AMERICAN RESEARCH THOUGHTS
Volume 1 │ Issue 9 │ July 2015
ISSN: 2392 – 876X
Available online at: www.researchthoughts.us
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1493035
Impact Factor: 2.0178 (UIF)
DREAM AS DESTRUCTION:
A CLOSE READING OF MILLER’S
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Indrajit Mukherjeei
The resiliency of the American Dream can be traced to the Declaration of Independence
in 1776 and its promise that citizens of the new nation were already endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life and liberty, and that these people
were entitled to engage in many varied pursuits of happiness which often ended with
many finding, some degree of fulfillment.
The term ‚American Dream‛, coined by J. T. Adams, means ‚that dream of a land in
which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyman, with opportunity for each
according to his ability or achievement…. not a dream of social order in which each man and
each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be
recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or
position….. a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman,
unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by
social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human
being of any and every class‛ (1941: 404-405).
From time immemorial, major American writers such as Emerson, Whitman,
Thoreau, Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Ernest Hemingway et al have been aware
of the haziness and of attendant ironies of the American Dream. Twain’s Huck’s
Indrajit Mukherjee (UGC NET) has been awarded with a Gold Medal for his academic excellence
in Hons and M. A. (first class first in both) from Rabindra Bharati University. His articles “Magic
Realism: The Literary Language of the Emergent Postcolonial World”, “Deconstructive Reading of
Calvino’s La citta invisibili”, “Nation, History and Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last
Sigh”, “The Hungry Tide: Amitav Ghosh’s Heart of Darkness” have been published in The Literary
Voyage (ISSN 2348-5272), Outlook on Contemporary Indian English Writers: A Critical Exploration
(ISBN 978-81-922645-0-9) and European Academic Research (ISSN 2286-4822), respectively.
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decision to separate himself from the hustle bustle of the mammon-worshipping
American society, the Young Man appearing near the end of Edward Albee's The
American Dream (1961), Franklin’s representation of America as the terrestrial paradise
and
as the culmination of the progress of civilization in his Autobiography (1791),
Langston Hughes’s description of ‚dream deferred‛ in his poem Harlem (1951),
Whitman’s illustration of America as an utopian land in which all are honored and each
is free to pursue liberty, life, and happiness in his famous ‚Preface‛ to Leaves of Grass
(1855), the Chippewa Indians in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), Jim Burden’s
material success in Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), the mad dream of grabbing,
taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery
cities beyond Long Island City of Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the impact of labor and
housing discrimination in L. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the sun (1959), Toni Morrison’s
depiction of the myth of Flying Africans in Song of Solomon (1977), are important
illustrations of American dream. In this present paper I am going to analyse how, in
Arthur Miller’s magnum opus Death of a Salesman (1949), ‚one of the triumphs of the
mundane American stage‛ according to John Gassner (1965:89), metamorphoses the
once promising agrarian American dreams, a romantic and optimistic vision of the
ethos which consists in the images of freedom and nationhood, into an urban
nightmare.
Here the interest and sympathy of the audience are engaged by the pathos of
Willy Loman who, like King Lear, gave all his life to a business only to be thrown on the
scrap-heap, a householder whose pattern of life was interwoven with installment plans
with which he could hardly catch up, a doting father disappointed in his children, and
an American naïf bemused by the worship of uncreative success and hollow
assumptions that ‚personality‛ is the summum bonum. The dream as a quest for paradise
is embodied in Willy Loman who dreams two versions of the American dream
throughout this tragedy: ‚the business-urban success dream‛ in which he sees himself as a
successful tycoon, and ‚the rural-agrarian‛ which brings forth his romantic escapist
notions of a life of communion with nature, a sort of safety value to withdraw from the
harsh realities of failure in the pursuit of the success dream (1978:119-120). We get a
glimpse of Willy’s dreaming first when he explains his wife why he has returned early,
and empty-handed, from his selling trip, he acknowledges that his mind wanders too
much for driving: ‚I'm dreamin’ again, and I nearly--- He presses two fingers against my eyes.
I have such thoughts, I have strange thoughts‛ (1961:14). In part, he taunts himself by
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invoking an idyllic past, in which he had the respect of his sons, who were themselves
carried forward by the promise of success, or by calling betrayals which he believes
destroyed that respect and blighted that promise. The irony is that Willy believed that
he failed Biff by disillusioning him with the dream of success, when in fact years later,
each spring he feels a sense of inadequacy for failing to make a material success of his
life (1998:xvi). His concept of success can be obtained through personality is not logical,
for what seems logical in pursuing success: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it --because personality always wins the day‛ (1961:51), as his opinion on his next door
neighbor Charley’s business: ‚bigger than Uncle Charley! Because Charley is not-liked. He’s
liked, but he’s not --- well liked‛ (1961:23). The inner selves that make up Willy’s many sided persona represent his experience of the outer world refracted through the
distorting medium of his fantasies. As the action of this tragedy progresses, the
connections between Willy’s inner world and external reality, which are tenuous
enough to begin with, grow increasingly unstable and volatile. He is driven to kill
himself, the ultimate act of self-deception in his struggle to impose his fantasies upon a
reality that consistently thwarts his ambitions and will (2007:14). Many of us wonder:
was Willy really responsible for his death, or was he, as Luke Carroll puts it, ‚a pathetic
little man caught in an undertow that’s much too strong for him?‛ (1950:110). Willy’s
braggadocio, his confidence that he and his sons, by divine right of personality, are
above the laws that bind ordinary men, put his acts in the realm of universal moral
censure and therefore he fulfills Arthur Miller's dictum of a tragic hero: ‚we who are
without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can
possible lead to in our time--- the heart and the spirit of the average man‛ (1978:7).
