Joyce Carol Oates on Death of a Salesman

[MrBranchAPLit]

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Celebration
By Joyce Carol Oates

Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 1998, and reprinted in Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going
Copyright ? by Joyce Carol Oates

?He?s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back?that?s an earthquake. and then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you?re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.?
?Death of a Salesman

Was it our comforting belief that Willy Loman was ?only? a salesman? That Death of a Salesman was about?well, an American salesman? And not about all of us?

When I first read this play at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I may have thought that Willy Loman was sufficiently ?other???old.? He hardly resembled the men in my family, my father or grandfathers, for he was ?in sales? and not a factory worker or small-time farmer, he wasn?t a manual laborer but a man of words, speech?what his son Biff bluntly calls ?hot air.? His occupation, for all its adversities, was ?white collar,? and his class not the one into which I?d been born; I could not recognize anyone I knew intimately in him, and certainly I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us. Or, rather, we are Willy Loman, particularly those of us who are writers, poets, dreamers; the yearning soul ?way out there in the blue.? Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child?s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity??God Almighty, [I?ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!?

Except of course, it can.

* * *

It would have been in the early 1950s that I first read Death of a Salesman, a few years after its Broadway premiere and enormous critical and popular success. I would have read it in an anthology of Best Plays of the Year. As a young teenager I?d begun avidly devouring drama; apart from Shakespeare, no plays were taught in the schools I attended in upstate New York (in the small city of Lockport and the Village of Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo), and so I read plays with no sense of chronology, in no historic context, no doubt often without much comprehension. Reading late at night when the rest of the household was asleep was an intense activity for me, imbued with mystery, and reading drama was far more enigmatic than reading prose fiction. It seemed to me a challenge that so little was explained in the stage directions; there was no helpful narrative voice; you were obliged to visualize, to ?see? the stage in your imagination, the play?s characters always in present tense, vividly alive. In drama, people presented themselves primarily in speech, as they do in life. Yet there was an eerie, dreamlike melding of past and present in Arthur Miller?s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman?s ?present-action? dialogue and his conversations with the ghosts of his past like his revered brother Ben; there was a melting of the barriers between inner and outer worlds that gave to the play its disturbing, poetic quality. (Years later I would learn that Arthur Miller had originally conceived of the play as a monodrama with the title The Inside of His Head).

In the intervening years, Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our domestic Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace, his mad scene on the heath a frantic seed-planting episode by flashlight in the midst of which the once-proud, now disintegrating man confesses, ?I?ve got nobody to talk to.? His salesmanship, his family relations, his very life?all have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric; yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to; nobody to listen. Perhaps the most memorable single remark in the play is the quiet observation that Willy Loman is ?liked . . . but not well-liked.? In America, this is not enough.

* * *

Nearly fifty years after its composition, Death of a Salesman strikes us as the most achingly contemporary of our classic American plays. It has proved to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the thirty-four-year-old playwright to temper his gifts for social realism with the Expressionistic techniques of experimental drama like Eugene O?Neill?s Strange Interlude and The Hairy Ape, Elmer Rice?s The Adding Machine, Thornton Wilder?s Our Town, work by Chekhov, the later Ibsen, Strindberg, and Pirandello, for by these methods Willy Loman is raised from the parameters of regionalism and ethnic specificity to the level of the more purely, symbolically ?American.? Even the claustrophobia of his private familial and sexual obsessions has a universal quality, in the plaintive-poetic language Miller has chosen for him. As we near the twenty-first century, it seems evident that America has become an ever more frantic, self-mesmerized world of salesmanship, image without substance, empty advertising rhetoric, and that peculiar product of our consumer culture ?public relations??a synonym for hypocrisy, deceit, fraud. Where Willy Loman is a salesman, his son Biff is a thief. Yet these are fellow Americans to whom ?attention must be paid.? Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success?which is to say, the dark side of us.

Write a response to what Oates says about Death. Cite specific lines that really caught your attention (that you may agree or disagree with) and include your thoughts on your first reading of this play.

Due Monday, November 6th.

[juanmax]

Oates says interesting things about A Death of a Salesman. He first tries to express the idea that people read the play and don't identify themselves or any known people with the sad character of Willy Loman. The following quote shows what Oates believes the readers think about when reading the play,
God Almighty, [I?ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away! <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Oates also mentions the very important idea that
Willy Loman is ?liked . . . but not well-liked.? In America, this is not enough.
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Oates also mentions a self discovery that Loman suddenly gets. Loman's supposedly good life, job, and family were all fake. Loman finally sees that he is not a succesful and happy man. Oates puts his ideas like this,
His salesmanship, his family relations, his very life?all have been talk, optimistic and inflated sales rhetoric; yet, suddenly, in this powerful scene, Willy Loman realizes he has nobody to talk to; nobody to listen. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">After reading A Death Of A Salesman, I have developed my own ideas on Willy Loman. I wouldn't say he is a succesful man, but wouldn't say he is a failure and a looser. He has a stable job, a loving wife, and a good life. The problem with him is that he is not happy with what he wants. The American dream is all over his head, and keeps wanting more and better for him and his family. He did a mediocre job raising his children and achieving personal satisfaction. Anyway, I believe Loman is a typical middle class man struggling in life in search of a better life.

