Ben was a successful dude and Willy looked up to him. The play returns to the present day, where the adult Bernard sits in his father's office. He praises his sons, now younger, who are washing his car. Linda feels that Willy is being too critical of Biff. Downstairs, Willy talks to himself. Linda asks Willy for forgiveness for being unable to cry. Willy remains in the restaurant with a troubled mind and broken heart.
His third wife was the photographer Inge Morath. Plot Overview As a flute melody plays, Willy Loman returns to his home in Brooklyn one night, exhausted from a failed sales trip. There is a memory of Linda catching Willy lying about how much commission he's earned, and Willy has to admit he won't have enough to cover their expenses. Miss Forsythe enters with another call girl, Letta. In this first part of the play, when Willy is introduced, we find out that he talks to himself and he seems confused. A woman witnessed one of the accidents and saw Willy drive into a bridge on purpose. Biff enters, and Happy introduces him to Miss Forsythe, continuing to flirt with her.
Willy insists on finding a seed store so that he can do some planting. Despite his hard work and grueling schedule, the Lomans have always lived on the edge of poverty and Willy has always been an underling in his company. Willy Loman and his sons, Biff and Happy, are symbols of the American Dream unrealized. All of a sudden, Willy has another flashback of his brother, Ben, who is now dead. Biff is still a high school football star.
Biff and Happy are stunned at the news, so they agree to try to garner funding from various sources to start a business. . Willy claims that, although Bernard gets the best grades in school, in the business world it is personality that matters and that his sons will succeed. Happy on the other hand decides to try his luck and becomes a businessman. He tells Linda and Happy. Unfortunately, Biff has bad news.
The two brothers discuss their father, thinking that his condition is deteriorating. Linda, Willy's dutiful wife, lives under the thin veneer of denial that her husband has so long tried to keep from collapsing. Biff and Happy are then at dinner together. In the stock crash of 1929, his father's clothing business failed and the family moved to more affordable housing in Brooklyn. He does not know how to cope with the deterioration of his sales career. The Death of a Salesman Author Arthur Miller Language English Genre s Play Publisher Released 1949 Pages 144, Hardcover Please enable JavaScript to view the Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning play of 1949 is widely considered to a cornerstone of American letters. Though Willy has been with the company longer than Howard has been alive, Howard refuses Willy's request.
While he is reliving his conversation with Linda, he begins to remember his conversation with the Woman a woman with whom he had an affair. Biff thinks that he may try again to work for Bill Oliver, for whom he worked years ago but quit after stealing a carton of basketballs from him. At the restaurant, the waiter helps Willy and tells him that his sons left with two women. First and foremost, there's Willy Loman. He is not able to concentrate on his driving anymore. Willy yells at Charley, who leaves. He has begun to talk to himself more and more, which causes concern for Linda.
Plot Summary: Act I We start with Willy, who is in his 60s. Suspense Willy starts chatting with the imaginary figure of his brother and considers killing himself. He reassures her that nothing has happened, but tells her that he only got as far as Yonkers and does not remember all of the details of his trip; he kept swerving onto the shoulder of the road, and had to drive slowly to return home. When Biff comes from his farm work, Willy reminds him that he could do better than this in the field of business. He is a father of two sons, Biff and Happy and has a wife Linda.
Willy talks to Bernard who will argue a case in Washington soon and whose wife has just given birth to their second son. This is the climax because it is when the American Dream is finally at the end for Willy. He wanders into his back yard, trying to see the stars. He gets angry because none of his boys have climbed the ladder of mediocrity. The play was published in 1949 by Viking Press. Willy ponders the bright-seeming future before getting angry again about his expensive appliances.
Then everyone goes to bed except Willy. Willy complains that Biff, his older son who has come back home to visit, has yet to make something of himself. Happy and Biff talk about their childhood, particularly their teenage years, and discuss their dad. The climax is when Willy shows up and Biff tells him the truth about Oliver not remembering him. Miller returns to the more recent past past for a short scene that takes place in a hotel room in Boston.
This is an example of how the family does not tell the truth about themselves. The difference between this and the nineteenth-century version of the same dream, in which a family or a single adventurer went into America's wilderness frontier and tried to make their fortune from the land itself, reflected the country's economic shift from agriculture to urban industry, and then from manufacturing into service and sales. Harold, Biff, and Willy are now in a restaurant, but Willy is not prepared to hear another bad news. But the realism of how to make your dreams happen is also a factor. Ben says that Willy will be a coward if he commits suicide. They would get the policy money and start over. Miller wanted to explore the American way of life, the condition of dreaming and losing, and always working.