Death of a Salesman

This is the play that put the ordinary working man on the tragic stage, and it still lands because everyone knows someone chasing being 'well liked' instead of being real. Read it if you have a father, if you sell anything for a living, or if you have ever confused a dream with a plan. It asks what a life is worth when the dream behind it turns out to be counterfeit.

1. 1

   Act 1

   The Man Who Drifts Off the Road

   The play opens late at night in the Loman house in Brooklyn, where Willy Loman, a 63-year-old traveling salesman, returns exhausted and confused from a sales trip to Yonkers, carrying two large sample cases. He tells his wife Linda he almost crashed the car because he kept drifting off the road onto the shoulder. Willy, alone in the kitchen, drifts into a memory of his teenage sons washing his car years ago. Young Biff and Happy laugh and joke with him, and Willy boasts about his sales trip to Providence. Willy's older brother Ben, who went to Africa and became rich (a successful diamond miner), appears as a ghostly figure in Willy's imagination. Willy idolizes him and repeats Ben's line: 'When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.' Willy's neighbor Charley comes over to play cards. During the game, Willy hallucinates Ben again and speaks to him, confusing and alarming Charley, who leaves. Biff, a 34-year-old farmhand visiting home, tells Happy he is lost at thirty-four, having failed at every job. He recalls that after flunking math and finding Willy with a woman in Boston, his life derailed. He says, 'I've 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.' Happy, a womanizing assistant to an assistant buyer, confesses to Biff his own emptiness. He says, 'I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment—all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy.' Linda confronts Biff and Happy about their neglect of Willy. She delivers a speech: 'I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.' Biff decides to stay in New York and ask his old employer Bill Oliver for a business loan to start a sporting goods line. Willy, excited, advises him on how to act and says, 'Knock him dead, boy.'

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Day Everything Is Sold Back

   Willy goes to his boss Howard Wagner's office to ask for a non-traveling job in New York. Howard, absorbed in a wire recorder playing his family's voices, dismisses Willy and eventually fires him, saying, 'I don't want you to represent us.' After being fired, Willy drifts into another memory of Ben. Ben offers Willy a chance to go to Alaska, but Linda interrupts, reminding Willy of his success with the firm. Ben leaves, saying, 'I'll be late for my train.' Willy goes to Charley's office to borrow money. Charley offers him a job, but Willy refuses, too proud. Charley gives him the money and says, 'Willy, when are you going to grow up?' Biff and Happy meet Willy at Frank's Chop House to celebrate the loan they believe Biff will get. Biff reveals that Bill Oliver didn't recognize him and made him wait for hours. Biff stole Oliver's fountain pen and ran out. Willy refuses to accept Biff's failure. He retreats into a memory of the day Biff flunked math. In the memory, young Biff discovers Willy in a Boston hotel room with a woman. Biff cries, 'You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!' In the restaurant, Willy's grip on reality breaks. He relives the Boston hotel scene aloud while Biff and Happy watch. Happy denies Willy is their father and leaves with two women, abandoning Willy in the washroom.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Seeds in the Dark

   Biff and Happy return home late. Linda screams at them for leaving Willy. Willy goes to the seed store and buys a packet of carrot seeds. In the dark backyard, he begins planting them with a flashlight, muttering, 'Nothing's planted. I don't have a thing in the ground.' Biff goes to the garden where Willy is planting seeds and talking to Ben about a suicide plan. Ben says, 'The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.' Biff confronts Willy in the yard. He breaks down crying and says, 'Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.' Biff tries to force Willy to let go of the dream. He says, 'Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?' Willy, touched that Biff cares, realizes, 'That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!'

4. 4

   Act 4

   Attention Must Be Paid

   At Willy's grave, Linda says she cannot cry. She speaks to him: 'I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there'll be nobody home.' At Willy's grave, Biff says of Willy, 'He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.' Charley defends Willy: 'Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.' Happy, unchanged, insists Willy 'had a good dream' and declares, 'I'm gonna win it for him.' Biff and Happy argue, and Biff says Happy will end up the same way.

• WWilly LomanA 63-year-old traveling salesman who believes being 'well liked' is the whole secret of success. He cannot see his own failure, so he plans his death as the last gift he can sell his family.
• LLinda LomanWilly's wife, the one person who sees him whole and loves him anyway. She found the rubber hose, defended him to their sons, and pays off the house with his life.
• BBiff LomanThe elder son, thirty-four, a farmhand who floundered after catching his father with a woman in Boston. He is the only Loman who faces the truth, and it nearly kills him to say it.
• HHappy LomanThe younger son, a womanizing assistant to an assistant buyer who admits his life is empty and does nothing about it. At the grave he inherits his father's dream intact.
• BBen LomanWilly's dead older brother, a rich diamond miner who appears in Willy's imagination as the standard of success. He walked into the jungle at seventeen and out at twenty-one rich.
• CCharleyThe next-door neighbor who lends Willy money every week and offers him a job Willy is too proud to take. At the grave he gives the play's defense of the salesman.
• HHoward WagnerWilly's boss, absorbed in his wire recorder and his children's voices. He fires the man his father once hired, with the machine still playing.

The rubber hose

The suicide Willy will not name, found attached to the gas pipe in the cellar and hidden by Linda. It is the physical proof that the cheerful salesman is already halfway gone, and the family's silence around it shows how little they can say to save him.

Seeds

Willy plants carrot seeds by flashlight in the dark, muttering that nothing's planted, that he has nothing in the ground. They stand for the legacy he never built: too late in the season, too little light, a harvest he will never see, planted the same night he plans his death.

The jungle and the diamonds

Ben's refrain—walk into the jungle at seventeen, walk out at twenty-one rich—recurs as Willy plans his death, 'the jungle is dark but full of diamonds.' The diamonds become the insurance money: Willy's final, terrible version of the success Ben represents, harvested from his own life.

The wire recorder

Howard's new toy, playing back his family's voices, is the future that has no use for Willy: a machine that remembers voices better than any salesman can charm. Willy begs it to be impressed while it plays, and the man who lived on being liked is fired in front of it.

The Requiem refuses consolation. Willy's funeral is the test of his life's theory—he believed a well-liked man's funeral would draw a crowd—and it fails: almost no one comes. Yet the ending is not simply an indictment. Charley's defense, that a salesman has to dream because it comes with the territory, and Biff's verdict, that the dreams were all wrong, are both allowed to stand, and the audience must choose or hold both. Linda's grief is the sharpest cut: the house is paid for on the very day of his death, freedom arriving one day too late for anyone to live in it. Her sobbing 'We're free and clear' turns the American dream of ownership into an epitaph. The ending lands because Willy's death is both a defeat and, in his own broken logic, a gift—he dies believing Biff will be magnificent on the insurance money, and Biff walks away from that money's meaning entirely. Happy alone keeps the dream, which is the play's coldest joke: the lie survives the man.

1. 1.Is Willy Loman a victim of the American Dream or a willing salesman for it? Track how often he chooses the flattering memory over the plain fact.
2. 2.Linda says attention must be paid; Biff says the dreams were all wrong. Do the play's two moral voices cancel each other, or complete each other?
3. 3.Compare Biff and Happy as heirs: one refuses the inheritance, one embraces it. Which son does the play ultimately judge more harshly, and why?

Anyone who has ever been promised that being well-liked pays the bills, and anyone who has watched a parent age into someone fragile and strange. Miller wrote it in under a day, and it still reads like he wrote it about your family last night.

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