death of a salesman literary essay

Death of a Salesman

Introduction to death of a salesman.

Death of a Salesman a play having “two acts and a requiem” is the masterpiece of Arthur Miller written in 1948 and produced in 1949. The popularity and success of the play demonstrate the strength of its story . The play was adapted for various tableaus, films, and course books across the globe, securing a Pulitzer Prize for Miller. The story of the play revolves around an unfortunate middle-class man who ruins his life, chasing the idea of the American Dream. This unattainable hunt costs him dearly; he seems stuck between fantasy and reality with a resultant loss of his own life. In one of his interviews, Miller mentions that the inspiration for the play is seeing his father struggle during the Depression.

Summary of Death of a Salesman

The play features Willy Lowman, living in New York City with his wife, Linda. Although Willy has worked as a salesman for almost thirty years, yet he has not achieved the real level of success that would allow him to stop tiring himself and afford the household expenditures that swallow his diminishing wages. He constantly compares himself to another salesman, Dave Singleton, who led a successful career and when he died, many people came to bid him farewell.

The play begins when Willy comes home exhausted from a failed trip with his mind full of tensions and worries. He seems sick of daily travels, while Linda, consoles him and suggests that he should ask his boss, Howard Wagner, to get a placement that demands less travel. Willy consents to request his boss the next day. Then, Linda and Willy start talking about their sons Biff and Happy, who are out for a date and are expected to be home soon. Also, she reminds him not to be critical or judgmental toward Biff, but Willy expresses his resentment over Biff’s lazy approach toward life.

Alone in the kitchen, Willy plunges back in time and remembers old times when his sons were young and idealized their father as an upright man. His flashbacks make the readers familiar with his philosophy of success that has derived him to his current unsuccessful state. Compared with his successful neighbor, Charley and his son, Bernard, Willy’s family is more determined and full of the natural charisma required for success. Willy always thought that his son’s rising high school football achievements would offer him university scholarships and make him a successful man. Yet the same neighbor once offered him a job but he refused despite the fact that he used to borrow money from him to cover household expenses and his son Bernard who was kind of a nerd in school, is now a successful lawyer.

Once again Willy drives back in time when he thinks about his brother Ben, who left home at seventeen and made quite a fortune in Alaska and Africa . Willy and Ben’s father abandoned them and Willy compares himself with his successful brother and regrets it. This comparison adds more to his miserable state, making him think that he is not capable of achieving success in life. Disturbed by Willy’s present state, Linda discusses his deteriorating mental state with his sons. She tells them about his failed suicide attempts as well. The boys get chagrined at themselves that they could not bring comfort to their father; Biff immediately decides to join his brother’s sports goods business and he’d go and talk to his old acquaintance for business funding. This idea pleases Willy, who, in turn, gives some incoherent and conflicting advice to his sons.

The next day, Willy goes to his boss, Howard Wagner, to request him for placement close to home. Howard not only refuses his plea but also suspends him from the job. Humiliated and disheartened, Willy turns toward Charley to borrow some money, and this time he encounters Charley’s son, Bernard. Like his father, Bernard has also achieved a respectful status in society, while his own sons are still striving to get settled in life. Stumbling between reality and illusions about success, he heads toward Frank’s Chop House where his sons are waiting for him for dinner.

Soon, Willy arrives and confesses that has been fired but hopes to have some good news from Biff. Biff tells Willy that the meeting with Bill Oliver was a failed attempt. Biff and Willy lock their horn in a disturbing argument that throws Willy backs into the past when young Bernard informs Linda that Biff has failed in a Math test and sets his trip to Boston to meet Willy to resolve this issue since it would be affecting his career. Biff discovers his illegitimate affair, which became Biff’s disillusionment with his father and the values that he taught all his life. After the argument, Biff and Happy leave with two call girls abandoning their father in the restaurant. Once, Willy comes back to his senses asks the waitress the way to a seed shop. Once home, Willy’s disconnection from reality continues as he plants seeds in the middle of the night , hoping to grow a garden. In his distress, he has an imaginary dialogue with his deceased brother who reminds him about a life insurance policy worth $20,000. Willy plans on getting in a car crash so he could at least leave them that money and show how much he cared for his children and wife. Also, how ‘well-liked’ by his friends at the grand funeral.

Back in reality, Willy has a final confrontation with Biff who announces leaving his family for good. After the announcement, Biff goes to his room and cries. Aggrieved by his son’s miserable state, Willy finally decides to commit suicide; he leaves the house and intentionally kills himself in a car accident. Only his family and Charley attend his funeral, sharing their thoughts about his struggling life and tragic end. The play ends with the contrasting opinions of Biff and Happy about their father’s unsuccessful life. Happy decides to stay back and fulfill his father’s ‘American dream’ of becoming successful while Biff plans to leave Brooklyn forever. Linda was confused with the irony of how the house mortgage was finally paid off with no one to live in it.

Characters in Death of a Salesman

Willy Loman : Willy Loman, the main protagonist of the play, is a simple family man and Linda’s husband. He also has a brother, Ben, and two young sons, Happy and Biff. As an aging salesman working in various parts of Europe, he seems to be an ambitious man, full of sales philosophy and hopes for a bright future for his son. In fact, he chases the American dream and aspires to enjoy the bliss of life with his family. Unfortunately, his hard work and lowly income not only weakens his determination but also leads him to suffer from anxiety and stress. His mediocre career, estranged relationship with his son Biff and some past mistakes steal the remaining joy of his life. His constant failures and suffering make him stand at the place where he begins to hallucinate. Unfortunately, his sons never understand the intensity of this pain despite Linda’s efforts to make them understand the traumatic state of their father. These worries force the old man to commit suicide.
Linda Lowman: Willy’s wife and mother of Happy and Biff, Linda is a loving lady as she always shares the worries of her husband, making him believe that one day he will taste the fruits of his untiring efforts. Although she supports him in his dreams of prosperity and success, she knows that it is impossible for him to live a life full of wonders. Despite Willy’s disturbed mental state, she stands by him and even rebukes his son for not living up to his father’s expectations.
Biff Loman: The older son of Linda and Willy Loman, Biff is a good and promising athlete and bright student but he never graduates from school. His life is moving at a smooth pace until he discovers his father’s extramarital relationship and becomes mentally upset. Willy wishes him to become a successful businessman, but he flees to the west, following his instinct to become a business tycoon. Despite trying his luck several times, Biff fails to win the admiration of his father. In the end, he admits that he has been chasing the shadow and wishes to lead a normal life.
Happy Loman: The younger son of the Loman family, Happy works as a manager in a store and seems to be a contented person. However, his father thinks that he has not made the right choice in life. He is shown as a really happy person in life with a single flaw that he is a womanizer. Despite his claim that he does not want girls, he fails to avoid them.
Charley : As a successful businessman living in Willy’s neighborhood, Charley helps Willy often with money for paying bills. Once he offers him a job that Willy refuses, claiming he shares distant views about success in life. Although Willy considers his children more practical and successful, he seems jealous of his social status.
Bernard: The intelligent and successful son of Charley, Bernard is a sober young man with a lot of potentials. Unlike his father, he has achieved success and status in society by becoming a successful lawyer. However, Willy’s jealousy toward their success never lets him praise his success.
Ben Loman: Willy’s late brother, Ben proves a constant reminder to the family due to his role of leaving his family years ago to try his fortune elsewhere. His travels to Africa and Alaska and his story of becoming a millionaire reverberates throughout the play. Although he is talked about like a dead person in the play, his success and prosperous life become a model for Willy to follow. He gets obsessed with his brother’s success that he forgets to accept the bitter reality of his own life.
Howard Wagner: Willy’s boss, Howard is shown as a stout and stern kind of person. As a pragmatic manager, he knows how to apply his principles, and caring only for his own interests, and not the problems of his employees. In fact, he is the epitome of a capitalistic owner, who refuses to understand Willy’s plight and when Willy tries to argue, he instantly sacks him.
The Woman: The Anonymous woman appears less in the play, yet plays a significant role in the storyline. She lives in Boston and works in a company. Unfortunately, the lady becomes the reason for contention between Biff and his father.

Themes in Death of a Salesman

American Dream; American dream stands as the most significant theme of the play as every member of the Loman family yearns for a better life. Willy and his sons try to chase this dream but get nothing except failure and dissatisfaction. However, some of the characters have shown it as an achievable model, as Howard Wagner, who has inherited this alluring dream from his father, while Loman’s neighbors have achieved this dream, showing how to lead a prosperous life. Willy is the only person who longs to have this bliss. Despite working hard, he fails to bring any improvement in the standard of his life. Biff, his son also faces continuous failures, while Happy is also not living up to his father’s expectations. Disheartened by the failures of his sons and his own tiring life, Will tries to see his dream through his brother’s success but gets nothing.
Modernity: During the 1950s, modernism started to alter the structure of society, making noteworthy changes in various professions. People started depending on modern gadgets, spending a fortune, and still vying to have another gadget just hitting the market. Creating a false idea of the American dream, modernity eventually creeps in the Loman’s life as they see their sons succeeding in the world like their neighbor but faces only mental torture when they see them failing. Howard keeps on working on his radio, making it clear that technological development has replaced manpower.
Opportunity: Although everyone strives to succeed, yet material luck finds those who seek better opportunities. Howard has been tolerating Willy because his father appointed him. Otherwise, he knows Willy does not deserve the job anymore. So, when Willy asks for some changes in his job, he fires him without having any compassion. Willy does not understand the reason for this sudden decision; instead of equipping himself with a better professional attitude , Willy gets more frustrated. Howard, on the other hand, gets an opportunity to find a new potential salesman. In the same way, Willy’s son, Happy, finds an opportunity to have a good job, while Biff wanders to seek one.
Family: The theme of family emerges through the Lomans, who never accept the changing shift of time, an attitude that costs them dearly. Willy constantly tries to materialize his dreams yet ends up with a failure. After his failed attempts, he fixes his attention to his sons, thinking they may fulfill his dreams of the ideal life through their careers. Unfortunately, both of them fail him; Biff is directionless, while Happy does not run after dreams. In contrast to Willy’s failed family, Charley and his son have resounding success with money and career, making their family achieve the American dream.
Ideal Personality: The concept of ideal or well-liked personality is another major theme Miller discusses in the play. Willy constantly advises his sons that they must be well-liked. To him, well-liked persons are the demands of industry and market as he has seen it during his career as a salesman. It also transpires to them that an ideal personality wins success as they see it in Charley’s son as well as in Howard, the boss of Willy.
Hallucination: Hallucination also stands as another important theme of the play. Willy Loman’s series of failures and constant sufferings drag him to a place where he cuts himself from the biting reality and begins to hallucinate. His hallucination features his successful brother, Ben, who has used his talents to make a fortune. Although Ben is dead, he appears in the form of hallucinations, a state that drags Willy toward disappointment and further mental torture.
Pride: The play projects this theme through the character of Willy Loman. He is an extremely proud man even though he does not have any reason to be proud as his sons have failed him and he is fired from the job. Despite struggling financially, he constantly praises his ideas of success in business and the little accomplishments of his sons. His pride never lets him consider the real success and efforts of his neighbor, Charley, his neighbor, who helps him overcome his financial difficulties.
Betrayal: Although betrayal is a minor theme of the play, it casts a gloomy shadow on various characters as Willy betrays his wife Linda by having an extramarital affair. Similarly, Biff constantly dodges his father’s dreams and tries to figure out his own ways of living. Linda thinks that Biff is betraying his father by not fulfilling Willy’s desires.
Reality versus Illusion : Reality against illusion is another major theme as Willy constantly dreams to be a successful businessman, and in case, if he fails to win glory, his sons will carry the flag to win success for him. Unfortunately, his desires for amassing wealth are only illusions that do not turn into reality despite his struggle. To his surprise, his sons also go against his dreams.

Writing Style of Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman shows Miller’s style of writing simple and direct dialogues and presenting down-to-earth real characters. He has used sharp irony and satire to show the poisonous impacts of the American dream upon the middle class. The writer has juxtaposed realism with fantasy at various points in the text to comment on the hollow and unrealistic approach of the people toward the false standards of society. The success of this writing lies in the skillful use of other literary elements, complex characterization , and simple sentence structure though diction at times becomes highly complex, showing the mental state of the Loman family.

