Chapter 1: Introduction
Willy Loman’s life is a simulacrum! Whenever Willy fails to cope with the changed situation, he takes shelter in his world of illusion. He creates ‘hyper reality’ to escape from reality. Willy’s son Biff and Happy adopt Willy’s habit of denying or manipulating reality i. e., of creating the ‘hyper reality’ and practice it all of their lives, much to their detriment. It is only at the end of the play that Biff admits he has been a “phony” (Miller 106) too, just like Willy. Linda is the only character that recognizes the Loman family lives in denial; however, she goes along with Willy’s fantasies in order to preserve his fragile mental state. This paper critically reads Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to understand the importance of customized reality in the life of a common man in America who is a mismatch of capitalist society and this paper also explores how the unrealistic and unattainable dream and also American myth of success is responsible for the downfall of an American family and how their optimism becomes fatal. It also examines how the world of illusion breaks down through Loman’s suicide and how it continues through Happy’s character which is really a threat to American consumerism and technocracy. In spite of this, this paper at last presents a hope because of Biffs withdrawal from illusion.
…show more content…
This is certainly a library research where different books, critics, articles and also internet sources help to do it.
The extent of the study: While discussing customized reality in Loman’s family, my focus is only on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. But here I have applied a theory which is known as Baudrillard’s simulacra to enrich my