Death of a Salesman Film

Death of a Salesman is probably one of Arthur Miller's greatest achievements. This play describes the sixty-three-year-old protagonist Willy Loman, a rounded and psychologically motivated individual. Willy is also a familiar American Philistine and even a universal type. He embodies the stupidity, immorality, self-delusion, and failure of middle-class values Miller portrays as being sterile and vicious. At the same time Willy's love of his delinquent sons, however harmful and wrongly expressed has made him "a …

…reality. He could not live in reality, despite his constant failure, he keeps trying. He loses touch with his own identity. Willy's final destiny of choices is explained as an individual taking control of his own destiny by choosing to be a salesman rather by following his brother Ben. Thus would establish Willy as being an unrealistic, dream builder who was living to two different worlds and neither one any more real than the other.