Willy Loman A Martyr Of The Middle Class Analysis

Willy Loman: A Martyr of the Middle Class For many decades now, the American middle class has been subject to great self-delusion and failure. Stuck in a social construct not quite poor but far from wealthy, the suburban class tends to search for high risks with high rewards. Furthermore, it is constantly pressured by the materialistic extravagance of the affluent class, tempted to don superficial luxuries to disguise its lack of prosperity. This yearning to bridge the gap between lavishness and mediocrity tends to lead to the middle class’s involuntary dissociation from reality. Those of the social class become deluded and dilapidated by their own unrealistic thirst for material wealth and grandiose success, as demonstrated by the playwright …show more content…
Loman repetitively refers to his past in moments of lost rationality, back to the “great times…so full of light… and always some kind of good news coming up, always something nice coming up ahead” (Miller 127). However, in Loman’s attempts to unearth the roots of his disintegrating family, he dangerously tiptoes around the line between past and present, refabricating and editing memories so that they fit his needs. Loman formulates a “’mobile concurrency of past and present’…, [causing] time… [to] dissolve and… Willy Loman [to] no longer distinguish between illusion and reality… as Willy moves back and forth between the real world and the disorienting realm of his dreams” (Koprince). Sacrificing his own sanity and sense of reality, Loman reconstructs his past to mold his future but becomes lost in a purgatory halfway between faint semblances of the past and …show more content…
The Loman household continuously exaggerates its successes to compensate for its despondency in a capitalistic society. While Biff realized that they “never told the truth for ten minutes in… [their] house”, his intransigent father vehemently protested as he was so afraid of admitting the truth that he became physically incapable of imagining a world in which he was merely “a dime a dozen…, not a leader of men,… [and simply] a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like the rest of them” (Miller 131-132). The family members’ embellishments of triumph, only further debilitate and impede the family, projecting an illusion of hope and potential prosperity that generates overconfidence and unfounded optimism, thereby inhibiting the family from reaching its potential and genuinely working hard. Willy Loman’s family’s dysfunctionality primarily derived from it “exaggerat[ing] facts and minimiz[ing] others”, rendering their stories and accomplishments “barely recognizable… [and] indistinguishable from the real circumstances of their lives…” (Domina). Loman could not bear to relinquish his falsely devised memories of success created to prove his worth in society as it was the only hope he had left to stay alive. It was unimaginable for him to “live with the realization that he [had] failed to live up to his unrealistic expectations” (Galens and Spampinato, eds). Not