Death of a Salesman Critique Essay

Tags: literature american dream willy loman arthur miller family life success character freedom happiness mother devotion charity infidelity eulogy god

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Death of a Salesman

In order for a family to be fully and healthily functioning, it has to be honest and communicative, supportive and nurturing. The Loman family, however, lacks these characteristics and appears more dysfunctional than functional. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is essentially a eulogy for the American Dream, killed by the dysfunctionality of American life. That dysfunction is what seeps into the Loman family and prevents it from operating the way it should. As Biff states at one point in the play, “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house” (Act 2, Part 7, pg. 104). Communication barriers exist and dishonesty is rife. It is so stifling in the family that Biff states earlier in the play that his time in the house feels wasted: "I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life" (Act 1, Part 2, pg. 11). However, this is not the only reason the family is dysfunctional. Biff’s ambitions have been derailed by his own father’s infidelity. Willy’s wife Linda has always been a devoted wife to Willy, Biff’s father. Yet Biff catches his father with another woman, and it crushes his spirit. At the same time he wants to leave and be a farmhand, he wants to make his father proud of him—so Biff is torn in two, just like the Loman family overall. Willy wants to kill himself, is jealous of the success of others, and treats those around him miserably. Even Happy struggles to be happy. It is as though the angry, envious soul of Willy hangs around their necks like an albatross, reminding them constantly of their own miserable inadequacies. It is only with Willy’s death that the family finally feels “free,” as Linda states in the end. This paper will explain why the Loman family is severely dysfunctional by looking at the role that Willy plays as head of the household and why his part is the main problem.

As head of the Loman family, Willy is the old patriarch who should be wiser and more generous and loving than he actually is. Feeling stunted and stymied in his own life, Willy has impressed upon others the need to make something of theirs—almost tyrannically. It is so bad that both Biff and Happy feel like they should base their actions on whether or not it will please Willy.

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Linda is always seeking to accommodate Willy, even though he is not very kind to her. Even Willy’s neighbor Charley tries to help Willy by giving him a new job, which Willy characteristically declines because he does not know how to be generous himself and therefore rejects the generosity of others. Willy’s problem is pride. He is so full of himself…

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…this struggle. His struggle is one between the head and the heart. Eventually the head (Willy) dies, and Biff is allowed to begin to use his own head, which is informed by the good heart that he has and that he received from his mother.

In the end, the Loman family is only able to begin to be “free,” as Linda states, when Willy is dead and buried. Thus, the main obstacle to the family’s real success and happiness is Willy himself—the one person who has been bemoaning the family’s lack of success the whole time. What the family has needed has been freedom, the freedom of each person in the family to be themselves rather than to be Willy’s empty vessels that he can use for his own vicarious aims. Instead of giving them freedom and peace, however, Willy was just an albatross around their necks, dragging them down to his own miserable state of unhappiness, hung up on his own lack of materialistic gain, and hung up on his own disappointments in life. He has never wanted to do what was required of him to be good, to be self-sacrificing, to lift himself up to the ideal. Rather, he has grumbled and groused and made everyone else aware of their own failings. Thus, the reason the Lomans are so dysfunctional is because of Willy. He is the one who brings the dysfunction and spreads it to the….....

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Works Cited

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Dramatists Play Service, 1980.

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