Death of a Salesman

My wife and I have a list of the books that we have read. This is a list of the sort of classic literature that makes you a better person, not just any book. Harlequin Romances, Louis Lamour, those detective stories where the detective's cat always helps find clues, those are not on the list. Things like "Uncle Tom's Cabin", "Fahrenheit 451", "Leaves of Grass", "Jane Eyre", the literary equivalent of steak, potatoes and steamed broccoli is what I am describing.

My wife is 10 books ahead of me at present, but I'm not giving up.

I recently read "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller. It was a very good book. It's actually a rather long three act play. It's about a salesman named Willy Loman, nearing the end of his life and trying to come to grips with how things have ended. He is not the success he would have liked to be, and neither are his sons. Throughout the play he tries to determine what were the pivotal points at which things went wrong for he and his family.

Now from the title, you know he's going to die and you know its not going to be a happy story. I actually liked knowing that from the first. Even though it was not happy, it was a good book because it forces you to ask questions about life that are worth asking.

"What is success in life?"
"What is truly valuable in life?"
"Do we all have to be a success?"

Before I quote from the book, here are a list of the characters and their backgrounds.

Willy-the salesman-spent his life selling on the Eastern Seaboard States, always middling, never truly being a great success. He is at the end of his life now-trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

Biff-His oldest son-started out as a huge success as a High School athlete, but then never could make anything of himself. Biff has went from job to job, finding some happiness in working as a ranchhand in the West, but always being haunted that he never met his father's huge plans for him.

Happy-Willy's youngest son, works in an office job, has high ambitions of being successful so he can please his father.

Linda-Willy's Wife-The one that holds the family together, always believing in Willy no matter what, she knows he is at the end of his rope and is falling deep into depression. She loves him regardless and defends him to everyone.

In the first act, Willy is trying to get off the road and work as a salesman in the New York office, he's so close to having everything paid off and finally retiring, but nothing is working out. He begins to lose touch with reality and starts going in and out of conversations with people from the past. These are Linda's comments:

“I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.” – Linda

“A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.” – Linda

Willy goes to his boss, and asks for help. He has worked there all of his life, but he is not profitable anymore because of his erratic behavior, and because he is not the most successful salesman. His younger boss, finally tells him he has to leave.
This is Willy's response:

Willy: You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit.

Willy: After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Throughout the play, Willy tries to convince his oldest son Biff to try again to be a great success, to use what contacts he has to start a great sales campaign to make lots of money. Biff wants so hard to please his father, he goes and waits all day to see an ex-employer to sell him on his scheme. The man ignores him, and finally tells him to leave. Biff, in a moment of anger, steals the man's expensive fountain pen off his desk and flees. Afterward, Biff has an epiphany about life, work and what's really important in life:

Biff: ...I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this? I stopped in the middle of that office building and I saw--the sky. I saw the things that I love in the world. The work and the food and the time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptous begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy? [He tries to make Willy face him. but Willy pulls away and moves to the left]
Willy [with hatred, threateningly]: The door of your life is wide open!
Biff: Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!

Shortly after this exchange, Willy becomes more and more out of touch with reality. He goes from hating Biff for being a failure like him, to being ecstatic at the success he knows Biff will finally be. In a moment of delusion, he decides that he will kill himself so Biff can use the life insurance money as capital to finally be the big success he never was.

The last act of the play is called the requiem. Its Willy's funeral. The life insurance paid off all the bills and his little family is at the graveside. No one came but them to the service.

Biff explains why he died.

Biff:He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.
Happy [almost ready to fight Biff]:Don't say that!
Biff:He never knew who he was.

Happy refuses to accept that, and vows to fight on to be a success.

Happy: I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have - to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I'm gonna win it for him.

When I finished reading the play, I didn't know what to think. It was a shame for a man to die an ignoble death, grasping for a success based solely on material wealth, and the fame and notoreity.

What struck me most was how it seemed to illustrate a sociological term called False Consciousness. Here's a definition:

"An awareness mystified by ideology and unaware of its own basis in relations of oppression; failure to recognise one’s own oppression as a result of internalizing dominant political discourse."

A little more simply, society programs us to believe that by working harder we will always be rewarded. When this does not happen, we always blame ourself instead of wondering if maybe its not our fault, but an unfair world system around us. If we always think that working harder and playing by the rules is the answer, we will never realize if we are being oppressed by a system that favors the upper classes (Bourgesie) and keeps the lower classes(Proletariet) under their thumb.

No surprise that Karl Marx, one of the founders of Communism was the first person to come up with this theory. Do I believe all of this? No, I don't believe all of it.

I do, however believe that there are forces at work in this world that do, whether consciously or unconsciously, seek to control our beliefs about what is valuable and what is not. There are ideas that have taken root in our world that say that success is more important than truth and love, and that making money is proof that God has blessed you.

The most important truth we need to take away from the theory of false consciousness is that we have to not take anything society tells us at face value. What we do and what we become needs to be based on a truth that is outside of the jangle of messages that society markets to us.

Willy became so obsessed with success that he forgot his family. He wanted the material wealth and the notoriety of this world more than he wanted the true affection, simple love and fufillment of the relationships of the ones he held dear. He would rather die for an illusion of success than live with the happiness of being a mediocre man who was well-loved by those around him. Throughout the book, all his wife wants is for him to love her and not leave, his boys just want him to be proud of who they are, but instead, he trades it all for the delusion of what could have been and that delusion ultimately takes his life.

Arthur Miller may have meant the play to speak to some anti-capitalistic ideas, he may have had Marxist values behind some of it-that's conjecture on my part. What I do know is that when Willy gave all he had to his job and to the god of business, it used him up and threw him away like a rind from an Orange. That should not be a surprise to anyone, business is about making money and the corporate entity surviving. If we expect more than that, we are naive.

Willy should have spent less time obsessed with success, more time working on the relationships with the people who loved him. That is where there would be true success, only what we do in the lives of people can last for eternity.