Death of Salesman by Arthur Miller- An Introductory Note
Introduction:
Death of a salesman was first produced on Broadway on February 10, 1949 and it ran for 742 performances. it was excitingly staged by Elia Kazan and given memorable performances by Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy and the excellent Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. To many spectators the play seemed the most meaningful and moving statement made about American life upon the stage in a great many years and it is still generally considered Miller's masterpiece. The play was awarded the Pulitzer for drama and entrenched its author's reputation as a leading American dramatist and one of the country's significant writers.
Miller initially intended to write a monodrama-a play called "The Inside of His Head"--which would re-create a man's entire life in terms of past and present, by means of his recollections at a particular point of self-re- evaluation late in life. This is really the play Miller has written. Death of a Salesman is a drama of a man's journey into himself. It is a man's emotional recapitulation of the experiences that have shaped him and his values, a man's confession of the dreams to which he has been committed. It is also a man's attempt to confront the meaning of his life and the nature of his universe.
The play has been criticised because there is in it no recognition scene in the traditional sense. There is in it a notable absence, it has been said, of the classic, tragic, articulated awareness of self-delusion and final understanding. But, in emotional terins, the entire play is really a long recognition scene. Willy's heroism and stature derive not from an intellectual grandeur but from the fact that, in an emotional way, he confronts himself and his world. As Lear* in madness comes to truth, so does Willy Loman. Miller has pointed out that social laws have replaced fate as man's relentless enemy, and we might add as their help-mate, psychological determinism.
The play begins at that moment of anguish where the ordinary social realities and values (in Willy's case, the American success dream) are no longer adequate. The road and Willy's car, for all their social and psychological significance, have metaphysical meaning. Willy's soul can no longer travel the road; it has broken down because the road has lost meaning. The multiplicity within himself, his creative yearnings, and that part of himself which sees creativity as a moral value, now intrudes on consciousness. He is thrown into a hell of disorder and conflicting value within himself. The two bags which are his sales-goods, his emblems of material success, the two bags which his sons would carry into the capitals of [•In William Shakespeare's King Lear.] New England and so carry on the tradition of his dream, are now too heavy. His sons will never bear them for him, and the values which they represent are now the overwhelming burden of his existence.
The refrigerator and the house, though paid for, will never house the totality of the yearnings. They will never be the monuments to his existence that he has sought to make them. His sons, who would also have been the immortality of his dreams, his mark on the world, have failed him. When his sons leave him kneeling in a bath-room, and themselves go away with the two whores, in consonance with the manliness they have learned from him, they leave him alone to face the void within his soul.
In the play Willy has no traditional religion; his religion has been the American dream; his gods have been Dave Singleman, Ben, and his father, but they are now all dead-to the world and as meaningful values for himself. When Willy goes to Howard to demand his just due and winds up confronting a babbling recording machine, which he cannot turn off, he is confronting the impersonal technological society which metes out its own impersonal justice. But he is also confronting a world without justice, a world where final truth is a babble. Ironically, the capital cities which elsewhere function as symbols of the pioneer spirit and Willy's pride in his own travels, are now controlled by a child*; and Willy's own sword of battle is turned against him.
The play deals with the death of a salesman. The goods which Willy has sold, as well as being symbolic of his role in a capitalistic society, are, as Miller has said, "himself't. In the final analysis, it does not matter what he sold, or in objective terms, how well he succeeded.
The particulars concerning Willy's situation also have universal significance. Willy has lived passionately for values to which he is committed, and he comes to find that they are false and inadequate. He has loved his sons with a passion which wanted for them that which would destroy them. He has grown old and he will soon vanish without a trace, and he discovers really the vanity of all human endeavour, except perhaps love. His foolishness is really no greater than Othello's raving jealousy or Lear's appreciation of the insincere, outward appearance of love. Linda says: "A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man", and she cries out "attention must be paid." Inevitably, no matter what material heights a man achieves, his life is finite and his comprehension finite, while the universe remains infinite and incomprehensible.
The vehicle for his realization is the play. Intensity in the play "is built through images of multiple meaning, through rhythmic repetition, through a logic of association, through an evocation of emotional intensities, through a time sequence which is subjective, and through visual and auditory imagery and leit-motifs handled as metaphors."
[*The tape-recorder has recorded the voice of Howard's son naming the capital
cities of various American States.
† Miller has said so in the Introduction to his "Collected Plays".]
Death of a Salesman contains some of the tragi-comic irone, that Ibsen used so effectively in his social plays. For instance Willy tells Linda that he is "very well liked" in Hartford, adding immediately: "You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me." Again, he says that Chevrolet is the greatest car ever built, and then immediately goes on to say: "That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car." Such touches are not as pervasive as in Ibsen, but there are enough of them to suggest a fuller, more pathetic, more anguished, and more contradictory humanity than Miller had presented in All My Sons.
Another ironic device contributing to the fullness of Willy's character is the exaggerated speech which the audience, but not the speaker, realises is too far-fetched to come true. Every member of the Loman family makes such speeches, but the most and the finest are those by Willy. For instance: "You and Hap and I, and I'll show you all the towns. America is full of beautiful towns and fine, up-standing 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."
The play is a notable achievement, for in it Miller broke out of the realistic confinements of time and space and psychology. As already mentioned above, Miller first called the play "The Inside of His Head", and much of the play is sieved through Willy's eyes. The viewpoint is not quite constant, and it is a little difficult to tell from what viewpoint some of the scenes should be seen. However, as there should be no confusion in production about the point of any of the scenes, the question of who technically is the narrator is somewhat academic.
In theme and technique, the play accomplishes exactly what Miller wanted. It is not confined to Ibsen's front parlour or to the few hours preceding the climax; nor do we have to interpret what a person feels merely from what he says. The play beautifully balances the interior of a man's mind with a full evocation of his external world. By his own standards, Miller had succeeded, and his standards in this case were accepted by all concerned.