Literary Devices in Death of a Salesman

Action: The main action of the play comprises the struggle of Willy Lowman, a salesman by profession. The rising action occurs when Willy is fired from the job, while the falling action occurs when Willy blames himself for the troubles his family is going through.
Allegory : Death of a Salesman shows the use of allegory by presenting the main idea of how the person’s nonadoptive nature creates trouble for himself and the people who belong to him.
Anaphora : The play shows the use of anaphora at different places as give in the below examples, i. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe that’s my trouble. I’m like a boy. I’m not married, I’m not in business, I just—I’m like a boy. Are you content, Hap? You’re a success, aren’t you? Are you content? (Act-I) ii. Willy: Where is he? I’ll whip him, I’ll whip him! Linda: And he’d better give back that football, Willy, it’s not nice. Willy: Biff! Where is he? Why is he taking everything? (Act-I) iii. Willy: No, you’re no good, you’re no good for anything. Biff: I am , Dad, I’ll find something else, you understand? (Act-II) These examples show the repetitious use of the phrases “you’re no good”, “only think”, “I’ll whip him”, and “I’m like a boy.”
Allusion : The play shows the use of various allusions as given in the examples below, i. Biff: But you look at your friend….Happy: Yeah, but when he walks into the store the waves part in front of him… I want to walk into the store the way he walks in. (Act-I) ii. Willi: Like a young god, Hercules- something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges stand by? And the buyers I brought and the cheers when he came out, Loman, Loman, Loman. God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. (Act-I) iii. Willy: That’s why I thank Almighty God you are built like Adonises.” (Act-I) The first example alludes to Moses and the remaining two to Greek gods.
Conflict : There are two types of conflicts in the play, Death of a Salesman. The first one is the external conflict that is going on between Willy Loman and the competitive world around him as well as his own family. Another is the internal conflict of Willy, his fight with the heavy odds of life, and about the troubles of his life how they are going to be resolved.
Climax : The climax of the play, Death of a Salesman, occurs when Willy confronts his distressed son, Biff, for the last time.
Characters: Death of a Salesman presents both static as well as dynamic characters . Willy’s sons Biff, and Happy are dynamic characters as they change their attitude toward life as well as their father. However, the rest of the characters do not see any change in their behavior as they are static characters like Willy Loman, Linda, Charlie, and Bernard.
Irony : The play shows situational irony in the following examples, i. That’s just what I mean. Bernard can get the best marks in school, y’understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y’understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want. (Act-I) ii. CHARLEY (an arm on Bernard’s shoulder) : How do you like this kid? Gonna argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. The irony is clear in the first example through the mention of Adonises and in the second through the mention of the Supreme Court.
Metaphor : Death of a Salesman shows good use of various metaphors besides the extended metaphors of good versus evil such as, i. I am a dime a dozen, and so are you. (Act-II) ii. The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress. (Act-I) These examples show that characters and the world have been compared to different things to make them feel prominent.
Mood : The Play, Death of a Salesman, shows a melancholic, though it becomes tragic, ironic, and highly satiric at times. Sometimes, it also becomes gloomy when Willy is trapped in the troubles of life
Motif : Most essential motifs of Death of a Salesman are mythic figures, the American West, and the African jungle.
Protagonist : Willy Loman is the protagonist of the play. The text starts with his discontent with his life and ends with his tragic death.
Rhetorical Questions : The play shows the use of rhetorical questions at various places such as, i. CHARLEY: Without pay? What kind of a job is a job without pay? (Act-II) ii. WILLY: What’s the matter with you? I’ve got a job. (Act-II) iii. CHARLEY: Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? These examples show the use of rhetorical questions asked by Charley and Willy but they do not need answers. They are self-explanatory.
Theme : A theme is a central idea that the novelist or the writer wants to stress upon. The play, Death of a Salesman, shows the clash between dream and reality, the idea of the American dream and betrayal.
Setting : The setting of the play is Willy Loman’s house, his yard, and other places he visits in Boston and New York.
Tone : The tone of the text is somber, serious, melancholic, and tragic.
Simile : The play shows the use of similes at various places such as, WILLY: Sure. Certain men just don’t get started till later in life. Like Thomas Edison; I think. Or B. F. Goodrich. (Act-I) ii. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. (Act-I) iii. Like a young god. Hercules — something like that. (Act-I) These use of “like” in these examples show as things have been compared such as men with Thomas Edison, then Willy with an old dog, and then a person with Hercules.
Symbols : Death of a Salesman presents various symbols such as seeds and diamond symbolize Willy’s hope and the American dream and the rubber horse symbolizes false hopes.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 30, 2020 • ( 0 )

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its literary achievement, as such, but is, rather, the impact which it has had on spectators, both in America and abroad. The influence of this drama, first performed in 1949, continues to grow in World Theatre. For it articulates, in language which can be appreciated by popular audiences, certain new dimensions of the human dilemma.

—Esther Merle Jackson, “ Death of a Salesman : Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre”

It can be argued that the Great American Novel—that always elusive imaginative summation of the American experience—became the Great American Drama in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Miller’s masterpiece forms the defining myth of the American family and the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the play’s only rival in American literature in expressing the tragic side of the American myth of success and the ill-fated American dreamers. A landmark and cornerstone 20th-century drama, Death of a Salesman is crucial in the history of American theater in presenting on stage an archetypal family drama that is simultaneously intimate and representative, social and psychological, realistic and expressionistic. Critic Lois Gordon has called it “the major American drama of the 1940s” that “remains unequalled in its brilliant and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its richness of visual and verbal texture, and its wide range of emotional impact.” Miller’s play, perhaps more than any other, established American drama as the decisive arena for addressing the key questions of American identity and social and moral values, while pioneering methods of expression that liberated American theater. The drama about the life and death of salesman Willy Loman is both thoroughly local in capturing a particular time and place and universal, one of the most popular and adapted American plays worldwide. Willy Loman has become the contemporary Everyman, prompting widespread identification and sympathy. By centering his tragedy on a lower middle-class protagonist—insisting, as he argued in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”—Miller completed the democratization of drama that had begun in the 19th century while setting the terms for a key debate over dramatic genres that has persisted since Death of a Salesman opened in 1949.

Miller’s subjects, themes, and dramatic mission reflect his life experiences, informed by the Great Depression, which he regarded as a “moral catastrophe,” rivaled, in his view, only by the Civil War in its profound impact on American life. Miller was born in 1915, in New York City. His father, who had emigrated from Austria at the age of six, was a successful coat manufacturer, prosperous enough to afford a chauffeur and a large apartment over-looking Central Park. For Miller’s family, an embodiment of the American dream that hard work and drive are rewarded, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything. The business was lost, and the family was forced to move to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in a small frame house that served as the model for the Lomans’ residence. Miller’s father never fully recovered from his business failure, and his mother was often depressed and embittered by the family’s poverty, though both continued to live in hope of an economic recovery to come. For Miller the depression exposed the hollowness and fragility of the American dream of material success and the social injustice inherent in an economic system that created so many blameless casualties. The paradoxes of American success—its stimulation of both dreams and guilt when lost or unrealized, as well as the conflict it created between self-interest and social responsibility—would become dominant themes in Miller’s work. As a high school student Miller was more interested in sports than studies. “Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift , and Rover Boys, ” Miller recalled, “and only verged on literature with some of Dickens. . . . I passed through the public school system unscathed.” After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his job that Miller began reading, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world and his vocation: “A book that changed my life was The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up, I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

In 1934 Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan. There he found a campus engaged by the social issues of the day: “The place was full of speeches, meetings and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues. . . . It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.” At Michigan Miller wrote his first play, despite having seen only two plays years before, to compete for prize money he needed for tuition. Failing in his first attempt he would eventually twice win the Avery Hopwood Award. Winning “made me confident I could go ahead from there. It left me with the belief that the ability to write plays is born into one, and that it is a kind of sport of the mind.” Miller became convinced that “with the exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human could do.” He would embrace the role of the playwright as social conscience and reformer who could help change America, by, as he put it “grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” Two years after graduating in 1938, having moved back to Brooklyn and married his college sweetheart, Miller had completed six plays, all but one of them rejected by producers. The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play examining the ambiguities of success and the money ethic, managed a run of only four performances on Broadway in 1944. Miller went to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, tried his hand at radio scripts, and attempted one more play. “I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.” The play was All My Sons, about a successful manufacturer who sells defective aircraft parts and is made to face the consequences of his crime and his responsibilities. It is Miller’s version of a Henrik Ibsen problem play, linking a family drama to wider social issues. Named one of the top-10 plays of 1947, All My Sons won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award over Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The play’s success allowed Miller to buy property in rural Connecticut where he built a small studio and began work on Death of a Salesman .

This play, subtitled “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,” about the last 24 hours of an aging and failing traveling salesman misguided by the American dream, began, as the playwright recounts in his introduction to his Collected Plays , with an initial image

of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons —a method one might call linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be “brought forward” in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment. . . . I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.

The play took shape by staging the past in the present, not through flashbacks of Willy’s life but by what the playwright called “mobile concurrency of past and present.” Miller recalled beginning

with only one firm piece of knowledge and this was that Loman was to destroy himself. How it would wander before it got to that point I did not know and resolved not to care. I was convinced only that if I could make him remember enough he would kill himself, and the structure of the play was determined by what was needed to draw up his memories like a mass of tangled roots without ends or beginning.

At once realistic in its documentation of American family life and expressionistic in its embodiment of consciousness on stage, Death of a Salesman opens with the 63-year-old Willy Loman’s return to his Brooklyn home, revealing to his worried wife, Linda, that he kept losing control of his car on a selling trip to Boston. Increasingly at the mercy of his memories Willy, in Miller’s analysis, “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Reflecting its protagonist, “The way of telling the tale . . . is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical.” The family’s present—Willy’s increasing mental instability, his failure to earn the commissions he needs to survive, and his disappointment that his sons, Biff and Happy, have failed to live up to expectations—intersects with scenes from the past in which both their dreams and the basis for their disillusionment are exposed. In the present Biff, the onetime star high school athlete with seeming unlimited prospects in his doting father’s estimation, is 34, having returned home from another failed job out west and harboring an unidentified resentment of his father. As Biff confesses, “everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” His brother, Happy, is a deceitful womanizer trapped in a dead-end job who confesses that despite having his own apartment, “a car, and plenty of women . . . still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” The present frustrations of father and sons collide with Willy’s memory when all was youthful promise and family harmony. In a scene in which Biff with the prospect of a college scholarship seems on the brink of attaining all Willy has expected of him, both boys hang on their father’s every word as he exults in his triumphs as a successful salesman:

America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ’cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.

Triumphantly, Willy passes on his secret of success: “Be liked and you will never want.” His advice exposes the fatal fl aw in his life view that defines success by exterior rather than interior values, by appearance and possessions rather than core morals. Even in his confident memory, however, evidence of the undermining of his self-confidence and aspirations occurs as Biff plays with a football he has stolen and father and son ignore the warning of the grind Bernard (who “is liked, but he’s not well liked”) that Biff risks graduating by not studying. Willy’s popularity and prowess as a salesman are undermined by Linda’s calculation of her husband’s declining commissions, prompting Willy to confess that “people don’t seem to take to me.” Invading Willy’s memory is the realization that he is far from the respected and resourceful salesman he has boasted being to his sons as he struggles to meet the payments on the modern appliances that equip the American dream of success. Moreover, to boost his sagging spirits on the road he has been unfaithful to his loving and supportive wife. To protect himself from these hurtful memories Willy is plunged back into the present for a card game with Bernard’s father, Charley. Again the past intrudes in the form of a memory of a rare visit by Willy’s older brother, Ben, who has become rich and whose secrets for success elude Willy. Back in the present Willy is hopeful at Biff’s plan to go see an old employer, Bill Oliver, for the money to start up a Loman Brothers sporting goods line. The act ends with Willy’s memory of Biff’s greatest moment—the high school football championship:

Like a young god. Hercules—something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges standing by? And the buyers I brought, and the cheers when he came out—Loman, Loman, Loman! God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!

