"Death of a Salesman" stirs us by its truth, the ineluctability of its evidence and judgment which permits no soft evasion. It might have been graven on stone-like tablets of law. There is poetry in "Death of a Salesman"-not the poetry of the senses or of the soul, but of ethical conscience. For this reason his play is clearer than those of other American playwrights with similar insight whose lyric gifts tend to reflect the more elusive and imponderable aspects of the same situation.
His talent is for a kind of humanistic jurisprudence: he sticks to the facts of the case. He never owns anything outright till his death by suicide (committed to give Biff a foundation of $20,000) he has never been free.Īrthur Miller is a moralist. "That man never knew who he was," Biff says of him. From this perpetual self-denial he looses the sense of his own thought he is a stranger to his own soul he no longer knows what he thinks either of his sons or his automobile (he boosts and denounces them both in almost the same breath) he cannot tell who are his true friends his is forever in a state of enthusiastic or depressed bewilderment. "Even your grandfather was more of a carpenter," he tells Biff. His real ability for physical work seems trivial and mean to him. He idolizes the dream beyond the truth of himself, and he thus becomes a "romantic," shadowy nonentity, a liar, a creature for whom happiness only lies in looking miracles, since reality mocks his pretensions. The competition Willy encounters is too tough for his modest talents the path he has chosen denies his true being at every step. "We had the wrong dream," says Biff', Willy Loman's son, and what Miller is saying in terms few can miss is that this wrong dream is one the greater part of America still cherishes. It is not a realistic portrait, it is a demonstration both of the facts and of their import. Willy Loman is everybody's father, brother, uncle or friend, his family are our cousins 'Death Of A Salesman" is a documented history of our lives. The play has tremendous impact because it makes its audience recognize itself. It was not unusual to hear of this person in the thirties, but in the theatre of the forties he has once more become the forgotten man. Attention!" The man his wife refers to is Willy Loman, the central figure of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Perhaps the chief virtue of the play is the attention that Miller makes us pay to the man and his problem, for the man represents the lower middle class, the $50-a-weekplus-commission citizen, whose dream is to live to a ripe old age doing a great volume of business over the telephone.
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