ASSIGNMENT 28:
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (pt. 2)

Act I of Miller's two-act play posed the chief problem for its audience: What sinister forces have driven wedges between the family members, and between the Lomans and the realization of their desires? The "length of rubber tubing" glimpsed at the end of Act I galvanizes that question, as had Linda's question to Willy about why he and Biff don't get along. The Loman family history had implied a heritage of declining fortunes, and declining freedoms; still we need to know more. Act II will provide the needed details. Its function, as we have said in the remarks to Assignment #27, is to take us more extensively outside the Loman's home and more deeply into the past.

One way of thinking about the design of Miller's play is to envision it as a kind of "double-plot." That is, the forward movement of events plotted in the spring of 1949 will be shown to be driven by forces in the past when the boys were teenagers during the 1930s. These two temporal sequences, present and past, are enfolded one in the other, thus forming a kind of double-plot. The device is commonplace in detective stories, for example, where the writer typically begins by tracing the forward movement of events after a crime, whereas the detection of the perpetrator will inevitably take us back into the past that led up to the crime itself. Now, there is no murder in Miller's play, but there is a kind of transgression deep in the past, one Willy committed, and about which only Biff seems to know. Through its temporal shifts, Act II will transport the audience into the past where that transgression, and its consequences for the Lomans, can be considered.

Ask yourself whether or not that transgression is serious enough to have caused the failures and alienation that characterize the Loman family. And if it is not, then is it a symptom of a greater, more sinister disease of the spirit that Miller is seeking to define.

One way of approaching this problem is to begin with Willy's remark to Howard: "We've got quite a little streak of self-reliance in our family." Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance," defines a quality of fierce individuality, an ideal of self-realization that occurs in isolation from the mass of men. Political parties, organized religions, bureaucracies, and institutions of all kinds are for Emerson structures that impose conformity on the individual. They hinder self-realization. Intellectual and spiritual growth must occur, then, wholly as a function of the individual and not the masses. Willy clearly would like to believe that this is so: he's a salesman, and such a man is--in Charley's great speech at the play's end--"way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." He's a loner. Yet Miller also makes it clear from Act I on that Willy is also desperately alone. He talks about the comradeship of salesmen on the road, who are welcomed into any city, and whose gravesites are thronged with mourners; yet Willy is a tragically alienated figure.

In Emerson's day the doctrine of self-reliance spoke to a nation throbbing with excitement over new opportunities for settlement on the Western frontier. Ben invokes this excitement for Willy when he advises his brother: "You've a new continent at your doorstep, William." But that's not so at all! For what does Willy have at his doorstep if not a broken porch that needs mending, and a street full of cars that pollute his air? The West is gone, one century after the Gold Rush of 1849, and Miller knows it. By 1949, Emerson's idealism can be seen as a grand, and potentially even a dangerous, delusion. Tracing the Emersonian allusion through Miller's play can thus provide one approach to the destructive energies influencing its characters. There is more that needs to be said about Miller's critique of self-reliance, though, and still more about other motifs in the play. Miller's criticism of the system of American class values (Willy is a Low-Man, in these terms) is a related concern, and you will want to think about it as your complete the play.

Reading Assignment

1. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (pp. 1949-1985).

Writing Assignment

1. Why does Howard Wagner decline Willy's request for an easier sales territory, closer to home; indeed, why does he fire Willy? Do you think he is justified in doing so? What is Miller suggesting about modern work?
2. When the action flashes back to Boston and Biff's encounter with Willy in the hotel room, what exactly happens? A plot summary of a paragraph or two will do here.
3. Based on what you've said in response to the previous question, state why, exactly, Biff does not attend the University of Virginia on an athletic scholarship.
4. How does Willy die? Summarize the evidence, and infer your conclusion about his death from that evidence. Then say how Miller uses those inferences to shape our understanding of the play's theme.
5. How does Willy's idealized description of Dave Singleman's death--from which we first understand the title of this play--contrast with the realities of Willy's death? Discuss in several paragraphs.
6. Ben's advice to Willy has been that he should reach out and grab something solid, like the fortune in diamonds that he, Ben, supposedly brought out of an African jungle. Also, in the end Biff claims that there "is more of him [Willy] in that front stoop" of the house "than in all the sales he ever made." And Charley agrees: "Yeah. He was a happy man with a batch of cement." Does Willy latch on to something concrete in the end? If so, what is it? How does that ending ironically comment on Linda's final exclamation: "We're free. . . ." Discuss in a response of about 200-300 words.

Other Sites of Interest