The second act shatters all prospects, revealing the full truth that Willy has long evaded about himself and his family in a series of crushing blows. Expecting to trade on his 34 years of loyal service to his employer for a nontraveling, salaried position in New York, Willy is forced to beg for a smaller and smaller salary before he is fired outright, prompting one of the great lines of the play: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” Rejecting out of pride a job offer from Charley, Willy meets his son for dinner where Biff reveals that his get-rich scheme has collapsed. Bill Oliver did not remember who he was, kept him waiting for hours, and resentfully Biff has stolen his fountain pen from his desk. Biff now insists that Willy face the truth—that Biff was only a shipping clerk and that Oliver owes him nothing—but Willy refuses to listen, with his need to believe in his son and the future forcing Biff to manufacture a happier version of his meeting and its outcome. Biff’s anger and resentment over the old family lies about his prospects, however, cause Willy to relive the impetus of Biff’s loss of faith in him in one of the tour de force scenes in modern drama. Biff and Happy’s attempt to pick up two women at the restaurant interconnects with Willy’s memory of Biff’s arrival at Willy’s Boston hotel unannounced. There he discovers a partially dressed woman in his father’s room. Having failed his math class and jeopardized his scholarship, Biff has come to his father for help. Willy’s betrayal of Linda, however, exposes the hollowness of Willy’s moral authority and the disjunction between the dreams Willy sells and its reality:

Willy: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.

Biff: You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!

Willy: I gave you an order!

Biff: Don’t touch me, you—liar!

Willy: Apologize for that!

Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!

Willy’s guilt over the collapse of his son’s belief in him leads him to a final redemptive dream. Returning home, symbolically outside planting seeds, he discusses with Ben his scheme to kill himself for the insurance money as a legacy to his family and a final proof of his worth as a provider of his sons’ success. Before realizing this dream Willy must endure a final assault of truth from Biff who confesses to being nothing more than a thief and a bum, incapable of holding down a job—someone who is, like Willy, a “dime a dozen,” no better than any other hopeless striver: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Biff’s fury explodes into a tearful embrace of his father. After Biff departs upstairs the significance of his words and actions are both realized and lost by the chronic dreamer:

Willy, after a long pause, astonished, elevated Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!

Linda: He loves you, Willy!

Happy ,deeply moved Always did, Pop.

Willy: Oh. Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Plays

Doggedly holding onto the dream of his son’s prospects, sustained by his son’s love, Willy finally sets out in his car to carry out his plan, while the scene shifts to his funeral in which Linda tries to understand her husband’s death, and Charley provides the eulogy:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. 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 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.

Linda delivers the final, heartbreaking lines over her husband’s grave: “Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free. . . .”

The power and persistence of Death of a Salesman derives from its remarkably intimate view of the dynamic of a family driven by their collective dreams. Critical debate over whether Willy lacks the stature or self-knowledge to qualify as a tragic hero seems beside the point in performance. Few other modern dramas have so powerfully elicited pity and terror in their audiences. Whether Willy is a tragic hero or Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy in any Aristotelian sense, he and his story have become core American myths. Few critics worry over whether Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero, but Gatsby shares with Willy Loman the essential American capacity to dream and to be destroyed by what he dreams. The concluding lines of The Great Gatsby equally serve as a requiem for both men:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Death of a Salesman is that rare thing: a modern play that is both a classic, and a tragedy. Many of the great plays of the twentieth century are comedies, social problem plays, or a combination of the two. Few are tragedies centred on one character who, in a sense, recalls the theatrical tradition that gave us Oedipus, King Lear, and Hamlet.

But how did Miller come to write a modern tragedy? What is Death of a Salesman about, and how should we analyse it? Before we come to these questions, it might be worth briefly recapping the plot of what is, in fact, a fairly simple story.

Death of a Salesman : summary

The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn’t make a sale, he doesn’t get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family’s table. He wants to get a desk job so he doesn’t have to travel around any more: at 62 years of age, he is tired and worn out.

He is married to Linda. Their son, Biff, is in his thirties and usually unemployed, drifting from one temporary job to another, much to Willy’s displeasure. Willy’s younger son, Happy, has a steady job along and his own home, and is therefore a success by Willy’s standards.

However, Happy, despite his name, isn’t happy with the life he has, and would quite like to give up his job and go and work on a ranch out West. Willy, meanwhile, is similarly dreaming, but in his case of the past, rather than the future: he thinks back to when Biff and Happy were small children and Willy was a success as a salesman.

The Lomans’ neighbour, Charley, offers Willy a job to help make ends meet, but Willy starts to reminisce about his recently deceased brother, Uncle Ben, who was an adventurer (and young Willy’s hero). Linda tells her sons to pay their father some respect, even though he isn’t himself a ‘great man’.

It emerges that Willy has been claiming to work as a salesman but has lately been borrowing money as he can’t actually find work. His plan is to take his own life so his family will receive life insurance money and he will be able, with his death, to do what he cannot do for them while alive: provide for them. Biff agrees reluctantly to go back to his former boss and ask for a job so he can contribute to the family housekeeping.

Meanwhile, Willy asks his boss, Howard, for his desk job and an advance on his next pay packet, but Howard sacks Willy. Willy then goes to Charley and asks for a loan. That night, at dinner, Willy and Biff argue (Biff failed to get his own former job back when his old boss didn’t even recognise him), and it turns out that Biff once walked in on his father with another woman.

Willy goes home, plants some seeds, and then – hearing his brother Ben calling for him to join him – he drives off and kills himself. At his funeral, only the family are present, despite Willy’s prediction that his funeral would be a big affair.

Death of a Salesman : analysis

Miller’s family had been relatively prosperous during the playwright’s childhood, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious. This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen in much of his work for the theatre.

Death of a Salesman represented a decisive change of direction for the young playwright. His previous success as a playwright, All My Sons , was a social drama heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen, but with his next play, Miller wished to attempt something new. The mixture of hard-hitting social realism and dreamlike sequences make Death of a Salesman an innovative and bold break with previous theatre, both by Miller and more widely.

In his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which Miller wrote to justify his artistic decision to make an ordinary American man the subject of a theatrical tragedy, Miller argued that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes.

As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

Death of a Salesman is an example of this ethos: Loman, who cheated on his wife and lied to his family about his lack of work and his reliance on friends who lent him money, makes his last gesture a tragic but selfless act, which will ensure his family have money to survive when he is gone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Miller is somehow endorsing the hero’s final and decisive act. The emphasis should always be on the word ‘tragedy’: Loman’s death is a tragedy brought about partly by his own actions, but also by the desperate straits that he is plunged into through the harsh and unforgiving world of sales, where once he is unable to earn money, he needs some other means of acquiring it so he can put food on the table for his family.

But contrary to what we might expect, there is something positive and even affirmative about tragedy, as Arthur Miller views the art form.

For Miller, in ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, theatrical tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life, but there is something affirmative about the events leading up to this final act, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man – a man willing to take a moral stand and evaluate himself justly – in the way that it has.

Does Willy Loman deserve to be pushed to take his own life just so his family can pay the bills? No, so there must be something within society that is at fault. Capitalism’s dog-eat-dog attitude is at least partly responsible, since it leads weary and worn-out men like Willy to dream of paying off their mortgage and having enough money, while simultaneously making the achievement of that task as difficult as possible. When a younger and better salesman comes along, men like Willy are almost always doomed.

But by placing this in front of the audience and dramatising it for them, Miller invites his audience to question the wrongs within modern American society. Thus people will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve it. The hero’s death is individually tragic but collectively offers society hope.

So it may be counter-intuitive to describe a tragedy like Death of a Salesman as ‘optimistic’, but in a sense, this is exactly what it is. Miller takes the classical idea of the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , and updates this for a modern audience, too: the hero’s tragic flaw is redefined as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society.

There is something noble in his flaw, even though it will lead to his own destruction. So really, the flaw is not within the individual or hero as much as in society itself.

A key context for Death of a Salesman , like many great works of American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, is the American Dream: that notion that the United States is a land of opportunity where anyone can make a success of their life and wind up stinking rich. Miller’s weaving of dream sequences in amongst the sordid and unsatisfactory reality of the Lomans’ lives deftly contrasts the American dream with the American reality.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman”

This is a very insightful and convincing appreciation. What it misses is any idea that Miller’s being Jewish may have had a hand in helping him to see why the American dream and its popularity-cult needed to be criticized. The word “cult” in “populairty-cult” says it all, because “The Death of a Saleman” is at its core a play about idolatry, the Ol,d Testament theme against which its prophets railed the most.

Willy is portrayed as an idol-worshipper, whereas his friend, Charely, and Charley’s son, Bernard, are both seen as devotees of the “true” God, in whose religion the human being is always endowed with dignity and always seen as an end in himself, never as a means to some other end. The play, in fact, asks a very Jewish question. If the true God and the false god both require sacrifice, how can you ever know which is which? And its tragedy supplies us with Miller’s answer: those who worship idols discover in the end that THEY are the sacrifice!

Miller, like Philip Roth later on, was a Jewish-American inheritor of the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition, a tradition in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremia en Ezekiel continually used their verbal art to expose Israel’s stinking moral corruption, foreseeing nothing but doom if it continued in irs idolatrous ways. Change ancient Israel to America, change the average Israelite of that time to Willy Loman now: both wind up destroying themsevles for the very same reason: with all the good will in they world, they have no self-knowledge and spend their whole lives worshipping a false god, deluded in the belief that they are worshipping the true one.

Their mistake in both cases only becomes apparent when it is time to offer the sacrifice, but by then, of course, it is always too late!

Perfect analysis, particularly when viewed in regards to recent events, involving American involvement with Israel dogma

Analysis of "Death of a Salesman"

Categories: Death of a Salesman

About this sample

Words: 847 |

Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 847 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Body paragraph 1: the illusion of the american dream, body paragraph 2: the demise of the traditional family, body paragraph 3: the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, body paragraph 4: the evolving definition of success, counterargument: critiques and alternatives, references:.

Trandell, Jesica et al. "American Dream: Is the American Dream Dead or Alive?" Michael H. Conseur Company, 2020, https://www.ihcnp.com/american-dream/.
"Family Dynamics - a Look at the American Family." Walden University, http://www.waldenu.edu/connect/newsroom/publications/articles/2012/08-family-dynamics-a-look-at-the-american-family.
Kasser, Tim. "Materialistic Values and Goals." Psychology Today, 21 June 2012, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-and-the-good-life/201206/materialistic-values-and-goals.
Ramasubbu, Shantala. "Death of a Salesman: A Mindmap and General Notes." Ramasubbu, 2011, https://ramasubbutech.blogspot.com/2011/02/death-of-salesman-mindmap.html.
SparkNotes Editors. "SparkNote on Death of a Salesman." SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2002, http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/salesman/.

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105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Examples

Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis.

Death of a Salesman

By arthur miller, death of a salesman study guide.

Arthur Miller 's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial element, reducing most plot to the confines of the nuclear family. Death of a Salesman focuses on two sons who are estranged from their father, paralleling one of Miller's other major works, All My Sons , which premiered two years before Death of a Salesman.

Although the play premiered in 1949, Miller began writing Death of a Salesman at the age of seventeen when he was working for his father's company. In short story form, it treated an aging salesman unable to sell anything. He is berated by company bosses and must borrow subway change from the young narrator. The end of the manuscript contains a postscript, noting that the salesman on which the story is based had thrown himself under a subway train.

Arthur Miller reworked the play in 1947 upon a meeting with his uncle, Manny Newman. Miller's uncle, a salesman, was a competitor at all times and even competed with his sons, Buddy and Abby. Miller described the Newman household as one in which one could not lose hope, and based the Loman household and structure on his uncle and cousins. There are numerous parallels between Abby and Buddy Newman and their fictional counterparts, Happy and Biff Loman : Buddy, like Biff, was a renowned high school athlete who ended up flunking out. Miller's relationship to his cousins parallels that of the Lomans to their neighbor, Bernard .

While constructing the play, Miller was intent on creating continuous action that could span different time periods smoothly. The major innovation of the play was the fluid continuity between its segments. Flashbacks do not occur separate from the action but rather as an integral part of it. The play moves between fifteen years back and the present, and from Brooklyn to Boston without any interruptions in the plot.

Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway in 1949, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman and directed by Elia Kazan (who would later inform on Arthur Miller in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee). The play was a resounding success, winning the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Tony Award for Best Play. The New Yorker called the play a mixture of "compassion, imagination, and hard technical competence not often found in our theater." Since then, the play has been revived numerous times on Broadway and reinterpreted in stage and television versions. As an archetypal character representing the failed American dream, Willy Loman has been interpreted by diverse actors such as Fredric March (the 1951 film version), Dustin Hoffman (the 1984 Broadway revival and television movie), and, in a Tony Award-winning revival, Brian Dennehy.

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Death of a Salesman Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Death of a Salesman is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Significant of the tittle in 600 words.

I think the title refers to both the death of Willy the salesmen and the death of his dreams. Willy's dreams of success turn to disillusionment when he cannot compete in the capitalist world. An extended metaphor might also involve Capitalism and...

death of a salesman

Charley visits because he is worried about Willy.He knows Willy is a proud man and he wants to help him, though Willy isn't really willing to take his help.

Please submit your questions one at a time.

How have biff and happy responded to their father’s condition

Biff denies responsibility for his father's condition, but he is forced to acknowledge that he is linked to his father's guilt and irrational actions. I think happy is just stressed about it.

Study Guide for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman study guide contains a biography of Arthur Miller, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman Summary
Character List

Essays for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Shattered Dream - The Delusion of Willy Loman
Perceptions of Self Worth and Prominence: Spaces and Settings in Death of a Salesman
Sales and Dreams
Musical Motifs
Death of A Salesman: Shifting of the American Dream

Lesson Plan for Death of a Salesman

About the Author
Study Objectives
Introduction to Death of a Salesman
Relationship to Other Books
Notes to the Teacher

Wikipedia Entries for Death of a Salesman

Introduction
Characters and cast

Death of a Salesman: Literary Analysis Essay

A radical innovative strategy in the literary analysis of a text in the modern literary learning and appreciation has been that of the literary experience which insists on the appreciating of a literary work as it is experienced by the reader and the elimination of the intimidating elements of literary analysis and appreciation including the specialized terminology and the categorization. A literary analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman , one of the most celebrated plays in American literature, as to draw out its theme, plot, structure, character, and setting proves that the literary merit of the play is astonishingly great. This kind of analysis is often counted in an understanding of the ideas and messages conveyed by the novel and the identification of the literary tools used by the writer in order to gain the expected literary effect will assist in such an analysis. Therefore, this literary analysis has been of supreme literary value as it helps one in a better understanding and greater appreciation of the Death of a Salesman . In a very remarkable analysis of the play, the Death of a Salesman may be well “viewed as a social commentary, a Freudian analysis of family structure, an anti-establishment portrait of capitalism and religion, a documentary on sales. But, according to Arthur Miller, its origin and meaning are of much simpler stuff. The play grew from observations of ordinary life, a simple frame house surrounded by others almost identical to it, a house filled with children who will grow and leave a house that will one day be full of strangers. It is a play about the fabric of family life; the day-to-day banter among family members, as well as the moments of intense joy and sorrow. It is a play about agony, about a boy’s belief in his father, and a father’s dreams for his sons and himself. Although the play deals with failure and disillusionment, it also celebrates humanity and the love between a father and a son” (“Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Meaning & Art”). The article analyses the celebrated play in order to contribute to a deep understanding of the real meaning, idea, theme, plot, structure, and true merit of the work.

As we have seen, the play was an instant success in the literary circles as well as in the stages and there are various elements that explain the glorious success of the play. This literary analysis, through an investigative examination of the play, aims at bringing out the elements that went into the success of the play. Therefore, it is important to begin this analysis of the play with a short investigation of the plot followed by a serious explication of the supreme themes of the play. Basically, the play is concerned with the life and death of a salesman who lived in a world of dreams and completely avoided the thoughts of reality. Death of a Salesman needs to be addressed on the basis of this ultimate fact of the play. This best-known work by Miller treats the ending hours in the life of Willy Loman, an old salesman. On a specific day, Loman quarrels constantly with Biff, his older son, who has come back home after spending time out West. He is also rebuked by his company after more than 30 years of strenuous sweat for it. He continues to scrounge money from one of his previous friends to conceal the fact that he has not been earning anything from his sales work. He “conjures up the presence of his dead brother and other memories of a happier past; recalls as well the traumatic moment when Biff, a teenager, discovered him in a hotel room with another woman; and, finally, because he is worth more dead than alive (thanks to an insurance policy), kills himself at the wheel of his automobile” (Walsh). Thus, the play culminates in the death of the salesman. There are important questions regarding his suicide that have been faced by the reader. However, the epilogue of the play has been of significant consideration in an understanding of the meaning of the play. Thus, we find that in the epilogue Willy’s neighbor defends his memory, “Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” (Miller).

The theme of the literary work has been one prominent element of literary analysis and this discussion on the play Death of a Salesman needs to include an investigation of the major themes underlining the work. Therefore, it is significant to mention that a primary reading or analysis of the play can be instrumental in an understanding of the key themes that run through the play. Thus, in this literary analysis, we may understand the most prominent themes of the play as the American dream, abandonment, betrayal, and the like. The effect of each of these themes on the main characters is worth analyzing. To explicate on these basic themes, we can very well understand that Willy sincerely believes in the promise of the American Dream—that a “well-liked” and “personally attractive” man in business will absolutely and deservedly obtain the material comforts that the modern American life offers. Strangely, his obsession with the outward qualities of attractiveness and likeability is contrary to a more coarse, more rewarding understanding of the American Dream that identifies hard work without grievance as the means to triumph. “Willy’s blind faith in his stunted version of the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when he is unable to accept the disparity between the Dream and his own life… Willy’s life charts a course from abandonment to the next, leaving him in greater despair each time… Willy’s primary obsession throughout the play is what he considers to be Biff’s betrayal of his ambitions for him” (Death of a Salesman: Study Guide: Themes). Our understanding of these primary themes of the play is augmented by the critical analysis of the play that has been available. When the play is treated as an important commentary upon the society of the time, it is significant to see Willy, representing a normal American, is completely dedicated to a life according to the American Dream which runs through the play as a significant theme.

A prominently notable element of the Death of a Salesman by Miller is that the play has been of great contribution to the literary tradition of America. When the dominant themes in the drama of twentieth-century literature are investigated, perhaps the prominent among them seems to be an attempt to recuperate or restate tragic anxiety about the human state. Thus, we find that a persistent apprehension about the decisive meaning of human suffering has been reflected, in one way or another, in the works of all of the major twentieth-century playwrights. The contribution of the American drama in this regard is worth mentionable as a particular concern of this literature has been to deal with the modern face of suffering. Arthur Miller is perhaps the most successful dramatist in the American group in terms of his ability to formulate coherent mythic patterns. Miller demonstrates his superiority to other American dramatists in the symbolic interpretation of universal dimensions of collective experience through Death of a Salesman . The play becomes conceivably the most nearly mature myth about human torment in an industrial age. Miller has formulated, in the play, a declaration about the nature of humanitarian crises in the modern era which seems, evermore, to be valid to the entire structure of civilized experience. “The superiority of Death of a Salesman over the other worthy American dramas…is the sensitivity of its myth: the critical relationship of its central symbol—the Salesman—to the interpretation of the whole of contemporary life.” (Jackson 7-8). Thus, the play has got great relevance in the American literary tradition as it contributes to the general themes of American literature and the literature of the twentieth century in general.

Another of the dominant themes of the play has been the inability of the chief characters to differentiate meaningfully between reality and illusion and this becomes especially important as the general mood of the play tends to move in this direction and the total experience of the different characters is based on this essential nature of the play. All through the play, we find that the Romans in general and Willy, in particular, cannot discriminate between reality and illusion. This becomes one of the major themes and sources of conflict in the play. Willy is not able to identify who he and his sons are. He conceives that they are great men who have every potential to be victorious in the business world. Regrettably, the notion proves itself to be wrong as they cannot, in reality, be successful. “This reality versus illusion problem eventually brings about Willy’s downfall. In the end, Willy believes that a man can be “worth more dead than alive.” Charlie, always the voice of reality tells Willy, “A man isn’t worth anything dead.” Willy is also unable to see change. He is a man lost in the modern era of technology. (Theme). Now, to discuss the structure of the play by Miller, it is evidently a play in three parts, two Acts and the Requiem. The play is structured to include three different days in three sections and the first two sections deal with the main themes and elements of the play through the reflections of Willy with the use of flashbacks which form a central element in the overall structure of the play. The play beginning in the present moves back into the past through flashbacks. And, this forms a significant tool for the author. “The events that took place in the past expose for the reader the situations that have led up to the present-day boiling point in the Loman household.” (Structure). This clearly reveals the structure of the play and this structure can very well be rated as the dramatist’s essential way of dealing with the themes of the play most effectively.

It is also essential to have a clear idea about the characters of Death of a Salesman and their specific importance in an overall analysis of the play. Thus, we can see that Willy Loman, the protagonist of the play, is an unconfident, self-deluded salesman. Most essentially, he is a strong believer in the concept of the American Dream which, as he thinks, would make him a successful person. In fact, he never achieves success in life. When his sons also fail to achieve this same success that he hoped for, Willy becomes a terribly disappointed person which turns him go mentally disabled. The overpowering and irresistible apprehension which the character feels due to the actual difference between what he hoped for and what he gained along with other powerful elements in his character such as the social elements contribute to the wider appeal of the play. The other main characters include the two sons of Willy, Biff, and Happy, Linda the wife of Willy, Charley, Bernard, Ben, and the unnamed woman. All these characters have an important contribution to make, in one way or other, towards the success of the play.

There are several ways to analyze the play and various ways of critical approaches contribute to an analysis of the play. One of the most essential types of criticism that can be applied to this play is archetypal criticism and when evaluated from this point, the play is rated very significantly in a way that it represents the culture of a society. This remains one background contributor to the volumes of literature that has been written on the myth of the American Dream. As we have already analyzed, one prominent theme of the play has been that of the American Dream as represented and illustrated through the central characters of the play. Thus, the culture and tradition of an entire generation and a group of people have been very essentially reflected through the masterly play by Miller. It incorporates and reflects fading dreams of a nation as well as the real potency of a myth as the American Dream. It also points to the archetypal myths that have been central to an entire community. The 1930 Depression seemed to smash all the promises America had made to its citizens. The 1929 stock market crash ended a particular version of history that is optimistic and positive. In an overview, it seemed that the American dream faded. However, it was not absolute. “Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. Arthur Miller knew this. When Charley, Willy Loman’s next-door neighbor, says that “a salesman is got to dream,” he sums up not only Willy’s life but a central tenet of his culture.” (Bigsby vii). Thus, we can very well argue that the play by Miller has been instrumental in keeping the optimistic spirit of the cultural myth of an entire nation. This is the real significance of the play by Arthur Miller.

Another remarkable element in the character of Willy who mythologizes people around is relating to the mythological way of understanding the play. For example, he compares Biff and Happy to the mythic Greek figures Adonis and Hercules as they are identified by him as apexes of “personal attractiveness” and power through “well-liked” -ness and notably, “to him, they seem the very incarnation of the American Dream.” Willy’s mythologizing proves quite nearsighted, however. Willy fails to realize the hopelessness of Singleman’s lonely, on-the-job, on-the-road death…Similarly, neither Biff nor Happy ends up leading an ideal, godlike life; while Happy does believe in the American Dream, it seems likely that he will end up no better off than the decidedly un-godlike Willy” (Death of a Salesman: Study Guide: Mythic Figures). Therefore, the use of such mythic figures also needs to be understood on the basis of an archetypal way of dealing with this literary piece.

