Play: Death of a Salesman

Overview
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman follows two fraught days in the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman in his sixties whose faith in charisma and being well liked collides with economic reality and family truth. The play weaves present action with memory, hallucination, and imagined conversations, revealing the personal cost of chasing an illusory American Dream. At its center are Willy’s wife Linda, who tries to protect his fragile dignity, and their sons, Biff and Happy, who struggle under the weight of Willy’s expectations and their own evasions.

Setting and Structure
Set in the late 1940s in Brooklyn, the Loman house stands dwarfed by encroaching apartment buildings, a visual metaphor for confinement and dwindling horizons. Miller’s expressionistic structure lets time loosen; scenes from the past fold into the present without clear boundaries. The sound of a solitary flute, associated with Willy’s father and a lost pastoral promise, recurs as a mournful undertone. This fluid staging exposes how memory, fantasy, and regret shape the characters’ choices as much as external pressures.

Plot Summary
Willy returns home exhausted from a failed sales trip. Linda reveals mounting bills and hints at his recent car accidents, which may be deliberate. Biff and Happy are visiting; Biff, once a high school football star, has drifted through ranch work out West and feels stuck. Willy clings to the belief that Biff is destined for business success if he can just make the right impression, and he drifts into glowing memories of the boys’ youth, when their confidence and his own seemed boundless.

These memories darken as Willy conjures Ben, his adventurous brother who found wealth in Africa and stands as Willy’s imagined mentor. Willy pleads for guidance, oscillating between bravado and panic. He seeks stability by asking his young boss Howard for a local job; instead Howard fires him, absorbed in his new tape recorder and oblivious to Willy’s desperation. Charley, Willy’s neighbor, quietly offers him a job and lends him money, but Willy refuses the job out of pride, taking the cash while posing it as earned commission.

Biff, hoping to land a deal from his former employer Bill Oliver, discovers Oliver barely remembers him; he was a shipping clerk, not a salesman. Biff impulsively steals a fountain pen, an old habit of petty theft revealing his confusion about entitlement and success. That night at a restaurant, Biff tries to tell Willy the truth, but Willy escapes into a pivotal memory: years earlier in a Boston hotel, Biff, having flunked math, came to seek help and discovered Willy’s affair with a woman. The betrayal shattered Biff’s faith and derailed his ambitions. Back home, Biff and Willy clash over reality versus illusion. Linda, furious, demands the boys show respect and attention to Willy’s obvious mental decline.

Willy, convinced he can redeem himself by providing $20,000 in insurance money, plants garden seeds in the dark, dreaming of a legacy sprouting for his sons. He resolves to end his life in a car crash, imagining the funeral will prove his popularity. The Requiem reveals a sparse funeral. Charley eulogizes the perilous hope that drives a salesman, while Biff rejects his father’s dream and seeks an honest life. Happy vows to prove Willy right, perpetuating the cycle Linda mournfully cannot break.

Themes and Symbols
The play interrogates a commercial vision of success rooted in charm and connections, contrasting it with quiet integrity and work. Stockings embody Willy’s infidelity and guilt toward Linda. Seeds represent his yearning to nurture something lasting in barren soil. The rubber hose and the car signal self-destruction. Ben’s diamonds suggest tangible reward for risk that Willy never secures, while the flute recalls a simpler, hand-crafted livelihood that he abandoned.

Impact
Death of a Salesman fuses intimate family drama with a national critique, portraying how dreams can harden into delusions and how love strained by pride becomes tragedy. Its blend of realism and memory theater exposes the gap between self-image and truth with enduring clarity.