[mariecburt]

I really enjoyed Oates response to Death of a Saleman because it offered a completely new perspective to the one that I had. I never thought that this play could be considered a critisism to American consumerism and how in a way Willy Loman is in all of us- "Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success?which is to say, the dark side of us."

"we are Willy Loman, particularly those of us who are writers, poets, dreamers; the yearning soul ?way out there in the blue.? Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child?s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity??God Almighty, [I?ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!?
I really loved this quote. For me, Willy Loman was a terrible character and a person without depth or honor. After reading this, Willy seems to be a lost dreamer, a character that one can come to love because deep within us is a Willy, a dreamer; and as she says that dreamer is in every writer, poet and dreamer.

I really enjoyed this review because it gave me a completely new perspective on this play. Willy is not a bad person, he is just a dreamer like all of us and maybe the problem with the world today is people like me who judge Willy, because in fact the dreamer, Willy, in all of us is what is keeping us alive.

[lucas89a]

What Oates attempts to do is to "generalize" the meaning of DOAS so it fits every person's story, which in fact may have been Miller's point. In a way Oates clarifies a lot of things; DOAS isn't just Willy Loman's loser and sad story, it is everyone's story (I particularly agreed with him when he highlited writers, poets and dreamers, since it is true: these group of people, like Willy Loman have nothing to hope for than to dream).
As I read the article, I noted that there was some contrast between Biff and Willy. I have always noted something between these two characters, so much that I for a moment thought that the tragic heroe was Biff and not Willy, and that the story was concentrated on Willy's oldest (After thinking about the meaning of tragedy and tragic heroes, I have discarded such perspective). Anyhow, Biff is the thief, while Willy is the salesman (Biff actually declares that the saleman's spirit is not within him). I noted this towards the end of the play when we cna see that Willy is the quixiotic, almost dellusional dreamer while Biff tries to tell him that he is living in a lie; his (Willy's) dreams aren't real. I had thought that these characters where the same when in fact they are counterparts in the scheme. Thus we have found why they both dislike each other so much.
Answering to the very first question in the post, regarding the fear of being associated with this "loser", I agree. Perhaps the reason so many people see Willy as a mere salesman (being the story of a salesman) is because we are afraid of having the same fate: of persuing our dreams and realizing at the end that they are mere dreams.

[dainkelly]

I agree with oates in that we are all a bit lowman, because we do all alter our own reality to fit our dreams. I think that there is something inside all of us that says "you are special", but that if you look from far away we are infact, regular, that we arent as great as we belive we are. I think that DSM (death of a salesman) really makes the viewer or reader in our case realiza that everybody thinks of themselves the same way, and in that is what i believe to be the most tragic part of the play. I do however disagree with the part of the article that agrees with willy when he said that he had "no one to talk to", because I think that they didnt talk about his real life enough, only about his illusions, in his real life willy did have a very loving wife, and biff, who despite everything really wanted the best for his father, and the article makes it look as if willy really didnt have anything, when in fact he just didnt value the things he had.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ November 04, 2007 06:57 PM: Message edited by: dainkelly ]</font>

[montanaro.g]

I could not have recognized myself, nor foreseen a time decades later when it would strike me forcibly that, for all his delusions and intellectual limitations, about which Arthur Miller is unromantically clear-eyed, Willy Loman is all of us.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Nobody wants to be a "failure" in life. At least, I don't. Nobody wants to see themselves 20-30 years from now and be in the same situation Willy was. But, we are constantly striving towards success that, most of the time, is out of our reach. Sooner or later we are going to fall into the hands of greed, which is what happened to Willy, and we are going to find ourselves lost in the game we call success.

Dreaming is required of us, even if our dreams are very possibly self-willed delusions. And we recognize our desperate child?s voice assuring us, like Willy Loman pep-talking himself at the edge of a lighted stage as at the edge of eternity??God Almighty, [I?ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">We constantly dream of being great, of being successful (by the way, what is successful?), etc. All of our dreams are our goals in life, even though most of them are some-what crazy. Willy was striving in getting a better work, but if you didn't get one when you were younger, the chances of you getting a better job are low. But, Willy still tried, making him go mad and even neglecting his role in society and within his family. Willy had a dream, MLK had a dream. Most dreams never turn into reality, some do.

Thoughts on the reading of the play...
I really liked this play. It is more realistic, per say, than Hamlet is. Death of a Salesman's themes pertains more to the everyday Joe Shmoo, when Hamlet pertains more to the aristocracy/royalty. I liked the ending of the play, although the first time I did not understand it completely.