There have been a large number of critical works that concentrate on the various merits of the play and an overall discussion of what elements go into the making of the play an important achievement in the American literary tradition brings about a number of conclusions. In an ultimate conclusion, it is not possible for a common reader of the play to arrive at all the elementary aspects of this literary achievement. There have been severe criticisms as well about the merit of the play. However, no analysis of the play can conclude without paying attention to the true merits of the play that distinguishes it from the countless volumes of literary pieces in a similar stratum. “There are a hundred ways to see the play, as Miller himself knew, bogus ways and true ways. We can smile when Miller tells us that as one audience left the play he heard a man, probably a salesman, tell another that New England always was a lousy territory. But something about the play strikes deep now, and did in 1949, and will. This something is the poetry of the play, not something that can be isolated in particulars, but the way the whole play ranges out from its center which is Willy, the way it echoes far past its own American images, the way it demands a hearing for its own sentimentality and exaggeration. The great issues the play embodies are human issues brought to a focal point on the American continent.” (Heyen 48). In an ultimate conclusion to the literary analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, it can be well established that the merit of the literary piece is far superior and the several awards and the long-lasting recognition it has achieved proves the true class of the play as well as the playwright.

Works Cited

Bigsby, Christopher. Introduction: Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts by Arthur Miller. (n.d). Penguin Classics. 1998. vii.

“Themes, Motifs & Symbols.” SparkNotes. 2006.

Walsh, David. “Arthur Miller, An American Playwright.” World Socialist Web Site.org. 2005.

“Death of a Salesman: Study Guide: Themes, Motifs & Symbols.” SparkNotes. 2006.

Heyen, William. “Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and the American Dream.” New York: Chelsea House. 1988. 48.

Jackson, Esther Merle. “Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre.” New York: Chelsea House. 1988. 7-8.

“Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Meaning & Art” Yahoo: Geocities. 2008.

Miller, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman.” Penguin Classics. 1998.

“Theme, Death of a Salesman.” Homework Online. 1998-2008. 2008.

“Structure, Death of a Salesman.” Homework Online. 1998-2008. 2008.

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Death of a Salesman

Read our detailed notes on the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Our notes cover Death of a Salesman summary and analysis.

Introduction

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, is written in 1949, is a modern tragedy and is considered both the masterpiece of the playwright and foundation of modern American drama. The play is awarded various honors and awards that also includes the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

Initially the play was titled as The inside of His Head, however, later he appears dissatisfied with the title and conferred the second title of the play i.e., Death of a Salesman. We, from the 1 st title, get a deep intuition into the psychosomatic temperament of the central character who is a salesman.

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller reconnoiters subjects of money, death and the loss of individuality. Other than the American Dream, Willy Loman desires nothing. He craves his brother’s prosperity and endeavors for a flawless life, nonetheless, he frequently is unsuccessful to accomplish his dreams.

He, as a salesman, is subject to the impulses of the flea market and thinks that it is this job that can only rise him in the world of business. But, due to a miserable financial status, he couldn’t secure a loan for his son to start his own business. And in the end, Willy commits suicide, realizing his so little accomplishments in his life.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary

Willy Loman, after having set out on a sales trip to Portland, Maine that morning, returns to his Brooklyn home very late at night since he continually drove his car off the side of the road. Willy, who is now sixty-three years old, has been working as a traveling salesman for more than thirty years. Recently, his sales rate has declined as his old costumes are either dying or retiring.

Moreover, the company has taken away his salary so that he works on a straight commission. On his return to home, Linda, Willy wife, ease him and motivates him to ask the master of the company, Howard Wagner, for a place in in the New York office where he his salary will be guaranteed without traveling.

Biff and Happy, Willy’s two sons, upstairs in their bedroom recalls their past happier times of their adolescents and compares it with their disappointing lives of today. Biff, now thirty-four years of age, has held four different jobs since graduating from his high school. He senses that he’s not moving ahead toward anything at all.

At a high school, he was among the best football player but couldn’t get a college scholarship since he failed the mathematics test and declined to earn money for his summer school to graduate. After working on a farm in Texas, Biff has just returned home and Willy, that morning, begins criticizing for his failures to earn money and to find a prestigious profession.

Happy, the younger son of Willy, works as a low-level sales position in New York City, employing most of his time seducing women. Biff and Happy, as they talk, resolve that they can be effective, successful, and happier if they initiate a business of their own, together.

Meanwhile, Willy sits downstairs in the kitchen and talks to himself loudly, recalling happy moments from past: their family car cleaned by Biff and Happy, Biff’s preparation for his important football game, willy’s joyfully working on projects around his own home, his afternoon with a woman in a hotel room on trips to Boston.

Ultimately, Charley, Willy’s neighbor, enters from the next door. While playing play cards and talking to Charley, Willy imagines himself talking to his elder brother, Ben. Ben once invited Willy to Alaska and ask him to join him in order to make his fortune. Willy moves outside the kitchen, after Charley leaves home, and is still caught up in his imagined conversation with his elder brother.

Meanwhile, Linda comes downstairs and speaks to Biff and Happy that she dreads that Willy is planning to kill himself as she had found a piece of rubber hose that was connected to a gas pipe in the basement. The conversation turns to dreams when Willy returns home: of Biff becoming a successful entrepreneur and a salesman that Willy has of him. Willy advises Biff, upon which the whole family agrees, to see Bill Oliver, one of his former bosses, and request for a mortgage so that he can start his own sporting goods business.

The very next morning, Willy visits his boss, Wagner, to requests for a place in the New York office. However, despite getting a new place, Wagner fires him from the job. Leaving Wagner’s office, Willy directs his way to Charley’s office to request for a mortgage to pay off his bills where he meets Bernard, Charley’s son. Bernard was a boyhood friend or Biff and Happy, now a successful lawyer dealing with cases before Supreme Court. Willy, being amazed, inquiries that how he was able to succeed since Biff and Happy failed, however, Bernard asks Willy why Biff never went to school to graduate, after doing badly in a mathematics course for a scholarship.

Happy arranges a dinner in a local restaurant so as to celebrate the successful meeting of biff with Mr. Oliver, however, when Biff reaches he informs that his owner didn’t recognize him, and Biff, as a reaction, angrily stole Mr. Oliver’s fountain pen.

Biff lies to his parents about his meeting (that it was a successful one) when hears about his father’s news that he is fired so as to console them. At the restaurant, happy arranges two women to join them. When Willy excuses for the washroom, Biff and Happy abandon their father and leave the restaurant with their father. While in the washroom, Willy recalls the time when Biff failed his Mathematics test and comes to Boston on a surprise visit and discover him with another woman in a hotel room. It was because of this incident that Biff refused to join summer school and to graduate from high school.

Willy, after leaving the restaurant, resolves on the way to the home that the only way to provide the best livings is that he commits suicide. By doing so, the twenty thousand dollars for his life insurance settlement would come to his family.

When Biff and Happy return from their date with the women, they encounter Linda’s scolding for abandoning their father at the restaurant. In return, Biff angrily accused his father and brother of not taking life seriously and claims that he, now finally, knows himself and will work at the farm with his own hands, that gives him more satisfaction than any other job could. Biff confronts everything and cries at his father’s shoulders.

Willy, moved by Biff’s affectations, leaves home and drives the car to commit suicide and ultimately died. Linda, in the last scene, in the graveyard, talks ironically to Willy that he killed himself in the same way when they ended disbursing for their house.

Death of a Salesman Characters Analysis

Willy loman.

He is a sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman. Willy has started dwelling on past unknown of the present condition. His past life frequently flashes back before his eyes in the last two days of his life. He has two sons, Biff and happy, who he wants to have a cherished lifestyle and worldly success, though he is unable to help to achieve it. At last, he commits suicide, the last gesture for his family, so that they can have a lavish lifestyle by the insurance money.

He is the elder son of Willy Loman. Biff, thirty-three-year-old, is still in search of himself. The best football player at school, couldn’t get anywhere for further studies. When his owner refused to give a loan, frustrated, he steals his owner’s cheap fountain pen. Though he loves his father, however, because of his defeated state curses him as a fool and a dreamer.

Happy Loman

He is Willy Loman’s younger son, who is somehow successful in his life, he works as a clerk in a store. He is a womanizer, who chases a woman to seek pleasure.

He is a friend and a neighbor of Willy Loman. He provides money to Willy and also suggests him a job.

He, son of Charley, is a successful lawyer who argues cases before the Supreme Court. His success is an indictment for Biff and Happy.

Linda Loman

She is Willy’s wife. She is fearful, however, patient woman. Despite Willy’s failures, she loves him very much and consoles him in his hard times.

Howard Wagner

He is the son of Willy’s boss at the company. He fired him from the company and let him know that he is no more able to work as a salesman

He is a brother of Willy. He is a rich man whose success is an accusation to Willy. He once goes into the jungle and comes out, after a few years, from the diamond mines, a rich man.

The unnamed character in the play with whom Biff caught his father in a hotel room and due to this discovery he refuses to join the summer school for further studies.

Themes in Death of a Salesman

Failure of the american dream.

One of the most important themes of the play Death of a Salesman is the failure of the American dream. The American dream symbolizes a promise and commitment of opportunity and freedom for all. Those who follow the American dream believed that the only way to accomplish a dream is hard work and those who work hard are only qualified to be the follower of the American dream.

The followers of American dream believe in a happy and prosperous life; moreover, they also believe that those who are born Americans naturally acquires a happy and prosperous life. Moloch, money, and materialism have become the famous song of the followers of American dreams. They believed that, in a material world, one is always destined to have a prosperous and successful life. Failure is no option for the one born in America and if a failure occurs, suicide is much better than that failure.

Willy Loman is also facing this kind of creed behind the American dream in his life. Willy had a natural capability in the field of carpentry, but the craze of earning more money and a bright future made him choose the field of business with an occupation of a salesman. He spent the mature and productive period of his life doing hard work in hopes of having a comfortable and settled life in a later part of life.

Opposing this expectancy, he was downgraded and terminated. He, financially ruined, had to lend money from his friend to pay off his bills.

Furthermore, his son Biff, from whom Willy had great expectations, has ruined his life by not joining the school. Biff, another follower of American dreams, didn’t know how to start his career from the bottom and also wants to start from the top. Biff was not settled in his life, even in the age of Thirty-four, he was moving from one job to another. It was wearisome for Willy to see the unsettled life of both of his son. Failure of his son was equally burdened for him as his own failure.

Crumpled by absolute defeat and great desperateness Willy planned suicide. When his miserable itch overwhelmed him, he committed suicide.

Fake existence

Willy Loman turned out to be an obsessive believer of the deity of success. Success, to him, was life, and life is all about success. He was ambitious to make his dream for successive life a reality. He not only became ambitious is striving towards success but also made his son ambitious, too. There was no limit in his struggle to achieve his dreams as they were natural, however, the consequences of all the struggle that he made turned out to be humiliating.

Willy, throughout his life, encourages his son to realize the principles of the American dreams, but Biff turned out to be immature and reckless boy who couldn’t proper in getting a settled life and a salaried job and turned out to be a briber; Happy carried dishonor by seducing the women in his store whom he had no concern at all. Willy was penniless when fired from the job, and borrowed from his friend Charley, in order to give an impression to his wife, Linda, that he is earning money.

Willy was living a fanciful, fake life that was filled with illusions. He was full of arrogance, egocentric and unreasonably over-assertive. It was because of these flaws that he was unable to accept and face the reality. Sightless to his genuine dilemma he instigated to hide in the sanctuary of illusion. Despite his total failure, he wasn’t accepting his failure. It was more insulting and painful for him to accept his failure.

It was due to this reason, he stopped talking to his friends and avoided people around. He would use to lie to others and was just making himself a fool by a false vision of his popularity.

Nature versus City

The comparison between nature and city is shown through Willy’s love for music. He is a great admirer of natures. When Willy’s self goes close to his nature, the music plays in a loud tune. This melody is a representation of Willy’s sentimental yearning for instinctive rusticity that has exemplified in the affiliation between music and Willy.

It appears that Willy is certainly prone to adore and appreciate nature. When we traced the family background of Willy Loman, we see that Willy father was a wanderer, a musician, a maker of flute and a pioneer. Similarly, his brother Ben was also an adventurer. Willy’s son has strong athletic skills. Thus all of them were wonderful in outdoor skills. However, Willy’s monetary anxieties locked in on him, overwhelming him with the need to produce money.

