Jill Schenck 5/11/18 AP English Literature Mrs. Montgomery Rough Draft Death of a Facade All families have skeletons in their closets, but the most destructive secrets are those kept between family members-- secrets, no matter how stressful to conceal, easier to hide than admit the truth. In Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, aging Willy Loman faces his demise both in his career and in his interpersonal relationships— a downfall which ultimately results in Willy taking his life after purchasing life insurance which provides his family more money than he had been earning in his career as a traveling salesman. As revealed through one of Willy’s flashbacks, when his sons Biff and Happy were teenagers, they discovered that Willy had been …show more content…
When Biff first sees Willy being intimate with an unnamed woman (referred to simply as The Woman), Biff breaks down bawling in public. Not coincidentally, Biff then suddenly loses his motivation to peruse his life’s goals. Additionally, Biff suddenly announces that he will not attend summer school to recover the single math credit he needs to graduate, and because he will not graduate, he now cannot take advantage of his hard-earned opportunity to play football for the University of Virginia on a scholarship. Tragically, even by age thirty-four, Biff has not yet recovered his sense of direction of knowing what he wants to pursue as a career, only knowing that he does not want to follow in the business footsteps of his father. As an adult, he confides in Happy, “I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know —what I’m supposed to want.” (Miller 22) Biff did not feel this way before discovering his father’s affair: while he did not have his entire life planned out as most eighteen-year-olds do not, he had a solid plan regarding taking the next step in his life to get a college education at a subsidized cost or for free thanks to his football scholarship. At the restaurant, Biff’s image as his father as well as his previously held harmonious perception of family dynamics instantly proved to be false, a revelation which severely crushed Biff emotionally. In Biff’s childhood (as Willy recalls it through a flashback) Biff looked up to his father but could no longer look up to him knowing that his father was not only unfaithful to his mother, but also unfaithful to his sons by lying by omission and hiding his affair from them. Especially as an adolescent, one’s family is his or her rock, and when he or she discovers that the foundation is cracked or built on an untrue facade, his or her world turns upside