“Go to it, Biff! Go ahead, show him!” he exhorts his son.
When Linda is concerned that Biff might “flunk math”, Willy retorts: “You want him to be a worm like Bernard?” He makes a similar unfavourable comparison with Bernard’s father, Charley, saying “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man.” When Ben challenges Biff to a “fight” Willy is enthused. Willy feels Biff’s muscles, telling him: “You’re coming home this afternoon captain of the All-Scholastic Championship Team of the City of New York.” In fact Willy later admits that Biff’s “life ended after that Ebbets Field Game” – not however acknowledging the connection to his own adultery. Miller has commented: “Where’s Willy in all this? He’s competed himself to death.”īiff’s very name suggests an exaggerated form of masculinity, associated with sport, cars, the conquest of women, with fist-fighting as a kind of masculine play. In the end all that’s left is suicide, because he’s worth more dead than alive. Willy’s compulsion to compete – with his own father who, according to Ben “made more in a week than a man like you could make in a lifetime,” with Ben himself with Dave Singleman – leave him with no inner resources to deal with the failure of his life. She is a “chippy”, and, unlike Willy, she still has a “product” to sell. When Happy picks up the girl in the restaurant, he tells her he’s spending “company money.” She replies “That’s a charming product to be selling, isn’t it?” His philosophical comment – “Selling is selling,” – is followed by a question: “You don’t happen to sell, do you?” She says she doesn’t but in fact what she sells is herself. The symbolism of blindness, of “an eye for an eye”- the law of the jungle, is apparent.
When he play-fights with Biff, he trips his nephew and stands over him, the point of his umbrella poised over Biff’s eye. Willy believes, thinking of his brother Ben, whose diamond watch he has pawned, that “that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country, that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked.” Ben however, (who apparently “walked into the jungle” and four years later came out rich) shows a better understanding than his brother of the ruthlessness that’s needed for success. In the longest speech in the play, Willy exalts the life of Dave Singleman (perhaps a pun on single-minded) who made him realise “that selling was the greatest career a man could want,” but the stage directions tell us Howard is barely interested and has not looked at him. The “contacts” he boasts of to his brother are no longer operative. In his confrontation with Howard Wagner, when Willy wants to be taken off selling, he appeals on the basis of older values – “I was with the firm when your father used to carry you in here in his arms.There were promises made across this desk,” but his “reward” is to be sacked! There’s no room for sentimentality in this world. Similarly he proudly tells them “I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.” The underside of this purposeful momentum is Linda’s comment that Willy “drives 700 miles, and when he gets there, no one knows him any more, no one welcomes him.” it’s Linda who reminds Willy that “the fan-belt broke”, that they owe on the carburettor, and how much they still have to pay on the washing machine, the refrigerator and the vacuum cleaner. There must always be new things to consume, even if you don’t want them – and this amidst what Miller called “the biggest boom in the history of the world.” Willy exhorts his sons to “polish the car so careful.Get the chamois to the hubcaps,” – as if the presentation of material things is the key to success. He is a salesman a salesman must keep selling. Willy buys into the dream but it destroys him, and to an extent, has already destroyed his sons.
The distinguished American novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, has said of Death of a Salesman: “Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that illuminates the dark side of American success - which is to say the dark side of us.”