Gresna Ayu Wulandari
A 320080170
Second Assignment
Analysis Death of a Salesman Drama
Death of a Salesman is a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was the recipient of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. Premiered at the Morosco Theatre in February 1949, the original production ran for a total of 742 performances.
1. Characters
a. Willy Loman: An aging salesman haunted by a feeling that his life has been a failure. He hallucinates about past events. These hallucinations center on his dreams for a better tomorrow; on the future of his son, Biff, a star football player; and on a woman with whom he had an affair while on a sales trip. During his hallucinations, he sometimes talks to himself.
b. Linda: Willy’s loyal wife. She accepts her role as a devoted and subservient housewife.
c. Biff Willy’s older son, who has trouble holding a job and getting along with his father. After he returns home from the West, his presence and his failure to get a job exasperate Willy.
d. Hap: Willy’s younger son, who has a steady job but is afraid to take risks to better himself
e. Charley: Successful businessman who lives next door to Willy. Willy envies him because he is a constant reminder of what Willy is not. Willy snidely says Charley “is liked, but not well liked.” Nevertheless, Charley lends Willy money and even offers him a job.
f. Bernard: Charley’s son. He is intelligent, hard-working, and successful–everything Biff Loman is not.
g. Ben: Willy’s deceased older brother, who appears only in Willy’s hallucinations. He struck it rich at an early age in South African diamond mines. He symbolizes the success that has eluded Willy.
h. Howard Wagner: The son of Willy's former boss, Frank Wagner, whom Willy admired. Howard, who is now Willy’s boss, represents a new breed of business executive, interested more in advancing technology than people. He fires Willy because of his inability to perform satisfactorily.
i. Stanley: A waiter at a bar/restaurant where Willy meets his sons.
j. The Woman: An employee of a Boston company who has an affair with Willy. She is one of the subjects of his hallucinations.
k. Miss Forsythe and Letta: Attractive young women whom Hap and Biff meet in the bar/restaurant
l. Jenny Charley's secretary
2. Plot
Willy Loman returns home after an unsuccessful business trip. Frustrated at his lack of success, his wife Linda suggests that he ask his boss Howard Wagner to allow him to work in his home city so he will not have to travel. Willy complains to Linda that their son, Biff, who comes home for the holidays, has yet to make good on his life. Despite Biff's promise as an athlete in high school, he flunked senior year math, made no effort in summer school, and never went to college.
Biff and his brother, Happy, who is also visiting, reminisce about their childhood together. They discuss their father's mental degeneration, which they have witnessed by his constant vacillations and talking to himself. When Willy walks in, angry that the two boys have never amounted to anything, Biff and Happy tell Willy that Biff plans to make a business proposition the next day in an effort to pacify their father.
The next day Willy goes to ask his boss for a job in town while Biff goes to make a business proposition. Both fail, as Willy gets angry and ends up getting fired when the boss tells him to continue being a traveling salesman, while Biff makes a terrible impression during his business presentation and impulsively steals a fountain pen (an expensive symbol of status worth far more than a ball point pen). Willy then meets Bernard, who tells him that Biff originally wanted to do well in summer school, but something happened in Boston when Biff went to visit Willy there that changed his mind.
Happy, Biff, and Willy meet for dinner at a restaurant, but Willy refuses to hear bad news from Biff. The two sons decide to lie to their father, who then goes into a flashback of what happened in Boston the day Biff stopped trying to succeed in life. Willy had been in a hotel on a sales trip with a young woman when Biff showed up, causing him to want to flunk math and ruin his father's dreams of his success out of spite.
Biff and Happy leave their deranged father in the restaurant for a couple of young women, yet when they return home they find their mother knew they left Willy alone. She angrily shouts at them while Willy remains talking to himself outside. Eventually Willy joins the argument, at which point Biff forcefully says that he is no longer being a failure out of spite: he simply knows he isn't cut out to be a successful business man. The feud culminates with Biff hugging Willy, telling his father he loves him.
Rather than listen to what Biff actually says, Willy realizes his son has forgiven him and thinks Biff will now pursue a career as a businessman. Willy decides to kill himself in an auto accident so that Biff can get enough money to start his business, yet at the funeral Biff retains his belief that he does not want to become a businessman. Happy, on the other hand, chooses to take the insurance money and follow in his father's footsteps.
3. Setting
......The action takes place at Willy Loman’s house in the New York City area, as well as other New York locales, and in a hotel room in Boston. Some of the action takes place in flashbacks while Willy hallucinates.
4. Point
Though all works of literature present the author’s point of view, they don’t all have a narrator or a narrative voice that ties together and presents the story. This particular piece of literature does not have a narrator through whose eyes or voice we learn the story.
5. Theme
The theme in this drama is The Death of a Dream ..The play centers primarily on the inability of Willy Loman to fulfill his dream of a more prosperous and rewarding life for himself and his family. Willy’s failure as a breadwinner and father are due mostly to his own shortcomings, but he is also a victim of the survival-of-the-fittest business philosophy taking hold in America.
6. Style
The play is mostly told from the point of view of the main protagonist, Willy, and it shows previous parts of Willy's life in his time shifts, sometimes during a present day scene. It does this by having a scene begin in the present time, and adding characters onto the stage whom only Willy can see and hear, representing characters and conversations from other times and places. Many dramatic techniques are also used to represent these time shifts. For example, leaves often appear around the current setting (representing the leaves of the two elm trees which were situated next to the house, prior to the development of the apartment blocks). Biff and Happy are dressed in high school football sweaters and are accompanied with the "gay music of the boys". The characters will also be allowed to pass through the walls that are only impassable in the present, as told in Miller's stage directions in the opening of ACT 1:
7. Conclusion
The death of salesman is a tragedy drama. The story tells the life of a family with a father, Willy, a man that has dreams larger than his standard life can offer him. It is the story of a misguided person sets out to accomplish something that he thinks is the right thing, but ironically it is that very thing that causes pain and anguish to himself and everyone around him. In the end, the people that truly care are the ones whose admiration usually goes unnoticed.
From the drama, in face of life the man must be the wise. Experience being able to recognize the mistakes when make them again. Sometime, happiness is like a butterfly, the more chase it, the more it will elude. But if the men turn the attention to other things, it will come and softly descend upon the shoulder. But then it is not mean that the men just fold the hands. Success doesn’t come to the men, but go to it. Everything must be the balance. It is a fact of life.
