The Realism In Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman

The tragedy of Willy Loman has found an echo in the hearts of many readers since the time of its inception. Willy, the symbol of common man, wages an ineffective war against the materialistic American society where “it’s all cut and dried” and no chance for “respect, and comradeship, and gratitude” (Miller 63). Incidentally, Willy’s psychological deterioration in the play goes hand in hand with the surrounding ecological decay. His tragic flaw is his unrealistic desire of mixing “natural” and “civilised” world together. Though almost all of Miller’s plays deal with “the dialectic of enclosure and freedom, nowhere is this theme so dominant than in Death of a Salesman, in which Willy Loman dreams of the open road as urban confinement encroaches

Willy hits at the root of the problem when he asserts that growing population is ruining the country and leading to maddening competition (Miller 12). Willy’s son Biff is equally a lover of nature, an outdoor person, who loves to be on a farm all the time. But in the capitalistic society where there is cut throat competition “to get ahead of the next fella,” Biff finds himself a failure (Miller 16). He expresses his disgust at the claustrophobic environ of a typical office job where one has “to suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off” (Miller

They are compelled to go against their natural instinct of working in the open. Willy’s deteriorating mental condition does not leave much option before Biff, but to come back to New York and start a business by borrowing money from one of his previous employers, Bill Oliver. The prospect of Biff making a fresh start fills Willy yet again with optimism. He starts dreaming for better future and once again plans to “buy some seeds” while his way home that night (Miller 55). When Linda reminds him that nothing will grow in their backyard, since “not enough sun gets back there,” Willy expresses his long nurtured desire of getting a “little place out in the country” and raising “vegetables” and “a couple of chickens” (Miller 55-56). The soul of a “workman” in Willy longs to build “a little guest house” only if he could get a “little lumber and some peace of mind” (Miller 56). Throughout the play Willy on many occasions exhibits his leanings towards manual work right in the vicinity of nature. Indeed, it is surprising why he chose to become a salesman, instead of becoming an explorer like his elder brother Ben. Willy himself acknowledges that life changing moment when he met Dave Singleman, a salesman in the Parker House, who made him believe that “selling was the greatest career a man could want” because it offers an opportunity to “be remembered and loved and helped by so many