Death Of A Salesman Willy's Dream

Death of a Salesman In Death of a Salesman, failed salesman Willy Loman, 63, strives to succeed by being “very well liked,” as he feels a salesman must be in order to achieve success. Knowing he is at the end of his career, Willy places all his hopes on his son Biff, a former high school football star who once had the sort of popularity Willy believes essential for making it in America. Biff, however, is still traumatized by an event that occurred in his high school years: his discovering his father in a hotel room with a woman. Willy, perhaps correctly, sees Biff’s becoming a ne’er do well as Biff’s deliberately spiting Willy for his infidelity. When Biff’s petty theft at his big job interview becomes known to Willy, Willy retreats

Willy retreats into a hallucinatory past, to a time before Biff knew the truth about him and he knew the truth about Biff. Deluded that “that boy can be magnificent,” Willy stages an auto accident so that Biff can use the life insurance money to make it in the business world and to achieve his father’s dream. Willy leaves his longsuffering wife, Linda, and his other son, Happy (always the lesser son in terms of Willy’s affections), to make do, thinking of nothing but proving that Biff can be as much the business hero as he was the gridiron hero. Willy’s unfulfilled dream is that America will come to “pay attention” to his son. The Loman family in some ways mirrors Arthur Miller’s. Miller’s family, who had lost everything in the Depression, moved to Brooklyn and lived in modest circumstances, rather haunted by their former economic and social success and their struggle to re-attain the American dream—the prosperity they had known when Miller was a boy. Miller’s work is no wholesale indictment of material success; it is rather an examination of the particularly American sense that financial success is the result of

Each of the Youngers has a dream, a way of moving himself or herself from the margins into the center of American culture. Walter Lee wants to make it as a businessman; Beneatha wants to make it as a physician; and Lena wants to make it as a homeowner, someone who has her own yard and garden. Each wants to use the insurance money to fulfill the dream. Lena decides upon a compromise. She takes a portion of the money for a down payment on the house in a white suburb, but leaves enough for Walter Lee to buy his liquor store and for Beneatha to go to medical school. Lena shows her faith in Walter Lee by trusting the money to him, only to have the money stolen by an unscrupulous business partner. While being focused on this financial setback that keeps them from achieving the American dream, the Youngers are confronted by racism in the form of a white man from the neighborhood where Lena has bought the house. He tempts the Youngers by offering to buy their house at a considerable profit. Walter Lee assumes the stature of his deceased father, standing up to the white man so that Lena can have her dream. The Youngers move themselves from the margins to the mainstream of American culture of the 1950s by moving to the suburbs, despite the inevitable negative response of their new neighbors. The Youngers defy the naysayers by taking their place as typical Americans. Though comfortably middle class, Hansberry’s own family mirrors the Youngers. When Hansberry