honor, Linda couldn’t believe that only a few people showed up for his funeral, and if William could have witness his own funeral, it would have break him even more.

Going back to the poem Anne Sexton writes:

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

During the play Linda reveals that William has a set of options with which he could kill himself, tools, but can we say he really knew why he wanted to be death? I think William followed the voices, the special language suicide used with him, the memories. But until the very end of the play he was amazed by life, the fact that Biff cried to him was a happy event for William and then, he committed suicide?  I think each reader would have his explanation to William’s decision, in my opinion  it was an unconscious decision,  I think death seduced him in so many ways that he could no longer differentiate reality from fantasy and in his lost mind he followed the wrong path.

The play has many other points to analyze but I chose to focus on death because in this play it does not only mean physical death, but also the death of dreams and the death of hope.

 Every day we make decisions that will shape ourselves and shape our and other’s future, and with each big decision there is one path that we choose to take and another path that we choose to set aside, there will always be a part of past that might come back and shove our bad decisions in our face, let’s not allow those ghosts from the past lead us to death.