Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller (1949)
“The most devastating autopsy of the American Dream ever staged — a salesman who sold himself a lie and couldn't stop paying for it.”
Character Analysis
His name is a thesis: Willy = diminutive of William (the common man) + Loman = Low Man. Miller denied this was intentional; the denial is not credible. Willy is not evil, not stupid, not unsympathetic — he is a man who was given a false map and followed it faithfully to the edge of the cliff. His tragedy is that his love for his sons is genuine, his need for their admiration is bottomless, and the two destroy each other. He cannot be loved without being believed, and Biff can no longer believe him.
Brooklyn cadence, contractions, intensifiers ('absolutely,' 'magnificent'), trail-offs that signal the gap between confidence and reality. Uses hyperbole constantly — 'the greatest country in the world,' 'he could be anything.'