Arthur Miller made the comment that a tragic hero “has the inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity. ” Nowhere is this more evident than in Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, where salesman Willy Loman desperately struggles to regain a sense of dignity after experiencing a number of setbacks in his life. Despite not being able to provide for his family, Willy Loman continues the futile struggle to earn a living, which shows the despair of falling from a position of respect to a position of uselessness.The hopes and dreams that he has for his kids in the past never come into existence, but Willy still enthusiastically pushes his adult children to accomplish unrealistic goals, highlighting his overly sanguine outlook on life. Unable to conceive a redemptive plan, and unwilling to remain passive, Willy’s suicide reveals that when people are rendered useless and unwanted by society, they often see no more purpose in life.
Throughout Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s portrayal of a struggling tragic hero shows that high expectations unfulfilled can end in tragedy.Willy Loman, once a very successful and well admired traveling salesman, does not want to accept the fact that he is older, weaker, and less capable of providing for his family. Willy is an ordinary man who is responsible for his own life and family’s well being, but when he discovers that he can no longer fulfill his job due to his age and health, Miller has Willy fall into a state of self-deception and mental breakdown. Arthur Miller wants the audience to see that people do not have complete control over their lives.Although Willy Loman was never a rich man, he was never very poor, and refuses to start living the life of a more impoverished man. His pride is most evident when he says to his wife, “I won’t have you mending stockings in this house! Now throw them out! ” (39).
To Willy, mending stockings is a symbol of poverty, and although both he and his wife realize that the only way to save money is to live a more meager lifestyle, it hurts Willy’s dignity. Through this, Miller demonstrates that self-deception can lead to even more problems.In accordance with Arthur Miller’s definition of a tragic hero, Willy is unwilling to remain passive when his dignity is challenged. When his neighbor Charley offers Willy a steady paying job, Willy refuses. By taking the job from Charley, Willy feels as though it would hurt his pride. Willy’s inability to see past his pride blinds him to the basic rationality of taking a steady paying job.
Miller shows that one must differentiate between an appropriate time to protect one’s honor, and an appropriate time to be pragmatic in order to make ends meet.Willy’s unwillingness to remain passive is seen when he pleads with his boss to allow him to work closer to home. He says, “Forty dollars a week, that’s all I’d need..
. I put thirty four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat an orange and then throw the peel away! A man is not a piece of fruit! ” (82). Miller has Willy fired from the job altogether after this meeting in order to show that people that have become useless will often be rejected by society.Willy’s expectations that he would continue to live a dignified life are thwarted, and Miller thrusts Willy even deeper into despair, proving that unfulfilled expectations can potentially ruin one’s life. Similar to Willy’s non-passive attitude toward his own job, he is extremely optimistic about the fate of his two sons, which stresses the unrealistic optimism of some parents towards their children. Both of Willy’s children are in their mid thirties, and are not married.
Biff does not even have a job.Clearly, this reflects negatively on Willy, who spent a lot of time with them, and tried to raise them to be very successful individuals. Miller has Willy say, “The trouble is that Biff is lazy, goddammit!...
And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff- he’s not lazy” (16). The confusion reveals that just as Biff is lost, so too is Willy. With Biff and Happy not able to support him in his time of need, Willy cannot stand the reality of the failure of his sons. Instead of ignoring their problems, he treats them as though they are his own problems. Willy is once again not passive.
When his sons express the idea that they want to start a business, he enthusiastically supports them saying, “I see great things for you kids, I think your troubles are over... But remember, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it- because personality always wins the day” (64-65).
Like any tragic hero, Willy has a flaw. His flaw is that he is too sanguine. As he will learn the next day, personality is not enough to be successful. One must also have special skills. Furthermore, Willy’s desperate want for his sons to be successful blocks reality from his vision.His kids are already dults, and Biff was once jailed for theft.
This lack of foresight causes Willy to have extremely high expectations for his sons. When they are not fulfilled, it creates an enormously devastating effect on Willy, showing how people must dream big, but to a reasonable level. Willy finally completes his struggle against the challenges to his dignity through his own suicide, which stresses that when people are rendered useless by society, they no longer feel any purpose in life. The whole reason as to why Willy decides to become a salesman in the first place is because he is inspired by a man named Dave Singleman.
Willy says that when this man died, “he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers... hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral” (81). Willy dreamed of the pleasant lifestyle and respect which he would be given as a salesman.
As disappointment piled atop disappointment, however, Willy’s endeavors to regain the dignity that he had held before all go to waste. Unlike a twentieth century hero, who would have devised a redemptive plan, Willy can only come up with a compromise to his desperate situation.By killing himself, he is both able to provide his family with the much needed financial aid from the insurance company, and he is able to escape from a life that is now meaningless to him. Through Willy’s suicide, Miller further shows that Willy will not remain passive to any challenge to his dignity. One of Willy’s major flaws is that he relies his whole life on being liked, rather than actually having certain skills.
Charley sums up this fatal flaw within Willy when he says, “He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine.He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back- that’s an earthquake” (138). This is Arthur Miller once again stressing that being liked is not enough to succeed in life because that can change with one’s age and circumstances. If one has a special skill, however, that person will never be rendered useless. Even Willy’s expectation for a funeral attended by hundreds of people, as when he talks of Dave Singleman, is not fulfilled, further demonstrating how removed Willy is from reality throughout the whole play.
The tragedy of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman conveys the devastation that can occur when high expectations are not fulfilled. No matter how hard Willy tries to regain the dignity he has lost, he is swept away by a wave of misfortune resulting from big dreams left unfulfilled. Willy tries, but to no avail, to regain his dignity by working as a salesman closer to home, which shows the desperation that can result from a fall down the social status ladder.His children, whom he loves very much, never live up to Willy’s expectations, further portraying Willy as a failure. Lastly, in order to both escape from the world in which he is no longer valued, and in order to help his family financially like any dignified man, he kills himself. Arthur Miller wants the audience to learn that they should always have reasonable expectations, or else they will end up like Willy Loman, desperately striving to achieve dignity, but to no avail.