[alberto_dacosta]

Oates characterizes Willy as a lost dreamer, drifting along in life with the outlandish thought that he might one day become someone big, someone important. Throughout the play, the reader observes that what Willy patched up into a facade of success is actually a crumbling edifice built on "talk, optimis[m] and inflated sales rhetoric". Oates is correct: Willy pays the price for living the life of a dreamer in a society that is "frantic [and] self-mesmerized", where the essence of the dream doesn't matter. Oates is right that "dreaming is required", for Willy's dreams were very much "self-willed delusions". Faced with a life he didn't want and confronted with the results of his own idealism as a parent, all that's left to Willy Loman are his dreams: his certainty that he could've done better in Alaska, his belief in his professional success, his notion that he managed to weave together an ultimately successful family. It is the "desperate child's voice assuring us"; it is the persistent belief that one didn't actually fail to become what he or she wanted to be, but rather postponed the date of the transition; it is the persistent belief that one's life veered in the direction they wanted it to.

Willy's realization that "[He's] got nobody to talk to" is the death of a dream and the death of a man. Willy's life was built atop his dream: he raised his children for it, he bought his house for it, he worked hard for it. Without that dream - even though he lives in a world that is distinctly superficial - Willy is an empty husk; after all, who could come to terms with the realization that his or her whole life was squandered to no avail and keep a shred of sanity? Willy must confront the "hypocrisy, deceit, [and] fraud" twice; once in his idyllic vision of the American Dream and again in his own personal life. Willy Loman lied to his wife like the American "promise" lied to him; Willy Loman fueled his children's self-esteem and "hypocrisy" just like the American Dream did his. Oates is right: Willy is a lost dreamer. By the end of the play, however, there is no lost dreamer, for there is no dream; Willy is a broken man, brought to his knees by the realization that his life was a sequence of falsehoods and that his dream - the thing that had kept him going all these years - was nothing but a scam. The play does reflect "the dark side of us"; it questions our standing dreams, the notions we hold for certain, and begs us to confidently answer to the question: are we ready to confront ourselves in face of the failure of what we hold to be an absolute truth?


I enjoyed the play very much. It is frankly more realistic than Hamlet, and I had an easier time identifying with Willy's mindset than I did with Hamlet's. Willy is, indeed, a common man; he's no prince, no magnate, no contributor to the public good. He's just a simple individual, going about his daily life and trying to make a living. Even then, however, he doesn't escape the gaping maw of failure and deceit. That, in my opinion, is what is truly impacting about the play. The death of a man - of a man who spent his life in the pursuit of a dream - should be something we are capable of mourning for, but in Willy's case it is not - as is evident by his nearly empty funeral. Despite the fact that the trajectory of this man should warrant him some tears, there is nothing but pity for Willy; not the kind that would make you cry, but rather the one that simply elicits a frown and a sigh. All of his life for that? Therein lies the strength of Miller's play and the true tragedy of its protagonist; a man has to confront his life, much like Hamlet, but unlike the noble prince, who dies in a situation that cannot be described as anything short of gloriously chaotic, this man dies nearly like a stray dog: abandoned, forgotten, and neglected. That is where the true tragedy lies, and it is the essence of that tragedy that made the play so impacting to me.

[cjkb90]

?God Almighty, [I?ll] be great yet! A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!?
Except of course, it can.

This line shatters Willy's apparent self-depiction of immortality through the greatness he has achieved. He was never great, and even if he were, magnificent stars also fade away.

Willy Loman has become our quintessential American tragic hero, our domestic Lear, spiraling toward suicide as toward an act of selfless grace

I can see why Willy can be described as a tragic hero, since he is at odds with an enemy much greater, which is corporate America. However, I do not see how his suicide is an act of selfless grace. Suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness.

Arthur Miller has written the tragedy that Illuminates the dark side of American success

This line made me think "how many other Willy Lomans are there out there?" This can be creepy, because if families like this are less uncommon than we might think they are, American society should be reformed.

[rcln]

?Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy??
Afterwards, this statement complements to the fact that Willy lives in all of us?all of us who dream and hope to be in our ideal place in the world. Thus, it is not only the salesmen who should dream, and such desire should not be restricted. A good dream is the impulse we need to strive for success, yet it is simultaneously the delusion which can blind us from reality. Presently, many people, like Willy, are over-inflated by their self-esteem, own ambitions, and the American Dream that they reach such a height where they become vulnerable to slightest failure. They don?t accept their outcome because ?in America, this is not enough.?

?Yet there was an eerie, dreamlike melding of past and present in Arthur Miller?s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman?s ?present-action? dialogue and his conversations with the ghosts of his past like his revered brother Ben??
We could see this contrast when we compare it to Hamlet. In the Shakespearean play, there are no shifts back and forth between the present and the past. Miller uses this strategy to achieve a complete portrait of his main characters and the American Dream. In his dreams, Willy finds hope and courage, as well as disappointments and regrets.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ November 05, 2007 09:12 PM: Message edited by: brucelin ]</font>

[mariaceleste]

One of the questions I?d asked myself as I read through the novel was whether Willy Loman was aware his own eccentricity- of his own madness. I found Oates?s idea that Willy?s dreams are ?self-willed delusions? interesting, and more and more I?ve come to concur with her view. That Willy Loman, eager to escape his solitude, ?breaks the barriers between the inner and outer worlds,? and that by talking to the ghosts of his past, he mitigates his loneliness.
I agree with her claim of the universality of the character of Willy and I like that Oates so accurately ties the context of contemporary American society to the play.