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Success In Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman

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What is success? There many different ways of defining what success is, but different people have different ways of seeing it. To me, success is how happy you are with your life and if you could die knowing you had a great journey. In The Death of a Salesman, the author uses two different characters to show how there is a difference between people’s meanings of what success is. Success is something that everyone in the world dreams of having. People dream of succeeding in different ways, for some it may be loads of money and for others it may be the thought of being remembered after they pass. In The Death of a Salesman, Willy’s opinion on success is making tons of money and having everyone know who you are. During a hallucination between him and Ben, Willy talks about his funeral saying: “Ben, that funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates- that boy will be thunder-struck, Ben, because he never realized- I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey- I am known, Ben, and …show more content…
Willy keeps on trying to convince Biff that success is making tons of money and being popular. On the other hand, Biff actually believes that his father isn’t all that special. Biff doesn’t care about making a lot of money, to him success is being able to do what you truly love throughout your entire life. During a conversation between Biff and Happy, Biff tells him: “To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And still- that’s how you build a future” (1562). Biff tells Happy this because he wants him to know that no matter how many jobs he gets and no matter how hard he tries, he knows that he will only be successful if he’s doing what he loves, which is enjoying the wonders of the

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