Write brief character sketches of Biff and Happy.
Biff:
As a boy, Biff was thought to be almost a prodigy by his father. Willy found in him a rich potential. Biff seemed to possess all those qualities which indicate a bright future for a growing young man. He distinguished himself in sports and became the most sought-after football player. His schoolmates idolised him and felt proud to carry his kit. The girls were crazy about him and were willing to spend their own money on him to have his company. He never chased any of the girls. On the contrary, he treated them somewhat roughly so that mothers always felt worried when their daughters went out with him. Willy lionised his son and kept telling him he had a great future before him. Far from reprimanding him for stealing a football from the school locker-room, Willy almost expressed his approval of Biff's action and thus encouraged him to believe that thievery was not a serious matter.
Thus brought up, Biff began to nurse certain illusions about himself and his future. However, on entering the arena of life, he found all his dreams of a rosy future dissolving into thin air. He wandered from place to place, took up job after job, but failed to make good. When we meet him in the play, he is already thirty-four and a good-for-nothing. He has not been able to "find himself" yet. He tells Happy that he has had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since he left home and that "it always turned out the same". He has always liked a life out of doors, but he has not been able to stick to any one place or any one job. He speaks of buying a ranch and raising cattle because he believes that men built like him and his brother Happy should be working out in the open.
Biff is quite fond of his mother and is on very cordial terms with her. But he is indifferent towards his father even though it later appears that he has always loved him after all. The reason for his indifferent attitude towards his father is revealed to us in a kind of flash-back when we learn that he had discovered his father with a strange woman in a Boston hotel where he had gone to see Willy in order to inform him of his failure in the examination and to entreat him to meet his mathematics teacher in an effort to have the examination result reviewed. Since that shocking discovery, Biff has not been able to reconcile himself to his father. The reconciliation does come, however, but at a very late stage,
While Willy dies with his illusions intact, we must give Biff the credit for having realised how foolish those dreams of his father were. At Willy's funeral it is Biff who says that his father had "the wrong dreams", and it is he who speaks of the real worth of his father by saying that "there was more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made". But even before the funeral, we have been a witness to Biff's disillusionment with the false hopes and dreams that he had been cherishing. Biff's eyes have been opened by his disastrous meeting with Bill Oliver and by his involuntary action in stealing Biff Oliver's fountain pen. He feels very restless in the restaurant where he vainly tries to tell his father what happened in Bill Oliver's office. A little later, on returning home, he gives an outlet to his thoughts in an angry outburst. He says that he is "a dime a dozen", and so is his father. He confesses that he "stole himself out of every good job since high school", and he puts the whole blame on his father to whom he says: "And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!" He even blames his mother and his younger brother for having adopted Willy's foolish ideas. Turning to Happy, he says: "You're one of the two assistants to the assistant, aren't you?" We begin to feel by the end of the play that, having discovered the reality, Biff is now in a better position to build up his life.
Here is a comment on this discovery which Biff makes towards the end of the play: "There is the small hope that Biff may overcome his retardation; alternatively, he may remain a misfit in any society. At the very least, he will not possess the same wrong dreams as his father."
Happy:
This is how Miller describes Happy, the younger son of Willy and Linda: "Happy is tall, powerfully made. Sexuality is like a visible colour on him, or a scent that many women have discovered. He, like his brother, is lost, but in a different way, for he has never allowed himself to turn his face toward defeat and is thus more confused and hard-skinned, although seemingly more content."
When we meet Happy first, he is feeling a little troubled about his father's condition. He tells his brother Biff that his father cannot keep his mind on driving and that something is going wrong with him. But he does not feel over-anxious on this score. Happy is proud of his numerous conquests over women and says that about five hundred women would like to know how he spent his boyhood and other particulars, meaning thereby that a large number of women have felt interested in him at different times. However, he owes his initial knowledge about women to his elder brother, Biff. In the beginning, Happy used to be very shy with girls. Happy's present capacity to become quickly acquainted with women is brought out in the scene in which he meets a girl in a restaurant and, within minutes, induces her to go out with him. The manner in which he introduces himself to that girl is quite amusing, besides showing his ingenuity. He tells her that he sells champagne and compliments her by saying that her picture should appear on a magazine cover. Making love to women is a kind of game for him. He tells his brother that somehow or other he has developed an excessive sense of competition where girls are concerned. He has already seduced three girls who were engaged to be married, and "to top it all", he has attended their weddings. When there is some talk of Biff's settling down in New York, Happy tells him that there will be no shortage of girls for him and that he will need to give just a hint as to which girl he wants to have. In the restaurant he offers the girl whom he has picked up to Biff who is, however, not interested.
Happy is more successful than Biff in so far as he has got a stable kind of job. He is, however not satisfied with what he has achieved. He is making enough money but he thinks that he cannot go higher in life unless the merchandise-manager in his firm dies. He has got his own apartment, a car, and plenty of women, but still he feels "lonely". He can "outbox, outrun, and outlift" anybody in the store where he works but, being in a subordinate position, he has "to take orders from those common, petty sons-of-bitches till he can't stand it any more." He says that everybody around him is so false that he is "constantly lowering his ideals". Happy is determined to go up in life: "I gotta show some of those pompous, self-important executives over there that Happy Loman can make the grade." Immediately after saying these words, Happy turns to the subject of girls. "But take those two we had tonight," he says to Biff, "now, weren't they gorgeous creatures ?" Happy would like to get married, but he wants a steady girl, "somebody with substance, somebody with character, with resistance." In the restaurant, after he has made a girl agree to go out with him, he expresses his disappointment with girls in general because almost all of them make themselves available to men who want them: "That is why I can't get married. There's not a good woman in a thousand. New York is loaded with them, kid!"
Happy has never been given much importance by his father who has always doted upon Biff. Happy is fully aware of the fact that Biff is the favourite son. This does not, however, make him feel bitter. He remains quite cheerful and even tries to make his father feel interested in him. He tries to attract attention, for instance, by telling his father that, as a result of the exercise that he has been taking, he is losing weight: "I'm losing weight, you notice, Pop ?" But his father takes little notice of him. His father's neglect of him works upon his mind unconsciously perhaps and does leave its mark. That seems to be the reason for his neglecting his father in the restaurant when he goes out with a girl rather than stay back to look after his father. In fact, when the girl asks him whether he would not like to tell his father that he is leaving the restaurant, he replies: "No, that's not my father. He's just a guy." Such a reply from him shows him to us in a most unfavourable light. And yet it is he who defends his father's views after Willy has committed suicide. Biff says that Willy had all the wrong dreams. Happy tells his brother not to talk like that and is almost ready to fight with him. Contradicting Biff's view, Happy says: "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."
Here is a critic's comment on Happy Loman's character: "He contrasts with Biff and, although held in the background of the dramatic action because he is seemingly more content, the main features of his frustration are outlined. He has chosen the security of a job in a merchandise office and his frustration comes from acceptance of this security. Within this environment, working as an 'other-directed' man, his initiative and aggression are expressed through sexuality. Although he perceives the limiting effects of his position in society, he resists Biff's invitation to join him in wandering, he continues to admire the man who makes fifty-two thousand dollars a year even though such a successful person lacks peace of mind just as completely as his unsuccessful father lacks peace of mind. A sensitivity exists in Happy, but it is not subtle or profound in its perceptions. His is the nature of compromise: it seeks a modus vivendi* between sensitive appraisal of a situation and cautious acting upon this appraisal. Often, instead of acting decisively, he escapes into words-and facile promiscuitiest,"