The tragic story of Willy Loman and his ultimate demise show how a person’s obsession with wealth and popularity can keep you away from achieving true happiness. The exhilarating roller coaster ride Death of a Salesman is a story based in 1950’s New York that is focused on a middle-aged man that travels throughout New England selling merchandise. Although his job may sound boring, it is his family life and his flashbacks that occur often throughout the play that keep the reader interested. The protagonist, Willy Loman, misinterprets the so-called “American Dream” and uses the distorted view he manifested to spend his life chasing dreams that will never exist. As M.M. Shariful Karim put it, “A careful analysis of Willy’s character, his… guilty conscience, failure, fatherhood and other dimensions of his mental manifestation will reveal the soul of a common man being affected by psychological disorders.”(59).
Willy’s goal in life is to be like Dave Singleman, a man he met on one of his first sales trips. Dave was around 84 years old and was still working, but it was what he did for work that caught our protagonist’s attention. All Dave had to do to get paid was call companies and close sales. Dave was a well-known man, everyone in the selling business knew his name …show more content…
Traces of his ideals are still instilled in Happy and Linda, even after his death. Willy’s final sacrifice set Biff up for success by leaving him with $20,000 in life insurance money. These mementos of his life will result in success for Biff and an unsure future for Happy. But Willy still never realized, in an evaluation by the editors at sparknotes.com pointed out, his “personal failure and betrayal of his soul and family through the meticulously constructed artifice of his life.” (“Death Of a Salesman Analysis”). In simpler terms, this means he never truly realized how greedy and misled his life was, thus leading to him never achieving true
Willy’s goal in life is to be like Dave Singleman, a man he met on one of his first sales trips. Dave was around 84 years old and was still working, but it was what he did for work that caught our protagonist’s attention. All Dave had to do to get paid was call companies and close sales. Dave was a well-known man, everyone in the selling business knew his name …show more content…
Traces of his ideals are still instilled in Happy and Linda, even after his death. Willy’s final sacrifice set Biff up for success by leaving him with $20,000 in life insurance money. These mementos of his life will result in success for Biff and an unsure future for Happy. But Willy still never realized, in an evaluation by the editors at sparknotes.com pointed out, his “personal failure and betrayal of his soul and family through the meticulously constructed artifice of his life.” (“Death Of a Salesman Analysis”). In simpler terms, this means he never truly realized how greedy and misled his life was, thus leading to him never achieving true