DEATH OF A SALESMAN Study Guide for Teachers

SYNOPSIS -- (Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, Edinburgh)

Act 1 Willy Loman is a traveling salesman at the end of his career. The beginning of the play sees him
returning home to his wife Linda after nearly crashing his car. Biff and Happy, their adult sons, are on
a rare trip home. The relationship between Biff and his father is strained. Willy thinks Biff is a “lazy
bum”: he has not found himself a career at the age of 34. Upstairs in their bedroom, Biff talks to his
brother Happy about his inability to settle and his anger at his father’s criticism of him. Alone in the
kitchen, Willy retreats into his memory, remembering the boys as teenagers, Biff being a top class
footballer and his successful brother Ben. Within these memories are also hints of where things
started to go wrong for Willy as he exaggerates his success, dismisses Biff’s stealing and lies to his
wife. Another woman is seen in Willy’s past. The past and present mingle in Willy’s mind throughout
a visit by his friend Charley who offers him a job which Willy proudly rejects. The brothers and Linda
discuss Willy – Linda defends him and attacks her sons for their treatment of him. She tells them that
Willy is trying to kill himself. Biff tries to placate Willy’s anger when he overhears them discussing him
by telling Willy that he will go and see an old employer, Oliver, and ask for a job. This escalates into a
plan for the brothers to set up in business together. Willy is delighted and the whole family is sucked
into this daydream. At the end of the Act, however, Biff discovers the length of tubing that Willy has
hidden so he can use it to commit suicide.

Act 2

The Act opens happily with Willy making plans to ask his boss for a desk job and then meet his sons
for dinner. However, when Willy sees his boss he will not give him a different job and finally tells
Willy he is fired. This triggers memories of his brother Ben offering him a job, which he turned down.
Willy then goes to Charley’s office to borrow money and meets Charley’s son Bernard, whom Willy
had ridiculed as a boy but who is now a successful lawyer. Charley again offers him a job and Willy is
again furious at the ‘insult’. In the restaurant that evening, Biff tells Happy that Oliver did not
remember him – he realized he had been lying to himself about his importance in the company. As
he was leaving the office he stole a fountain pen. Willy joins them and Biff tries to tell him what has
happened but Willy won’t listen. Biff and Happy leave Willy alone in the restroom. Willy remembers
an incident in Boston where Biff discovers him with a woman. On the boys’ return to the house, Linda
is furious. Willy is talking to his brother Ben (in his mind) about his plan to commit suicide so his
family can have the insurance money. Biff and Willy argue again and Biff tells his family that he has
lost every job he ever had through stealing and that he has been in jail. However, Willy sees Biff’s
admission as a sign that Biff likes him and decides that if he leaves him the money he will be
‘magnificent’. As the others go to bed, Willy leaves the house and crashes his car.

Requiem

The graveside. The family react in different ways – Happy is angry; Charley believes that the job has
destroyed Willy. Biff knows that he has had the ‘wrong dreams’. The scene ends with Linda who
cannot understand why he has done it when they have just made the final payment on the house
and are ‘free and clear.’ Weston Playhouse Theatre Company
THE SETTING THIS IS AMERICA —Arthur Miller sets Death of a Salesman, his exploration of the
elusiveness of the American Dream, in the quintessentially American city of Brooklyn. (Actually, the
term “city” only properly applies to Brooklyn until 1898 when it officially became incorporated as one
of New York City’s five boroughs.) Brooklyn occupies Kings County on eighty-one square miles at
Long Island’s western tip and is connected to neighboring Manhattan by three bridges, one tunnel,
fourteen subway lines, one ferry service, and a pugnacious wariness of being consumed by the
cosmopolitan bully across the East River. We recognize Brooklyn from images of its high-stooped
brownstones and eponymous bridge, as the setting for numerous sitcoms from The Honeymooners
to The Cosby Show, and as the home of Brooklynese, a much-imitated accent popularized by
Hollywood through surly WWII soldiers and down-on-their-luck street toughs. Brooklyn’s many
distinct neighborhoods offer snapshots of the American melting pot. The ethnic communities of
Brooklyn were for decades synonymous with their neighborhoods’ names—some still are. There
have long been Jewish residents in Brighton Beach and Flatbush; African Americans moved into
Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville after WWI; Italians still congregate in Bensonhurst; and Vinegar
Hill near the Manhattan Bridge used to be known as Irish Town. Though the quiet of these Brooklyn
neighborhoods is sometimes disturbed by intense parochialism, the borough is united in its
resistance to being ranked second after the more genteel Manhattan. Such pride and doggedness
have earned Brooklyn its reputation as the hardscrabble borough of striving families. There’s more
space here, and it’s cheaper by the square foot. There are more family-friendly businesses, and fewer
skyscrapers blotting out the blue. The first half of the twentieth century saw Brooklyn in ascendance:
the Brooklyn Navy Yard brought thousands of workers to the borough during the two World Wars,
and new subway lines built in the 1930s made for an easy commute between Brooklyn and
Manhattan. A spike in housing construction after WWI expanded the borough’s residences so that by
the mid-1920s it surpassed Manhattan as the most populous borough of NYC, a predominance it
maintains to this day. Kenneth T. Jackson, a NYC historian, claims that as many as one-quarter of all
Americans can trace their heritage to one-time Brooklyn residents.