Morality versus Immortality

The dramatist Arthur Miller has said that besides hunger and thrust, to leave a thumbprint after death is also another strong need of humans. Every human, consciously or unconsciously, has a strong desire to be remembered after his death. Physically man is mortal, however, through his deed, he can make himself immortal. In the play, Willy is a symbol of failure. He is accused, mocked, and humiliated by many. He is considered petty and useless. It was because of this, he planned suicide and the insurance money of twenty thousand dollars will be given to the family which will settle their lives. Willy, by committing suicide made himself immortal.

Death of a Salesman Literary Analysis

The play Death of a Salesman is also subtitled as “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem”. According to the subtitle, the play is divided into two acts and each act is further divided into conversations- the present conversation and the conversation from the past- that are intermingled. The play covers an evening and the day following, however, the action is intermittent with past memories and flashbacks, mostly 17 years back.

The play The Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy that depicts the last days of the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. The play is both emotionally and psychologically realistic when the action occurs in the present; however, when the action occurs in past, the drama appears more dreamlike. For instance, only Willy can see the scenes when his sons Biff and Happy are in high school. Moreover, to inculcate Willy’s elder brother Ben, a rich man whom Willy consulted for advice when things were not functioning well in his life, a flashback system is also used.

The plot of the play is complex not only because it chains past and present events but also as it propagates out of a period of deceits, lies, and reputation. The tragic hero, Willy, is unable to uphold his energetic life on the path as a traveling salesman and is looking for a stable job in New York City. On request for this job, he is fired by his boss, Howard Wagner, the son of the man who hired him in the first place. Furthermore, he is burdened by his Thirty-four-year-old son Biff, who has recently returned from the farms in Texas in hopes of finding a salaried job in New York.

Biff and Happy have moved back to their parent’s house lamenting of their failures and their loss of innocence. Their boyhood friend’s Bernard, success has become accusation for both of them. Only Bernard has realized his dreams. Both brothers, consequently, blame Willy for not directing them well, though their resentment is yet oppressed with respect and affection.

Linda, during the quarrel, discloses before her sons that their father has been attempting to suicide by different means that is he has attempted suicide in a car with series of accidents and also with a hose that is fastened to a gas pipe. Upon hearing this, Biff decides to modify his life for his father. Act 1 of the play closes with the acquainted renunciation of long-standing abrasions and Biff’s promise to create a professional deal in New York.

The act two opens with Biff, Happy and Willy’s meeting at a restaurant. Willy, after being fired from the job, hopes to listen to good news regarding his meeting with his former boss, however, Biff reveals him the scene of the stolen fountain pen.

Shocked, Willy departures to the restroom, where he recalls the crucial and critical moment of his and Biff’s life, i.e., the time when Biff discovers his father with another woman in a hotel room, after coming back from failing math course. Biff, crumpled by his dad’s unfaithfulness with his mother, snubbed to go to summer school and to graduate from high school. This incident was the beginning of the series of trivial tragedies and insignificant robberies that have tumble-down his life.

The family, after meeting in the restaurant, reunite at home. In this gathering, they have the final short-tempered confrontation. Both Willy and Biff accuses each other: Biff accuses his father of not taking his life seriously and calls him the cause of his failures while Willy accuses Biff of spoiling his life without any reason.

Linda, a patient lady, and a peacemaker try to calm them down, however, is shouted down. Biff throws a hose before Willy and asks him whether committing suicide will make a hero out of him or something else. Willy starts weeping and both of them reconciled crying on each other’s shoulders. When the rest of the family goes to sleep. Willy accelerates his car for suicide in hope that the insurance money will provide Biff to initiate his own business and a new life that he greatly needs.

Death of a Salesman

Arthur miller, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Meloni’s Cultural Revolution

June 6, 2024 issue

Paolo Ventura: Rome No. 3 , 2024

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For months now an enormous excavating machine has been drilling deep into central Rome beneath Piazza Venezia, at the foot of the looming Victor Emmanuel II National Monument—a white marble pile of steps and columns that is probably the closest we will ever get to experiencing the grandeur of ancient Rome. Also known as the Altar of the Fatherland, and with an eternal flame for the unknown soldier flanked by a solemn honor guard, the monument is nicknamed “The Typewriter.” Romans have been deflating pomposity for millennia. On another side of the piazza is Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had his headquarters and from whose balcony he delivered speeches to adoring throngs.

Piazza Venezia is one of Rome’s busiest traffic circles—a whirl of cars, buses, taxis, and mopeds with no stoplights or discernible lanes. The excavating machine is working on a third line for the Rome metro, which is expected to take years and is causing endless maddening traffic delays. The drillers constantly encounter the remnants of the ancient city, and the new metro station under the piazza will include a museum with objects unearthed in its construction, which will no doubt rival some of the world’s best archaeological collections.

How can Rome—or Italy for that matter—possibly move forward or adapt to the exigencies of the contemporary world when at every turn the sheer enormity of the past hits with full force? How can one build or do anything new here without being encumbered by the literal and metaphorical weight of history, empire, tradition? It is no wonder that the Futurists wanted a radical break with everything that came before in order to forge something new. The more one engages with Italy, the more one understands why so many political innovations here have been right-wing: Futurism, fascism, Silvio Berlusconi’s postideological, personality-driven politics, the technopopulism and online rage that in the past decade brought antiestablishment and right-wing parties to power. Italy may share political weather patterns with the rest of the West, but what sets it apart is the utter inescapability of these layers of history.

I had come to Rome to try to understand the new cultural priorities of the government of Giorgia Meloni. When she became prime minister in the fall of 2022—the first woman to govern Italy and the first far-right leader to govern in the heart of the European Union—there was widespread international concern. Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party, which she cofounded in 2012, is a grandchild of the neofascist Italian Social Movement, a party formed in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini nursing their defeat. Was fascism back? Was Italy drifting away from France and Germany and closer to Poland and Hungary? Was Meloni’s us-versus-them rhetoric hot air or did it have a real impact? Was Italy a harbinger of the future or a throwback to the past? How worried should we be?

Responses, especially in world-weary Rome, tended to range from boh —the verbal equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders—to insomma , which loosely translates as “Are you kidding? Nothing changes here.” Giuliano Ferrara, the founder of the erudite and witty conservative daily Il Foglio and one of Italy’s sharpest political commentators, told me over lunch, “The only thing we can fear is to become a serious country.” But if we burn through the fog of Italian cynicism and the mixed messages of the government, a clearer picture begins to emerge. It is of a scrappy opposition party in power for the first time, eager to exact some comeuppance and hungry to put its loyalists in important positions yet lacking a deep bench of experienced officials and presentable right-wing intellectuals. It is a picture of the mainstreaming of a postfascist right seeking changes in Italian historical memory—what is emphasized, what is downplayed—and attempting, often ham-handedly and with a dearth of fresh ideas, to forge a modern right in a country that lacks a conservative tradition (comparable to, for example, the UK’s Tories) apart from fascism. Above all, it is an image of an aging country worried about its future and holding on to an idea of its past.

That idea does not reflect the reality of an economically precarious and increasingly multiethnic polity, but it was an electorate driven by fear and resignation, not hope, that brought Meloni to power. This does mark a shift from the past. For decades Berlusconi—eternal optimist, free marketeer, and consummate salesman—promised Italians a bright future. It didn’t happen. Economically the country stagnated. Populism bloomed, feeding on discontent. After a series of strange and often angry coalitions between 2018 and 2021 that scrambled the traditional lines between government and opposition, and a brief technocratic government led by Mario Draghi, a former European Central Bank president who deftly steered the country out of the pandemic, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy appealed to middle-class anxieties. She campaigned on protecting borders, cracking down on immigration, eliminating a “citizen’s income” subsidy for the poor, and upholding traditional family values. With the support of Italy’s public school teachers, public sector workers, factory workers, and shopkeepers, disillusioned constituencies that had once voted left and now drifted rightward, her party won 26 percent of the vote, not a majority, in a national election with the lowest turnout in Italian history.

The far right has been more normalized than defanged, a tendency well underway across the West, but fascism has not returned to Italy. In spite of her party’s postfascist roots—and a small but notable core of supporters with a penchant for Roman salutes—Meloni’s coalition government falls solidly within the mainstream European right. She shares power with Forza Italia, the center-right party founded by Berlusconi, and with the right-wing League party, formerly the Northern League, whose excitable leader, Matteo Salvini, she has kept in check. Her government is probably to the left of the US Republican Party in its belief in a social welfare state. Although she made noises to the contrary before coming to power, she supports the euro (crucial for an economy based on exports), the European Union (whose infusion of more than €100 billion in Covid-19 recovery funds—including for the new Rome metro line—it desperately needs), and NATO . Italy has eight US military bases, and Meloni has been a staunch ally of the United States in its support for Ukraine. Though she does not have a college degree, she is savvy and capable and seeks respect on the world stage. With a solid majority in Parliament, this spring she announced she wanted to change the constitution so that prime ministers would effectively be directly elected. This would weaken the institution of the presidency, which is supposed to stand above partisan politics. It is unclear if she will win this battle—or whether such a change would lead to political stability or autocracy. For now, Meloni has far more room to maneuver in the cultural realm.

Changes to Cultural Institutions

In many ways the cultural dynamics of Italy under Meloni are not greatly changed from those under previous governments. The state still struggles to contend with an enormous patrimony that it does not always have the resources to manage. Tourists come in droves, more than 445 million last year alone. Meloni has appointed her people to important cultural positions All are men and solidly of the right.

As the new general manager of RAI , the state broadcaster—a position with great power in shaping the national conversation—Meloni chose Giampaolo Rossi, a longtime member of far-right parties who on his personal blog has expressed great admiration for Putin and disdain for George Soros. Since he began, viewership numbers have dropped and RAI has faced accusations of censorship for canceling a monologue by a prominent novelist critical of Meloni.

As culture minister, Meloni appointed Gennaro Sangiuliano, a journalist who has also written books on Putin, Xi Jinping, and Hillary Clinton. When he was the director of the TG 2 news channel from 2018 to 2022, it offered a stream of images of dark-skinned people arriving on boats, which created the perception of an immigration crisis that helped keep the populists in power. Since taking office Sangiuliano has repeatedly expressed bold plans to overturn the “cultural hegemony of the left.” In the postwar era the Christian Democrats governed, and the Communist Party, once the largest in the West, eventually had influence over one channel of RAI , while the heads of most cultural institutions, as well as intellectuals, writers, artists, and filmmakers—then and now—leaned left. When I asked Sangiuliano what overturning that “cultural hegemony” meant, he said, “The radical-chic spirit of certain Roman salons tried to transform culture in Italy into something that spoke only to a small circle.” In response, he wanted to give “the national cultural panorama a wider horizon,” and also the international one, where “Anglo-Saxon cancel culture and a dictatorship of wokeness dominate.” In practice, the government is mostly replacing people installed by previous center-left governments.

Sangiuliano notably championed an exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien: “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author.” Meloni attended the opening last fall, and the exhibition has now moved to the Palazzo Reale in Sangiuliano’s native Naples. Meloni’s postfascist right has often looked to fantasy literature for heroes. For years she hosted an annual far-right festival called Atreju, after the warrior-boy hero of the The Neverending Story , who fights a dark force. The Tolkien exhibition’s run in Rome coincided with an exhibition for the centenary of the birth of Italo Calvino, who represents the left-wing cultural elite that Meloni’s government is so eager to supersede. Sangiuliano’s intellectual hero is Giuseppe Prezzolini, who died at the age of one hundred in 1982 and once directed Columbia University’s Italian Academy. Sangiuliano just published a biography of him and has said he admires Prezzolini as a conservative and antifascist. He often cites a favorite Prezzolini saying: “The progressive is the person of tomorrow. The conservative is the person of the day after tomorrow.” Italy’s satirists keep a running tab on Sangiuliano’s gaffes. He recently said that Times Square is in London.

In 2014 a center-left culture minister, Dario Franceschini, opened up the directorships of Italy’s top museums to non-Italians in a reform that also gave these museums more autonomy over their budgets. Sangiuliano told me one of his priorities was to extend that autonomy to more museums, for a total of sixty. This also puts more pressure on them to be financially self-sustaining. And while the posts remain open to non-Italians, all the directors appointed under Sangiuliano have been Italian.

