Death of a Salesman

Summary

Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting. His devoted wife Linda tends to him and urges him to ask his boss for a job in New York. Their sons are home: Biff, once a high-school football star with a scholarship to the University of Virginia, now thirty-four and a drifting farmhand and petty thief, and Happy, a womanising assistant buyer who flatters his father. Willy believes success comes from being 'well liked' and has raised his sons on that creed, and he cannot forgive Biff for failing to fulfil it. Throughout the play the present dissolves into scenes from the past: the boys' adoration of him, his boasting, the visits of his brother Ben, who walked into the jungle at seventeen and came out rich, and an encounter with a woman in a Boston hotel. Willy's neighbour Charley, whose son Bernard has become a successful lawyer, quietly lends him money each week and offers him a job, which Willy refuses out of pride. Linda tells the sons that Willy has been trying to kill himself: his car accidents are not accidents, and she has found a rubber hose attached to the gas pipe. The family resolves on a hopeful plan: Biff will ask a former employer, Bill Oliver, for money to start a business. The next day everything fails. Willy's young boss Howard fires him. Biff waits all day to see Oliver, who does not remember him, and impulsively steals his fountain pen. At a restaurant dinner, the sons abandon their bewildered father for two women. The climactic memory is revealed: as a teenager Biff came to Boston to find his father and discovered him with another woman, and lost all faith in him. That night Biff confronts Willy with the truth, that they are both ordinary men and that Willy's dreams are false, and breaks down weeping. Willy, moved that Biff loves him, decides that his life insurance will give Biff a new start, and drives off to his death. At the funeral, few people come. Charley defends the salesman's life of dreams, Biff says Willy had the wrong dreams, and Linda cannot cry, telling Willy that she made the last payment on the house that day and that they are free.

Top Lessons

• The wrong dreams

  Willy's creed of personality and popularity fails him and his sons. The play questions an idea of success measured only by sales and status.

• Attention must be paid

  Linda insists that an ordinary man's suffering deserves notice. Miller argues that tragedy belongs to the common man as much as to kings.

• Family secrets and their damage

  The Boston affair, hidden for years, explains the rupture between Willy and Biff. The play shows how secrets and lies distort a family's sense of reality.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Frequently used in medical and psychiatric education. Willy shows exhaustion, inability to concentrate on the road, loss of the line between memory and present, conversations with absent or dead people, mood swings and repeated suicide attempts (car crashes and the hidden rubber hose attached to the gas heater). Readers have variously proposed major depression with psychotic features, early dementia or a stress-related breakdown; the play deliberately renders his inner world rather than a diagnosis, and Miller's working title 'The Inside of His Head' emphasises this. Linda is a classic portrait of the family caregiver who hides the danger even as she warns her sons. The play also raises the theme of suicide motivated by life insurance and of the ageing worker discarded by his employer. Suicide-risk discussion should follow responsible-messaging guidance.

• Act One, opening

  Willy returns home unable to drive, describing how his mind drifted and he nearly went off the road.

• Act One, memory scenes

  Willy talks aloud to people from the past, including his dead brother Ben, while others watch.

• Act One, Linda's speech to her sons

  Linda reveals Willy's deliberate car crashes and the rubber hose she found by the gas pipe.

• Act Two, the firing and Charley's office

  Willy is fired after decades and remarks that he is worth more dead than alive.

• Act Two, final scenes and Requiem

  Willy plans his death for the insurance; the funeral and Linda's inability to cry.