Because of its role as a way station for such a large portion of the population, Brooklyn boasts a
number of iconic American landmarks. Ebbets Field—home to the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to
1957—bordered diverse neighborhoods in central Brooklyn until it was demolished to make way for
high-rise apartments. Prospect Park, a 19th-century city-beautification project designed by the same
architects as Manhattan’s Central Park, spans 585 pacific acres just blocks away (the architects
considered Prospect Park the more successful project). Coney Island, at the south tip of the borough,
was home to such classic amusements as the Cyclone roller coaster and the Steeplechase, and every
summer visitors elbowed each other on the boardwalk waiting in line for a Nathan’s hot dog. Death
of a Salesman opens in the Loman’s home in Brooklyn in 1949. The small, single-family unit is
described by Miller in a stage direction as crowded on all sides by the “towering, angular shapes” of
new apartment buildings. Miller never specifies in which neighborhood the Lomans live, rather his
play evokes an almost mythic Brooklyn. The past Willy recalls is another important setting of Miller’s
play – the early 1930s, when Willy’s two sons were in high school, Brooklyn was still green, and the
neighboring structures did not impede the view from the yard. Through leaps in memory spurred by
grief and confusion, Willy seems to live simultaneously in these two disparate Brooklyns.

THEMES
Reality and Illusion

The gap between reality and illusion is blurred in the play -- in the structure, in Willy’s mind and in
the minds of the other characters. Willy is a dreamer and dreams of a success that it is not possible
for him to achieve. He constantly exaggerates his success: (‘I averaged a hundred and seventy dollars
a week in the year of 1928’) and is totally unrealistic about what Biff will be able to achieve too.
Willy’s inability to face the truth of his situation, that he is merely ‘a dime a dozen’, rubs off on his
sons. Happy exaggerates how successful he is and Biff only realizes in Oliver’s office that he has been
lying to himself for years about his position in the company: “I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole
life has been. We’ve been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk.” Biff is the only
one who realizes how this blurring of reality has destroyed them all. His aim becomes to make Willy
and the family face the truth which they have been avoiding, the truth of who they are: “The man
don’t know who we are!… We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house.“ This blurring of
reality and illusion is carried through into the structure.

The American Dream

The American Dream is the capitalist belief that if you work hard enough you can be a success in
America. However, the success that the dream aspires to is based on money and power. In Willy’s
mind it is also linked with being “well-liked”. Biff realizes that being true to yourself is a more
important success. Howard’s treatment of Willy shows how destructive the pursuit of this dream can
be. He lays Willy off when he can no longer generate money for the company which enrages Willy:
“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.“ Willy’s adherence
to the dream means that he buys status symbols on credit that he cannot afford to keep the
payments up on. It is ironic then that Willy’s funeral is on the day that the last mortgage payment is
made.

Family

In the play, each generation has a responsibility to the other that they cannot fulfill. Biff and Happy
are shaped by Willy’s sins. In Happy’s case, he is destined to perpetuate Willy’s values and strive for
material success, where Biff has been destroyed totally by Willy’s betrayal of the family through the
affair and the fact that Willy never discouraged him from stealing. On the other hand, Biff and Happy
have the opportunity to save Willy by becoming “successful” in his eyes and supporting him and
Linda in their old age. However they are not able to do this because of the way they have been
raised. Biff is attempting to break this cycle of destruction in the family.

Nature and Physical Pursuits

In the play, the alternative to the corruption of urban capitalism is physical or natural pursuits. Biff
talks about working with horses or cattle on ranches as his calling. Happy knows he can ‘outbox,
outrun and out-lift anybody in that store’ and Willy ‘was a happy man with a batch of cement’. The
‘Loman Brothers’ would sell sporting goods and Willy should have gone to the wilds of Alaska. The
suggestion is that the true nature of all three of these men would be in physical pursuits and in a
rural setting. However, Willy’s dependence on ‘the dream’ means they cannot follow their true
calling.