After two terms as director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, a German who recently became an Italian citizen, was named director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, where he succeeded Sylvain Bellenger, who is French. When I went to see him at the Capodimonte, high on a hill overlooking the spectacular Bay of Naples, Schmidt told me his plans for the museum, but he seemed more animated at the prospect of running for mayor of Florence, a step he took soon after we met. In Florence, a city overrun by tourists, Schmidt had been hailed for cracking down on ticket scalpers. (This, too, plays into Meloni’s emphasis on law and order.) Schmidt is running as an independent with the support of the Brothers of Italy and other center and right-wing parties.

Opera directorships have also been caught up in a game of musical chairs and national sentiment. Stéphane Lissner, who is French, sued to keep his post as director of Naples’s San Carlo after the government passed a law saying directors of opera theaters could not serve beyond the age of seventy. In April Sangiuliano named Fortunato Ortombina, the director of Venice’s La Fenice, as the new head of Milan’s La Scala, trumpeting that “after three foreign general directors”—Lissner, Alexander Pereira, and Dominique Meyer—“an Italian” had returned to the position.

An important test case of how Meloni is putting her stamp on culture is the Venice Biennale, one of Italy’s most prominent international stages. As its new president, she picked her friend Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, an erudite novelist, journalist, and intellectual who is a former member of the Italian Social Movement. Buttafuoco has not given any interviews about his vision for the Biennale. He is expected to name the next curator of the Art Biennale and a new artistic director of the Venice Film Festival to succeed Alberto Barbera, an appointee of the left who is widely respected for having made the festival more competitive with the Cannes Film Festival.

Buttafuoco, a Sicilian, is nondoctrinaire and unpredictable. He is a convert to Islam and now a practicing Muslim. One of his novels recounts the Allied liberation of Sicily in 1943 from the sympathetic perspective of the Germans. He has been a regular guest on mainstream television talk shows and has written an affectionate introduction to an autobiographical novel by Paolo Signorelli, a militant in the hard-right Ordine Nuovo group who served a prison sentence for his involvement in the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station, in which eighty-five people were killed, but who was later acquitted. Buttafuoco has also been artistic director of several theaters and has a perch at the Leonardo Foundation in Rome, a nonpartisan think tank funded by Leonardo, Italy’s largest aerospace and defense company.

He seems to see himself in the mold of Gabriele D’Annunzio—a man of intellect, a man of action. The poet, journalist, and politician is something of a hero for the new Meloni right. Buttafuoco has addressed friendly audiences at CasaPound, the radical neofascist social center in Rome. In one speech there in 2012, he defended the idea of a deeper right-wing “tradition” and was critical of “the global right”—presumably the Atlanticist world order—which he called the opposite of the right as espoused by Ezra Pound, D’Annunzio, and the Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti. “I love CasaPound because it operates outside a logic in which souls and existences are turned into a market, in which youth are instrumentalized and deluded. Instead, it offers a laboratory,” Buttafuoco told the audience. He also urged it to “throw out the racists” and “kick them in the ass.”

This year’s Art Biennale, which opened in April, was curated by Adriano Pedrosa, a Brazilian appointed under the previous president, Roberto Cicutto. The theme is “Foreigners Everywhere,” an on-the-nose response to nationalism, with a focus on queer, folk, indigenous, and outsider artists. Pedrosa has said the title has several valences:

First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are you will always encounter foreigners—they/we are everywhere. Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner.

In remarks at the Biennale opening, Buttafuoco was fairly respectful of Pedrosa’s vision. He said that for Venice, “diversity has stood from the outset as a basic condition of normality. A process of mirroring and confrontation with the Other, never perceived in terms of denial or rejection.” It’s hard to know how Buttafuoco will handle his new position’s complex institutional and diplomatic demands. This year Sangiuliano defended Israel’s right to have a national pavilion at the Biennale in the face of opposition; ultimately, the artist representing Israel, Ruth Patir, said she would not open the pavilion until there was a cease-fire in Gaza and release of the Israeli hostages.

Alessandro Giuli, a journalist and author, was appointed the new head of MAXXI , the contemporary art and architecture museum in Rome designed by Zaha Hadid. Giuli hired two well-respected figures: as head of the artistic program Francesco Stocchi, previously a curator at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and as head of the architecture and design program Lorenza Baroncelli, a former artistic director of the Triennale in Milan. “Ambienti 1956–2010: Environments by Women Artists II,” organized by the Haus der Kunst in Munich, just opened. Upcoming exhibitions include one curated by the American architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro and a retrospective of the Arte Povera artist Giovanni Anselmo, organized with the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Giuli, who is close to Meloni, has given considerable thought to how the postfascist right can and should evolve. His book Il passo delle oche (The Goose Step, 2007) criticized the National Alliance party, which was created in 1994 after the neofascist Italian Social Movement disbanded, for not having fully broken with its fascist past. Meloni rose through the ranks of the National Alliance and represented it as youth minister in a Berlusconi government. Giuli’s book was published by Einaudi, a historic left-wing publisher. I met Giuli in his office at MAXXI , and above his desk there was a work of art by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar based on the front page of the antifascist newspaper Giustizia e libertà announcing the death of Antonio Gramsci in 1937. Giuli said Meloni marked a new chapter, and that after some years of rabid populism Italy had returned to “the normal dialectic between conservatives and progressives” and had moved beyond “the dialectic of the people versus the establishment.”

He said MAXXI would fit into the government’s larger geopolitical strategies, including its Mattei Plan for Africa, a €5.5 billion commercial agreement largely focused on energy and preventing immigration. There is already a MAXXI in L’Aquila, the Abruzzo city devastated by an earthquake in 2009, and now there are plans for a MAXXI Med in Messina, which will provide exhibition space and museum-studies training, including for people from the Maghreb. I suggested it sounded like a neocolonial project. Giuli said it was “the exact opposite.” He spoke of the Etruscan kings who turned ancient Rome into a colony and said the African countries that Italy had brutally colonized in the twentieth century later made use of fascist-era architecture. “We realize that Italy committed tragic and violent errors and also that the African world is capable of using, even reappropriating, whatever remains of the colonial presence,” he added.

Buttafuoco and Giuli, along with Annalena Benini, whom Meloni named as the new head of the Turin International Book Fair, are all journalists and contributors to Il Foglio , a center-right daily with sophisticated culture coverage and stylish writing. It is philo-American, Atlanticist, Zionist, pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump, antiabortion, and critical of what it sees as the overreach of the Italian justice system. Before Meloni was elected, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Claudio Cerasa, told me he saw her as Trump-like and inclined to conspiracy theories, but now he sees a normalization. “It’s not fascism—on the contrary, there’s a great spirit of freedom here,” he told me. As evidence, he said Woody Allen was still popular in Italy, and Roman Polanski, too. I asked if that was a good thing. Of course, Cerasa said. The Meloni-era vibe is anti–cancel culture, even though no one has been canceled in Italy, as far as I can tell. For the most part, Italy seems to have skipped the backlash and gone straight to the backlash to the backlash.

Italianità and Its Critics

Beyond the government’s rush to fill positions, there is a battle of ideas underway about nationhood, about what it means to be Italian. Meloni and her government talk frequently about patria , or fatherland. More tellingly, the fascist-era term Italianità —Italianness—has reentered political discourse. Sangiuliano wants to develop a Museum of Italianità in the Emilia-Romagna region. When I asked him to define Italianità , he told me, rather enigmatically, that it was “that special condition unique to our people in which being accustomed to beauty creates an almost innate propensity for the well made.” Giuli, too, used the word. The right, he said, should “recover what it is intellectually” by looking to the Italian constitution, “which introduced themes of social protection, and even by taking pride in Italianità without falling into aggressive chauvinism.”

But the government often pushes exclusion over inclusion. Meloni has a fierce penchant for singling out perceived enemies—migrants, same-sex parents, intellectuals who have criticized her—as a way of building consensus. For years in her campaigns she said that a family should have a mother and a father, not “parent one and parent two.” Italy legalized same-sex civil unions in 2016 under a center-left government, and Meloni is trying to make it illegal for children born to gay couples via surrogacy abroad to have their birth certificates registered in Italy. Surrogacy is illegal in Italy and across most of Western Europe, a position shared by Catholic traditionalists and leftists opposed to what they see as the commodification of women’s bodies, but this push has spooked gay couples and supporters of gay rights in Italy. Meloni has said she will not overturn Italy’s 1978 abortion law, but she just passed a law allowing nonprofits into public clinics to dissuade women from having them. (A majority of Italian doctors are conscientious objectors who won’t perform the procedure.) Meanwhile she has been encouraging Italians to have more babies and has appeared with Pope Francis to deliver that message. The country just reported its lowest birth rate since the state was founded in 1861.

Beyond simple demographics, there is also a question of culture. “When Giorgia Meloni says, ‘Have kids,’ she is not talking to me,” Djarah Kan, an Italian writer and journalist whose parents are from Ghana, told me. We were sitting in a café in San Lorenzo, a formerly working-class neighborhood that like so much of Rome has been increasingly gentrified. If she had a baby with another black Italian, she continued, “it would not be considered a real Italian by the Italian state.” This feeling of exclusion in her own country infuriated her.

I feel offended, I feel mocked…. They are trying to invent out of whole cloth a model of Italianità that doesn’t match the reality of the country. They want to impose their idea of society on a society that is changing, however slowly. Because Italian society is changing and there are so many people in their thirties like me, of Chinese origin or African origin or Indian origin, who reside and live in this country. And every time we hear talk of Italianità or “Made in Italy” and of who has the right to be considered Italian or not, we laugh, but it also makes us sick to our stomachs.

Kan was born and grew up in Castel Volturno, outside Naples. We talked about how hard it is for immigrants to get a foothold in Italy. Many Italians inherit family real estate; without that inheritance, the social order would collapse. In a sign of the spirit of the times, Italy’s leading daily, Corriere della Sera , has a new podcast about the last wills of famous Italians, all men. “It’s all so stagnant,” Kan said. She said many of her high school classmates, also children of African immigrants, were sent abroad for better opportunities after graduating. It’s the same at Italy’s poshest private schools, many of which are Anglophone. Italy is unique among core EU countries in that its ruling class now prepares its children to leave. The brain drain has gotten worse over the years. Meloni reduced a tax incentive designed to lure Italians back home. It is against this backdrop of resignation that she came to power.

Meloni’s government is fighting rearguard wars over the past. It approved the creation of a memorial museum in Rome dedicated to victims of the Foibe massacres—reprisal killings in Italian territories in what are now Croatia and Slovenia during the immediate postwar period when Tito’s Communists murdered fascists and civilians. Sangiuliano and the government have been promoting the initiative, saying the murders had been downplayed by past center-left governments.

There have also been heated polemics over Liberation Day, a national holiday on April 25 when Italy celebrates its liberation from fascism by the Allies. In April RAI canceled a Liberation Day monologue by Antonio Scurati, the author of the global best-selling novel M (2018), about Italy under Mussolini, prompting cries of censorship. In his monologue, the text of which later appeared online, Scurati said, “After winning the elections in October 2022, the postfascist leadership had two possible paths: to repudiate its neofascist past or to try to rewrite history. It undoubtedly chose the second.” Scurati has in the past criticized Meloni for not directly acknowledging the contribution of the Resistance to ending fascism, or that Italy’s constitution was born of antifascism. In his monologue he said that she had denounced the Nazis “without repudiating the fascist experience in its entirety.” Meloni said the cancellation was an economic choice, but a leak from RAI indicated it had been editorial. She then published his monologue on her own Facebook page, a move indicative of the unpredictability and confusion fomented by the government, making it hard to pin down.

Italy, which began the war with the Axis and ended it with the Allies, never underwent a deep examination of conscience the way Germany did. Meloni’s government could present an opportunity to do this. Instead she is attacking her critics and shifting the narrative to redress issues like the Foibe that have long been an obsession of the right. At the same time the government has been attentive to honoring Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In March Sangiuliano went with Germany’s culture minister to commemorate one of the country’s worst wartime massacres: the Nazis’ execution of 335 Italian civilians in 1944 at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.

