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Key Facts
FULL TITLE • Death of a Salesman:
AUTHOR • Arthur Miller
TYPE OF WORK • Play
上海新东方学校GENRE • Tragedy, social commentary, family drama
CLIMAX • The scene in Frank’s Chop Hou and Biff’s final confrontation with Willy at home
PROTAGONISTS • Willy Loman, Biff Loman
ANTAGONISTS • Biff Loman, Willy Loman, the American Dream
SETTING (TIME) • “Today,” that is, the prent; either the late 1940s or the time period in which the play is being produced, with “daydreams” into Willy’s past; all of the action takes
place during a twenty-four-hour period between Monday night and Tuesday night, except the “Requiem,” which takes place, presumably, a few days after Willy’s funeral
SETTING (PLACE) • According to the stage directions, “Willy Loman’s hou and yard [in Brooklyn] and . . . various places he visits in . . . New York and Boston”
FALLING ACTION • The “Requiem” ction, although the play is not really structured as a classical drama
ip是什么意思TENSE • Prent
FORESHADOWING • Willy’s flute theme foreshadows the revelation of his father’s occupation and abandonment; Willy’s preoccupation with Linda’s stockings foreshadows his affair with The Woman; Willy’s automobile accident before the start of Act I foreshadows his suicide at the end of Act II
TONE • The tone of Miller’s stage directions and dialogue ranges from sincere to parodying, but, in general, the treatment is tender, though at times brutally honest, toward
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Willy’s plightnanea
加减乘除英语>outrageousTHEMES • The American Dream; abandonment; betrayal
MOTIFS • Mythic figures; the American West; Alaska; the African jungle
SYMBOLS • Seeds; diamonds; Linda’s and the womon’s stockings; the rubber ho
Analysis of Major Characters
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Willy Loman
Despite his desperate arching through his past, Willy does not achieve the lf-realization or lf-knowledge typical of the tragic hero. The quasi-resolution that his suicide offers him reprents only a partial discovery of the truth. While he achieves a professional understanding of himlf and the fundamental nature of the sales profession, Willy fails to realize his personal failure and betrayal of his soul and family through the meticulously constructed artifice of his life. He cannot grasp the true personal,
ingan emotional, spiritual understanding of himlf as a literal “loman” or “low man.” Willy is too driven by his own “willy”-ness or perver “willfulness” to recognize the slanted reality that his desperate mind has forged. Still, many critics, focusing on Willy’s entrenchment in a quagmire of lies, delusions, and lf-deceptions, ignore the significant accomplishment of his partial lf-realization. Willy’s failure to recognize the anguished love offered to him by his family is crucial to the climax of his torturous day, and the play prents this incapacity as the real tragedy. Despite this failure, Willy makes the most extreme sacrifice in his attempt to leave an inheritance that will allow Biff to fulfill the American Dream. Ben’s final mantra—“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds”—turns Willy’s suicide into a metaphorical moral struggle, a final skewed ambition to realize his full commercial and material capacity. His final act, according to Ben, is “not like an appointment at all” but like a “diamond . . . rough and hard to the touch.” In the abnce of any real degree of lf-knowledge or truth, Willy is able to achieve a tangible result. In some respect, Willy does experience a sort of revelation, as he finally comes to understand that the product he lls is himlf. Through the imaginary advice of Ben, Will
y ends up fully believing his earlier asrtion to Charley that “after all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”
Biff Loman
Unlike Willy and Happy, Biff feels compelled to ek the truth about himlf. While his father and brother are unable to accept the mirable reality of their respective lives, Biff acknowledges his failure and eventually manages to confront it. Even the difference between his name and theirs reflects this polarity: whereas Willy and Happy willfully and happily delude themlves, Biff bristles stiffly at lf-deception. Biff’s discovery that Willy has a mistress strips him of his faith in Willy and Willy’s ambitions for him. Conquently, Willy es Biff as an underachiever, while Biff es himlf as trapped in Willy’s grandio fantasies. After his epiphany in Bill Oliver’s office, Biff determines to break through the lies surrounding the Loman family in order to come to realistic terms with his own life. Intent on revealing the simple and humble truth behind Willy’s fantasy, Biff longs for the territory (the symbolically free West) obscured by his father’s blind faith in a skewe
d, materialist version of the American Dream. Biff’s identity crisis is a function of his and his father’s disillusionment, which, in order to reclaim his identity, he must expo.
Happy Loman
Happy shares none of the poetry that erupts from Biff and that is buried in Willy—he is the stunted incarnation of Willy’s worst traits and the embodiment of the lie of the happy American Dream. As such, Happy is a difficult character with whom to empathize. He is one-dimensional and static throughout the play. His empty vow to avenge Willy’s death by finally “beat[ing] this racket” provides evidence of his critical condition: for Happy, who has lived in the shadow of the inflated expectations of his brother, there is no escape from the Dream’s indoctrinated lies. Happy’s diad condition is irreparable—he lacks even the tiniest spark of lf-knowledge or capacity for lf-analysis. He does share Willy’s capacity for lf-delusion, trumpeting himlf as the assistant buyer at his store, when, in reality, he is only an assistant to the assistant buyer. He does not posss a hint of the latent thirst for knowledge that proves Biff’s salvation. Happy is a doomed, utterly d
uped figure, destined to be swallowed up by the force of blind ambition that fuels his insatiable x drive.
