Death of a Salesman 6

“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done, … but how could that be, when I did everything properly?” I can hear it now, Willy Loman uttering those words as he flips through the pages of his life. In the play, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, we witness the deterioration and death of a very well intentioned man. The quote above from Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, could not possibly better …

…way it was supposed to be done. When nothing he had accomplished was of any real value. Willy’s many flashbacks throughout the play made him realize that maybe things hadn’t worked out the way he had planned, but that all went up in smoke with his final legacy left for Biff. In the end of the play Biff sums everything up at his fathers funeral. “He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong.”