Willy’s fate reminds us of the concluding words of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
‚He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seen so close that he could
hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him; somewhere back in the
vast obscurity of the city, where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night. Gatsby
believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, it eludes us
then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further‛(1995:
189).
Ben, Willy’s successful brother, represents the most corrupt form of the
American dream, the perfectionist of the great American virtues of self-reliance and
initiative by which an enterprising man may attain untold wealth, the older version of
the salesman, the ruthless capitalist whose adventure brutality contrasts with Willy’s
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Dale Carnegie approach to success (2007:114), most fully idealized in Willy’s vision of
Dave Singleman. He is less a substantial fact than an embodiment of that ruthless drive
and achievement which Wiley lacks in his own life and half believes he should want:
‚Ben! That man was a genius, that man was success incarnate‛ (1961:32). In every memory
scene in which Ben appears, his viewpoint is always contrasted with the perspective of
another character. This counterbalancing occurs because, while Ben has had a
significant impact on Willy’s past that continues to remain alive in the present in his
imagination: ‚Ben! I’ve been waiting for you so long! What’s the answer? How did you do it?‛
(1961: 36). Ben’s influence on Willy has actually been no stronger than that which has
been exerted upon him by people like the ‚othered‛ Linda and a mythologized Dave
Singleman --- the latter actually having the strongest effect, possibly because he exists in
Willy’s mind only as an idealized image (2007: 30). In one sense of the strain under
which he finds himself erodes the boundary between the illusions versus the reality so
that he can no longer be sure which is which. This is further stressed by his endeavors
to pass it on to his sons: ‚Ben, how should I teach them?.... That’s just the spirit I want to
imbue them with! To walk into a jungle! I was right! I was tight!‛ (1961: 40-41). Feldman
points out, ‚Ben made his riches in Africa, in the ‘jungle’. The jungle represents the business
competition of the story‛ (2003:394).
It is true that Biff, Willy’s ace in the hole, his last desperate throw, the proof that
he was right, after all, that tomorrow things will change for the better and thus offer a
retrospective grace to the past, has rejected Willy because of his discovery that Willy is a
fake --- that is, an unfaithful husband--- but in a broader sense Biff has seen through the
illusions. Biff, who seeks freedom from the ‚phony dream‛ (1961: 106) that he carries as
part of Willy, is an aging high school football star, too lazy to make his way up and
casually criminal. His choice of rural life smacks a little of Huck Finn, lighting out for
the Territory, ahead of the rest. He is moving against history, that history encapsulated
in a stage set which fades from rural past into urban present (1998: xix). In the
harrowing climatic scene, Biff puts an end to his self-deception and shatters the illusion
of his magnificence by firmly telling Willy: ‚I’m not bringing them home any prizes any
more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home‛ (1961:217). Knowing that
his days of glory are past and that his dreams have nothing to do with Willy’s vision of
success for him, Biff embraces his life and stops living a lie, ‚I know who I am‛ (1961:
222). The climax of the play comes not because Willy has been victimized by fate, or
capitalism, or some implacable abstraction, not because he has seen through the illusion
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of his manifold dreams, but because of the irreconcilable tug-of-war between those
dreams and a reality that Biff --- and the audience --- perceive at that bleak funeral. Biff
tries to shine the light of reality on Willy when he tells him, ‚Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and
so are you!..... I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but
a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an
hour, Willy!‛ (1961: 132). ‚The anagnorisis is there‛, according to David Sievers,‛ is given
to Biff, who is purged of his father's hostility when he comes to see his father for what he is‛
(1955:396).
The dashing Happy, a flawed extension of Willy and Linda, shares with Biff a
fondness for rugged outdoor living but wants material success even more, as his first
appearance has come to terms with life better than either his father or his brother, and
thus corresponds to Ben in a meager and debased way. This accomplished liar shares
his uncle’s unscrupulousness and the amorality, the shallowness of his filial emotions,
but has little of his singleness of purpose; and what he has of the last he dedicates to
cuckolding his superiors at work and to the pursuit of women in general, activities that
make up the only field in which he excels, as Linda recognizes when she sums him up
as ‚a philandering bum‛ (1961:163). The trite phrase he bestows on Linda --- ‚What a
woman! They broke the mold when they made her‛ (1961:169) --- is on its own vulgar level as
perfunctory and unfeeling as Ben’s more elegantly phrased endorsement, ‚Fine specimen
of a lady, Mother‛ (1961:155). However, Happy is the incarnation of Willy, such as his
bluster and nursing of injured pride, his insecurity about making good, as well as his
philandering. And in the Requiem, standing at his father’s grave, Happy insists, ‚All
right, boy. I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had
a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have --- to come out number- one man‛ (1961:138139) and thus seeks a modus vivendi between sensitive appraisal of a situation and
cautions acting upon its appraisal.