Meloni’s government has found it harder to address contemporary violence. In January she turned a blind eye when a group of far-right militants made Roman salutes at a memorial gathering for one of their members killed in clashes with left-wing groups and police in the 1970s. The legacy of the Years of Lead, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, when the battle between left and right moved beyond ideas to violence, is still palpable in Italy, and many consider it a civil war. Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Roman salute is a crime if done out of a desire to reconstruct the Fascist Party, but not if done as a commemorative act. In February videos circulated showing police in Pisa and Florence beating unarmed teenagers who were demonstrating in support of Palestine. President Sergio Mattarella, an institutional figure who normally does not weigh in on such matters, took the interior minister to task:

The authority of law enforcement is not measured by truncheons but by the capacity to safeguard security while at the same time guaranteeing the right to express one’s opinion in public. The use of truncheons against youth is an expression of failure.

The police beatings drew widespread concern. “The thing that worries me, frankly, is the censoring of the youngest voices, of the voices of dissidents, of the voices of the counterculture,” the writer Nadeesha Uyangoda told me at a book fair of independent presses on the foggy outskirts of Milan. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Milan, she is the author of L’unica persona nera nella stanza (The Only Black Person in the Room, 2021) and a columnist for the magazine Internazionale .

It is something intrinsic in Italian culture to go out into the piazza and demonstrate…. It’s a cultural act because you occupy a public space with your body. And if the state prevents this by beating you, what is it? It means there isn’t space for a different idea that doesn’t conform to that of the government.

Uyangoda told me she found the government’s talk of Italianità silly but troubling. Italy is, after all, a country of campanilismo , of people sticking to the traditions and dialect of their own towns beneath their local campanile , or church tower. “Only a group of far-right politicians could think they could bring back to life a concept of nationality, of Italianità , that doesn’t exist in Italy anymore,” she said. I asked if she took the government’s fusty rhetoric seriously. She paused. “When I hear them say some things, I can’t take them seriously,” she said. “But then I think of how we didn’t take them seriously six years ago, and look what happened. And so maybe it’s worth taking them seriously this time because they evidently have an impact on the country.”

Even before the Liberation Day polemics, Scurati was growing concerned. “I never thought that the potential victory of the far right would compromise democracy,” he told me.

I was afraid that a victory by the far right could represent a threat for the quality of democratic life, not for the survival of democratic life. And it’s getting worse. One of the signs of this worsening is in the world of culture. The few, the very few intellectuals who criticize the government become the object of violent and offensive attacks.

Indeed, Meloni has sued the historian and philologist Luciano Canfora for aggravated defamation, after he called her “a neo-Nazi in her soul.” * (Italy lacks the equivalent of First Amendment protections for press coverage of public figures, and Italian politicians often sue for defamation.) Members of the government have lashed out at the writer Roberto Saviano, a vocal critic who has been under police protection for years for his writing about the Neapolitan Mafia.

After Scurati was attacked by the right-wing, progovernment daily newspaper Libero , someone left dried feces in his building in Milan and the words Scurati merda appeared on the wall. He reported the incident. “When the police chief asked if I wanted police protection, I thought, ‘Now we have a problem,’” Scurati told me. “It’s very heavy for people who want to express their feelings,” he continued. “Almost none of my writer colleagues, most of whom are on the left, are speaking out. Most are just tending their own orticello ,” or little garden.

The Orticello

While a few public figures express dissent, such as Saviano, or defend gay rights, such as the social media influencer Chiara Ferragni, most cultural figures, to say nothing of the establishment, seem to be keeping their heads down or finding ways to turn the new regime to their own advantage. Loredana Lipperini, a longtime host of Fahrenheit , a program about books on RAI Radio3, a station popular with the left wing, used the same term as Scurati—the orticello . “I see on the one hand a great turning inward, and with some notable exceptions, what strikes me is that the majority of novels coming out now are intimate novels, autofiction, inward-facing and focused on themselves,” she told me. “I’m worried about this tendency in which everyone, with some exceptions…tends his or her own orticello .” For Lipperini it’s a sign that cultural figures aren’t fully engaging with the issues of the day. Institutionally and culturally, the left has not offered a clear response to the far right, with its well-defined positions on immigration, borders, and national identity.

A hit film in Italy since it came out last year is C’è ancora domani ( There’s Still Tomorrow ), directed by and starring Paola Cortellesi. Filmed in black and white and set in 1946, it tells the story of a scrappy Roman matriarch who maintains her dignity in the face of an abusive husband and an ogre of a father-in-law. In Italy the film sold more tickets than Barbie . It clearly hit a nerve, not only because it appeared when a case of a woman murdered by her boyfriend was calling attention to Italy’s high rates of violence against women. Cortellesi’s performance was strong, but I found the film reductive. Did we really need to be reminded that women in Italy got the vote? And yet I was struck by how many women in Italy told me how much the film had meant to them, had empowered them and given them a sense of solidarity. It showed the power of collective action—an alternative to the orticello .

In February 1948 Partisan Review published an essay by the antifascist and anti-Stalinist writer Nicola Chiaromonte, who captured the mood two months before the first national elections of the nascent Italian republic that the heroine of C’è ancora domani votes to create. “Italy has not changed,” Chiaromonte wrote of that tenuous transitional period, just two years after the 1946 plebiscite in which Italians chose to become a democratic republic, not a monarchy.

In the collapse of Fascism, only Fascism has been refuted. Fascist authority and state structure are not there any longer. But, if the façade has crumbled, everything that was behind the façade before is still there, very much the same. Except that everything looks like the scattered fragments of a scattered society. Everything is in a state of suspension: conservatism together with the need for change; authoritarian habits along with libertarian impulses; nationalism and the natural cosmopolitanism of the Italians. Political freedom, as it exists today in Italy, is a state of suspension. But it still makes a difference. The simple fact of free speech has given the country an animation which looks like a new life. Misfortune has made the Italians feel united as they never felt before. The country is far from inert. Yet the apparent immutability of Italian society weighs everybody down.

In trying to make sense of Italy today, I thought back to Chiaromonte’s essay, still so illuminating on the country’s infinite complexities. Just off Piazza Venezia I had sat for ages in traffic on Via del Plebiscito, named after the 1946 plebiscite. Italian society has indeed changed since then. Italy remains a free country. But its apparent immutability still weighs everybody down. I thought of Djarah Kan, her dynamism and energy like that of so many young Italians constantly running up against the muro di gomma —the rubber wall—of tradition, exclusion, and every power structure from the tax code to labor law to the Catholic Church, which are designed to preserve power and wealth in the hands of those who already have it and who are fearful of letting in newcomers. “Italians always have to go backward because they’re too afraid of going forward,” Kan told me. “They always like it in the places where they’re worse off because at least those awful places are familiar—they already know that suffering.” We both laughed. What else could we do? Around us the Roman café was thrumming. Kan is working on a novel. “As soon I’m done with my book, I want to get out of here,” at least for a while, she told me. “This country is a badly run museum.” When the children of immigrants want to become emigrants, perhaps that means they, too, possess Italianità .

—May 9, 2024

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Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman a play having "two acts and a requiem" is the masterpiece of Arthur Miller written in 1948 and produced in 1949. The popularity and success of the play demonstrate the strength of its story. The play was adapted for various tableaus, films, and course books across the globe, securing a Pulitzer Prize for Miller.
Analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Categories: Drama Criticism, Literature. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its ...
Death of a Salesman Study Guide
Key Facts about Death of a Salesman. Full Title: Death of a Salesman. When Written: 1948. Where Written: Roxbury, Connecticut. When Published: The Broadway premiere was February 10, 1949. The play was published in 1949 by Viking Press. Literary Period: Social Realism. Genre: Dramatic stage play. Setting: New York and Boston in 1948.
A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman: summary. The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn't make a sale, he doesn't get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family's table. He ...
Death of a Salesman Critical Essays
Indeed, much of the lasting popularity of Death of a Salesman, both in the world of the theater and in the canon of English literature, lies in its treatment of multiple themes. Too didactic or ...
Major Themes in Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman addresses loss of identity and a man's inability to accept change within himself and society. The play is a montage of memories, dreams, confrontations, and arguments, all of which make up the last 24 hours of Willy Loman's life. The three major themes within the play are denial, contradiction, and order versus disorder.
Death of a Salesman Sample Essay Outlines
Outline. I. Thesis Statement: Being a salesman not only constitutes Willy's occupation but shapes his entire personality and outlook on life. His identity as a salesman greatly influences his ...
Analysis of "Death of a Salesman": [Essay Example], 847 words
Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is a timeless tale of an aging salesman, Willy Loman, who clings to an optimistic philosophy of the American Dream and its associated values while struggling to provide for his family. In this essay, I will argue that the play critiques these values and sheds light on the dark side of the American Dream ...
Death of a Salesman Essay Questions
The Question and Answer section for Death of a Salesman is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Significant of the tittle in 600 words. I think the title refers to both the death of Willy the salesmen and the death of his dreams. Willy's dreams of success turn to disillusionment when he cannot compete in the ...
Death of a Salesman Essays and Criticism
In the following essay, Sister Bettina examines the function of the character of Ben in Death of a Salesman, arguing that Ben is an extension of Willy's own consciousness, and that "through [Ben ...
105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Samples
Updated: Dec 6th, 2023. 12 min. Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller's multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis. We will write.
Death of a Salesman Study Guide
Essays for Death of a Salesman. Death of a Salesman essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Shattered Dream - The Delusion of Willy Loman; Perceptions of Self Worth and Prominence: Spaces and Settings in Death of a ...
Death of a Salesman Themes
The tragedy of Willy's death comes about because of his inability to distinguish between his value as an economic resource and his identity as a human being. The Woman, with whom Willy cheats on Linda, is able to feed Willy's salesman ego by "liking" him. He is proud of being…. read analysis of Abandonment and Betrayal. Previous.
Death of a Salesman: Literary Analysis Essay
A prominently notable element of the Death of a Salesman by Miller is that the play has been of great contribution to the literary tradition of America. When the dominant themes in the drama of twentieth-century literature are investigated, perhaps the prominent among them seems to be an attempt to recuperate or restate tragic anxiety about the human state.
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary and Analysis
The play The Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy that depicts the last days of the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. The play is both emotionally and psychologically realistic when the action occurs in the present; however, when the action occurs in past, the drama appears more dreamlike. For instance, only Willy can see the scenes ...
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Plot Summary
Death of a Salesman Summary. Next. Act 1. Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, returns home to Brooklyn early from a sales trip. At the age of 63, he has lost his salary and is working only on commission, and on this trip has failed to sell anything. His son Biff, who has been laboring on farms and ranches throughout the West for more than a ...
Death of a Salesman
Fredric March (centre) as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1951), directed by Laslo Benedek. Willy Loman, fictional character, an aging traveling salesman who is the protagonist of Arthur Miller 's play Death of a Salesman (1949). The role has been performed by many noteworthy actors, including Fredric March, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy.
The Death Of A Salesman English Literature Essay
The play, "Death of a businessman" was written by Arthur Miller in 1949. According to reasonable amount of evidence from the play, it is a parody of the American dream. The pursuit of this essay is to determine the extent of truth in this allegation. In order to comprehend the topic fully, it is important to have a glimpse of the meaning of ...
Death of a Salesman Act 1 Summary & Analysis
Summary. Analysis. The curtain rises on Willy Loman 's house in Brooklyn. The house, with its small backyard, looks fragile next to the tall apartment buildings that surround it. A soft flute melody is playing in the background. It is a Monday evening. Home ownership is a central pillar of the American Dream.
Meloni's Cultural Revolution
Romans have been deflating pomposity for millennia. On another side of the piazza is Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had his headquarters and from whose balcony he delivered speeches to adoring throngs. Piazza Venezia is one of Rome's busiest traffic circles—a whirl of cars, buses, taxis, and mopeds with no stoplights or discernible lanes.

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Analysis of "Death of a Salesman"

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Introduction

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Summary

Death of a Salesman Characters Analysis

Happy Loman

Linda Loman

Howard Wagner

Themes in Death of a Salesman

Fake existence

Nature versus City

Morality versus Immortality

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