Eng102 Failing an American Dream

Failing an American Dream         

Xerx Aponesto

English 102

William Hammersmith

September 25, 2018

Abstract

This Research Essay will analyze the American dream theme in the play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller. It will examine the two versions of the American dream portrayed in the play. One version being a failure due to lies and fraud, and the other version being a success due to hard work. This essay will analyze four characters from the play. It will have information on Willy Loman, Biff Loman, Happy Loman, and Bernard. It will mainly focus on Willy.

Failing an American Dream

        In Arthur Miller’s tragic play, “Death of a Salesman”, he creates the life of Willy Loman before his unfortunate death. This play is set around the late 1940s in Brooklyn, New York as Willy working as a salesman trying to support his family. He lives with his wife and two grown sons. “Death of a Salesman” portrays many different themes, but the most predominant one being the idea of the American dream. The American dream commonly thought of as every United States citizen having an equal chance to success by working hard. Miller shows two different versions of the dream, one being a failure due to lies and fraud, and the other being success from hard work.

        Willy Loman’s version of the American dream is a failure due to his lies and ego. Willy has many dreams and just wants to become successful to support his wife and sons. That sounds like a respectable dream; the only problem is that Willy is fraud. According to Galia Benziman, author of “Success, Law, and the Law of Success: Reevaluating "Death of a Salesman's" Treatment of the American Dream”, a reason why Willy’s American dream was a failure is because of his egotistical personality and his delusions (p. 26). This delusional self-centeredness leads to many lies and fraud of himself. As his sons, Biff and Happy, were still in high school, he told them many lies on how successful he was in his job and how much money they were making. In reality, he was struggling to make sales and money. During this part of the play, Willy and his wife, Linda, are talking about the bills they must pay. Realizing the large amount he owes, Willy begins to panic “A hundred and twenty dollars! My God, if business don’t pick up I don’t know what I’m gonna do!” (Miller p. 25). Willy is able to lie to his sons and make himself look successful, but as soon as reality strikes him, he does not know what to do. Willy not only lies to his children, but also to his wife. In the play, it is shown that Willy cheated on Linda when it says, “You just kill me, Willy. (He suddenly grabs her and kisses her roughly.)” (Miller p. 26). While Willy is away from home for a sales trip, he meets a woman that makes him feels good and has an affair with her. Willy cannot seem to stay truthful to anyone, not even his family. That seems to be because it lies come with the territory of salesmanship. In the words of Ama Wattley, author of “Father-Son Conflict and the American Dream in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and August Wilson's "Fences", “instead of the ideals of hard work, we have salesmanship. Salesmanship implies a certain element of fraud” (p. 2). Some people like Blake Hobby, and Harold Bloom, authors of “The American Dream”, say that “one reason that Willy can no longer be a functioning salesman…is his increasing inability to psychologically [stable]” (p. 48). Although Willy was not psychologically stable, that is due to the reason of his self-centeredness convincing himself that he was better than what he really was, and he constantly lied to keep his image.

Many of Willy’s lies are not just to other people, but many of them are to himself. He deludes himself, convincing himself that his financial state is stable. Much of Willy’s delusions come from his ego causing himself to believe he is better than what he his. In the play, Willy talks about his son and says “Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such — personal attractiveness, gets lost” (Miller p. 8). Willy talks down about his son, saying he does not know what to do, but Willy is also lost and fails to see that in himself. Going into more detail, this quote also reveals Willy’s egotistical problem; he believes because his son is attractive, he should be successful, when personal attractiveness does not always lead to success. This also agrees with Lois Tyson, author of “The psychological politics of the American dream: 'Death of a Salesman' and the case for an existential dialectics” when she says that Willy believes the road to the American dream is to have a winning personality (p. 260). That clearly is not true, with Willy as a prime example. Another example of Willy believing personality can lead to success is when he asks Howard for a raise. Willy tries to make himself more appealing to Howard by talking about Howard’s father, “Howard. I never asked a favor of any man. But I was with the firm when your father used to carry you in here in his arms” (Miller p. 56). Willy tries to use the memory of Howard’s late father and when he was a baby to make himself more likable to Howard, but it does not work. It only annoys Howard and leads him to realize he does not need this exhausted, delusional man. Howard suggest having Willy’s sons help him out, but instead of telling Howard that his sons are failures due to his teachings, Willy tells Howard they are busy with something big. Once Willy realizes Howard is having none of his brown-nosing, Willy tries to tell Howard he’ll go back to his normal position, and then Howard decides to fire Willy.  Once Willy comes home, he does not tell Linda that he was fired; he tells her he wants to work in Alaska. To protect his image to Linda, he does not tell her he got fired from their family’s sole source of income. Willy convinces himself that that looking good and being liked is the only way to succeed in his American dream, but it only has backfired and caused him to even get fired from his only job.  

Willy’s failing dreams leave an affect that causes his sons to fail in their dreams as well. Both Biff and Happy grew up to amount to nothing so far in their lives. They are both in their thirties living with their parents. Happy, the younger brother of the two, grew up to be like Willy. Happy, like his father, grew up to have the same ego that made them both believe they can easily become wealthy in life. Happy has the ambition to succeed the American dream, but the problem is that it is misdirected. Throughout the play, Happy is portrayed as a man who blindly pursues woman. Happy looks more like Willy when he says “I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream… He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him” (Miller p. 104). Happy says that Willy had the right dreams, and the right way of pursuing them, and he will take them to prove it. This makes Happy just as delusional as Willy; at this point on, Happy should have realized that his father’s death was his own doing, yet instead he believes the dreams that led to his father’s death was the right way of aspiring success. Biff, the older brother, is different from Happy and Willy when it comes to ambition. Biff does not have much goals in life, and he cannot keep a job. This is because of Willy’s doing. The only dream Biff had as a child, was to play football. In his high school years, Biff was a football star. He had a scholarship to college for football, but unfortunately lost because he flunked math. Maybe the reason he flunked math was because Willy did not enforce any academics on his sons. There was a solution; Biff would just go to summer school to earn his math credit, but around that time, he caught his father cheating on his mother. That caused Biff to go into a state of disbelief and ended up not taking that summer course. Once again, Willy leaves a bad effect on his children. On the other hand, Biff is similar to Willy when it comes to their ego’s. Willy taught Biff that being well-liked is more important than hard work. Willy explains to Biff “the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want” (Miller p. 21), this leads to Biff believing that if he is liked, he will succeed.

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