Personality Analysis Of Willy Loman From Death Of A Salesman

The work disembowels everything that surrounds the individual: his own identity, his family environment, and his professional career. Arthur Miller, the author, chooses a man on the verge of retirement to build his representation of failure. The protagonist is one of many men: married, with two children, a mortgage, and some hobbies truncated by the absorbing nature of his work. Miller takes that kind of cliché and shows his shadows, what torments him most and how he manages in a world that is about to throw him away.

Because Willy Loman, the main character, is a salesman in his prime. A better past is continually presented to him, torturing him and making the typical hateful comparisons. Loman is a character who resorts to self-deception to survive, to move forward. But this system is not sustainable and reality ends up imposing itself. Loman has grown old, no company wants him anymore and his contacts are of no use to him.

Miller was singled out for his criticism of a system that discards individuals once it has squeezed the life out of them.

Get quality help now

Prof. Finch

Verified writer

Proficient in: Free Essays

4.7 (346)

“ This writer never make an mistake for me always deliver long before due date. Am telling you man this writer is absolutely the best. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

It is hard to see that this story is far from being just fiction. Many real cases have gone through the same obstacles that Loman encounters, obstacles that are renewed with each generation and that make history repeat itself continuously. The capitalist world has no human qualms. Miller was taken for red simply because he represents a reality, despite insisting on the selflessness and impartiality of his criticism, perhaps to cover his own back.

The events of the play are interpreted in the light of this defensive failure, which plunges the protagonist into a specific depressive reaction. In 1917, S. Freud considered that the reaction to the loss of a true or imaginary object for the topic was depression, and, undoubtedly, Willy Loman faces, within the period during which the action takes place, different and significant losses: on the one hand, loss of his abilities, his work performance, his salary, and eventually, of his job. we can understand that, during this case, the work was acting because of the object of the narcissistic activity, that is, the thing that permits us to hold out an activity that gives narcissistic satisfaction. Losing his job, besides drastically diminishing Willy's opportunity to feel valuable and important, means the loss of identity and a life project, of his aspirations seen because of the only means of gratification of demanding narcissistic needs.

The Depression of the 1930s gave the impression to break the guarantees America had made to its citizens. The securities market crash of 1929, it had been assumed, ended a specific version of history: optimistic, confident. The dream faded. And yet, not so. Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a buying deal on the national psyche, aren't so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future isn't a matter of choice. Death of a Salesman isn't set during Depression but it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman, who stands baffled by his failure. Certainly in memory, he returns to its periodically as if personal and national fate were somehow intertwined, while in spirit, in line with Miller, he also reaches back to the more expansive and confident, if empty, 1920s, when, in line with a president of The United States, the business of America was business. And since he inhabits ''the greatest country within the world,'' a world of imperialism, where can the fault lie but in himself. If personal meaning, during this cheerleader society, lies in success, then a failure must threaten identity itself. No wonder Willy shouts out his name.

To the protagonist of Death of a Salesman, the dream is the ability to become prosperous by mere charisma. Willy believes that a charming personality, and not necessarily diligence and innovation, is the key to success. Time and again, he wants to create sure his boys are well-liked and popular. as an example, when his son Biff confesses to creating fun of his math teacher’s lisp, Willy is more concerned with how Biff’s classmates react than with the morality of Biff's action:

BIFF: I Crossed my eyes and talked with a lisp.​​

WILLY [laughing]: You did? Do the kids like it?

BIFF: They nearly died laughing!

Of course, Willy's version of the dream never pans out: Despite his son's popularity in high school, Biff grows up to be a drifter and a ranch hand. Willy's career falters as his sales ability flat-lines. When he tries to use “personality” to ask his boss for a raise, he gets fired instead. Willy is extremely much concerned with being somebody and paying off his mortgage, which in themselves aren't necessarily bad goals. His hamartia is that he fails to acknowledge the love and devotion that surround him and elevates the goals prescribed by society specifically else.

To an unusual degree, Death of a Salesman interweaves past and present actions. Willy Loman repeatedly revisits old memories, sometimes even conflating them with the current moment. But these memories don't seem to be the sentimental, slightly melancholy daydreams of a contented man. Instead, they're the dark clues to Willy’s present state of mental and emotional disrepair. Miller uses the extended flashbacks to indicate both that Willy longs to know himself, and also that his efforts to try and do so are doomed.

Willy revisits the past not in an attempt to sink into happy memories, but in an attempt to investigate himself and understand where his life went wrong. His flashbacks are hardly comforting flights into idealized leisure pursuits. Rather, they're harrowing journeys that get to the guts of his dysfunction. Each of those memories lays bare one of Willy’s shortcomings: his failure to instill strong morals in his sons, his guilt over his adultery, his inability to work out Biff objectively, and his unequal love for Biff and Happy, respectively. If Willy’s dips into the past were purely escapist, he would fixate on the happy moments in his life. Instead, he tends to be drawn to the days in which he behaved in revealingly unpleasant ways.

Paradoxically, the very strength of Willy’s impulse to know himself scuttles his efforts at gaining self-knowledge. In his ineffectual desperation to know what went wrong, he becomes subsumed by the past. rather than remaining firmly rooted within the present and considering how the past applies to the life he's now living, he pulls his memories over his head sort of a blanket. Miller brings this absorption to life by fully dramatizing Willy’s flashbacks. they're not narrated within the person or addressed to the audience, as might befit events that occurred in the past and are at a remove. Rather, they're played out as fully realized scenes, even as vital and urgent as the present-day scenes are. By dramatizing Willy’s memories, Miller makes them as vivid for us as they're for Willy. Miller suggests that while Willy might get pleasure from sticking a toe into the waters of the past, he begins to lose his grip on sanity when he plunges into those waters completely.

Willy's efforts at self-analysis are doomed not simply because he gives himself wholly to his memories, but also because his passionate emotions don't seem to be balanced by cool critical thinking. Willy is constitutionally incapable of analyzing his behavior, understanding his character, and comprehending the mistakes he has made. Over and over, Miller shows how Willy plunges back to the past, stares uncomprehendingly at the errors he made, and so makes those identical errors within the present. He remembers idealizing Ben as a boy; then he describes Ben in outsized, glowing terms to his sons. He remembers implying that Biff didn't have to exert to attend an honest college; then he bridles at the implication that his parenting has something to try and do with Biff's failure. Willy dimly senses that his past missteps have an impact on the current, but he cannot bring himself to create the connections explicitly.

Willy Loman includes a multitude of faults, but escapism isn't one in each of them. He truly wants to know himself; a part of his tragedy is that he's incapable of doing so.