Next door, however, in the form of Charley and Bernard, is another version of
the dream, a version turning not on self-delusion and an amoral drive for success, but
hard work and charity. He has no time for Willy’s theories of business, but he provides
for his family and is in a position to offer Willy a do-nothing job to keep him bringing
home a salary. In a rare moment of candor, Willy privately acknowledges the rationalist
Charley’s virtues and superiority to himself: ‚a man of few words, and they respect him‛
(1961:149); but for the most part he seeks to set up his own pre-eminence by belittling
and hectoring him in petty ways, reminding Charley of his ignorance and inadequacy
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in ordinary matters: domestic repairs, diet, clothing, sports, cards, and so on. When
Willy meets the lawyer Bernard in his father’s office he is about to leave for
Washington, D.C. to argue a case in the highest arena in his profession, the Supreme
Court. The word ‚supreme‛, which recalls the ‚S‛ on Biff’s high school sweater (1961:28)
and Willy’s belief that Biff would become a superman, mocks Willy’s deluded hope and
recalls that seventeen years earlier Biff played in championship football game at
prestigious Ebbets Field where he ‚laid down and died like a hammer hit him!‛ (1961:93). It
mocks Biff’s failure to become a professional athlete and alludes to Charley and
Bernard’s professional success: ‚Great athlete! Between him and his son Bernard they can’t
hammer a nail!‛ (1961: 51).
Death of a Salesman deals with the twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman,
the hard-working sixty-three-years-old travelling salesman whose ideas of professional,
public success jar with the realities of his private desires and modest accomplishments
in order to present a rich matrix of enabling fables that define the myth of the American
dream (1997:60), a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what
they might have been and what they are, who need to believe that their children will
reach out for a prize that eluded them, and who feel that the demands of reality are too
peremptory and relentless to be sustained without hope of a transformed tomorrow
(1998:xxvi). It is the tale of a baffled man and his sons trying to find their way through a
world of images-dazzling dreams and fantasies - in the knowledge that they have failed
by the standards they have chosen to believe are fundamental. Willy has, as Biff alone
understands, all the wrong dreams but, as Charley observes, they go with the territory.
They are the dreams of a salesman reaching for the clouds, smiling desperately in the
hope that people will smile back. Willy, the Everyman figure of modern era, is ‘‘kind of
temporary’’ because he has placed his faith in the future while being haunted by the past.
Needing love and respect he is blind to those who offer it, dedicated as he is to
the eternal American quest of a transformed tomorrow. What else can he do, then, but
climb back into his car and drive off to a death which at last will bring the reward he
has chased so determinedly, a reward which will expiate his sense of guilt, justify his
life, and hand on to another generation the burden of belief which has corroded his soul
but to which he has clung until the end (1998:xxvi).Let me conclude with Miller’s own
words on the American Dream, ‚The American Dream is a largely unacknowledged screen in
front of which all American writing plays itself out—the screen of the perfectibility of man.
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Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his
story. It’s a failure in relation to that screen‛ (1987:362).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Adams, J.T. The Epic of America. Garden City, New York: Ribbon Books, 1941.
2. Bloom, Harold. Bloom's Literary Themes: The American Dream. U.S.A: Chelsea
House, 2009.
3. ______. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. U.S.A: Chelsea House, 2007.
4. Carroll, Luke P. ‚Birth of a Legend: First Year of ‘Salesman.‛ New York Tribune. 5
February. 1950, Sec. 5:1.
5. Feldman, Steven P. ‚Weak Spots in Business Ethics: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Competition and Memory in Death of a Salesman‛. Journal of Business Ethics. 44
(2003): pp.391-404.
6. Fitzgerald, F.Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J.Bruccoli. New York: Simon
and Schuster Inc., 1995.
7. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Intro. Christopher Bigsby. U.S.A.: Penguin
Books, 1998.
8. ______. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and A
Requiem. New York: Viking, 1949.
9. ______. ‚Tragedy and the Common Man‛. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller.
Ed.Robert A. martin. New York: Viking, 1978: 3-7.
10. Nourse, Joan Thellusson. Arthur Muller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons.
New York: Monarch Press, 1965.
11. Pradhan, N.S. Modern American Drama: A Study in Myth and Tradition. New
Delhi: Arnold - Heinemann, 1978.
12. Roudane, Matthew C. ‚Death of a Salesman and the Poetics of Arthur Miller‛.
The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Ed. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997.
13. ______. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1987.
14. Sievers, W. David. ‚Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.‛Freud on Broadway: A
History of Psychoanalysis and the American Dream. New York: Hermitage House,
1955.
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WEBLIOGRAPHY
1. http://csuchico.dspace.calstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.4/96/ANGELAthe
sis.pdf?sequence=1
2. http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/DeathofaSalesmanMAThesis2004.pdf
3. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:726516/fulltext01.pdf
4. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/chapters_1800/2112_ch1.pdf
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