Indian Readers discussion

An extract from the goodreads blurb:
"Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he is cast aside, his usefulness exhausted. With no future to dream about he must face the crushing disappointments of his past. He takes one final brave action, but is he heroic at last or a self-deluding fool?"

LitBug, can u help steer this discussion? I might be joining this a bit late.

Gladly - will do so shortly with a sensible backgrounding tot he text.

Social, Economic and Political Context

This play is considered perhaps the “first great American tragedy” and received the Pulitzer prize. Miller gained eminence with the play, and this play is widely recognized as being the first play to have adequately understood the essence of American nationalism, American values and most importantly, the American Dream.

This play was written in 1949, right after a series of calamities on the Western world – the Great Depression, and the two World Wars. It was the time when the spirits of the people of much of the Western world were broken, by the double burden of loss of lives and the loss of livelihood. The then leaders of America had delivered powerful speeches to the American nation, persuading them that the great nation of America could, and would build itself back to its former glory. They insisted that with hard work and a cheerful disposition, the Americans would not only live, but prosper. They built the Great American Dream, which the broken-spirited, comfort-hungry depressed American population eagerly lapped up – they needed something to believe in. They had lost faith in religion, as well as in the capability of science to bring peace. They had lost family and money. So they believed in the Great American Dream, in hard work and ceaseless optimism to rebuild their lives.

But beneath this façade, the American population did not entirely succeed in pursuing the Dream – family conflicts along with financial losses were rampant, and their own reckless belief in their Dream caused them to undergo acute stress that many of them could not face. The materialistic aspect of the Dream obscured the moral vision that the founders of the Dream had envisioned. The blind pursuit of the American Dream led to more disastrous results – it would not allow the Americans to face the bitter truth of their families falling apart on ideological concerns, and the worth of family members began to be measured on the yardstick of financial success.

To add to these issues were other parallel constraints – the growing racist attitudes, social stratification and the conflict with USSR that would escalate into the Cold War. America was surrounded by internal as well as external conflict.

The play is the child of authors who had indicted these fundamental hypocritical values of the Dream – people who had realized the enormous toll it took upon the population. In this sense, this play offers a post-war reading of the American society, an examination of the denial of Americans to face their personal morals, values and its larger ramifications.

Written in the “stream of consciousness” techniques, the play critiques the attitude of mapping personal worth by financial success through the family of Lomans, where the father is the typical believer of the Dream. A salesman, he believes staunchly he will succeed with the right attitude, and is torn apart within when his sons fail to live up to his expectations. In constant denial of not only the fractured state of his emotional relationships but also his professional success, the end of the play is spectacular. Written from a psychological perspective, the play is a beautiful examination of the impact of the Dream on people who could not understand its finer points, who could not relate to the values the Dream and ended up chasing the wrong goose.

I don't know about other editions that can replace this one, but you can read any edition, and if you need detailed explanations and literary analysis, go here - http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/salesman/

I suspect most of us might not have this edition, but for a literary dissection, the web is a rich source...

done reading!!!

Oh, great - hope you liked it... I found it very moving and frustrating at the same time.

Act 1

(view spoiler)[The scene opens with Willy stumbling into the house after an apparent near-accident that could have been fatal, while his wife Linda tries to soothe him.

This opening scene sets the tone of the play, and introduces two of the main characters - the biggest victim of the Dream, Linda and Willy. Willy finds it difficult to believe that all his life, he could never be successful, and even at his ripe old age, when he expects respect, he gets none. Unable to get over his present failure, he seeks to redeem it by looking at the past, reviving days of glory and success, punctuated by the happiness he felt in a solid, supportive family.

His reminiscences of the past seek to foreshadow further the fractured nature of his relationship with his family. Biff, his elder son, almost 34, has yet to settle down in a job - Biff comes across as a man torn between the hopes of financial success, something he had been told he would always get when he grew up, and that too effortlessly, and the sense of serenity he gets from simple farm-life that is, however, a low-paying job.

Also torn between his dedication to his family and his own hopes for a calm, peaceful life, he keeps coming home in the hopes of fulfilling his father's hopes of making it big by joining a business, and feeling lost and deluded once he is home.

His sombre mood is further punctuated by the contradictory responses he gets from Willy, who grows sour everytime he turns up, and from Happy, his brother two years younger, who earns more than him, but hardly enough, and happily spends his time on drinking and wooing girls.

Willy keeps on hallucinating, rambling around the house loudly in a stream-of-consciousness that reveals his partially-hidden guilt at depriving his family of fortunes by not following the footsteps of his own brother Ben, exposing his doubts over his capability as a parent that is apparent in his lashing out at the memories of Bernard (Biff's classmate in school) and his questions directed at Ben as to how he got so rich.

Disturbed and unable to come to terms with reality, Linda makes it her mission to hold up the illusion that Willy has nurtured for so long - she knows a delusion is under way, and that Willy would not be able to survive it - she divulges it to Biff - that she suspects Willy trying to kill himself in what would seem accidents - and berates Biff at not caring enough for the man who had taken care of them all his life, at which point Biff decides to plunge himself wholeheartedly into a career that would put his father at ease.

Willy comes across as a person denying the disillusionment that amounts to a failure of his entire life, implying that he lived his life all wrong - a fact he tries to deny with his conviction in himself and his sons - and which is time and again destroyed by the proof of financial failure, which causes a rift between his family.

Linda, on the other hand, tries to maintain his illusions, under rightful fear that Willy would not be able to take it. Almost a victim of Willy's volatile temper, she shows signs of breaking internally herself, but tries, nevertheless, to hide it. (hide spoiler)]

Act 2

(view spoiler)[The next begins with the next morning Linda telling Willy in the morning that he's supposed to meet his sons to dinner at a restaurant, a sign that the rift is healing. Biff's leaving early that morning to meet Oliver, his school-friend, now a businessman, to ask for employment is another positive sign. And with a similar positive note, Willy heads to the office of Howard, the son and now heir of Willy's erstwhile boss, where Willy's been a salesman for more than 30 years.

The tone turns grim again as we see Howard fire Willy instead of getting him a better position, and Oliver refusing to recognize Biff. The dinner date between the father-sons further turns dark as Biff tries to tell him of his failure and Willy is unable to take it - and lapses into another hallucination.

The hallucination of the past brings to the fore the reason behind Biff's disregard for his father - events foreshadowed in the first act are brought here. The episode with Charley and the now grown-up Bernard serves the same purpose.

With Willy returning home after his hallucination while the boys have walked out, Linda is enraged at them for letting their father alone, and Willy's rambling in the garden foreshadows his final step - while Biff fights with him and breaks into tears, Willy sees hope of reconciliation and a successful future.

With a mixture of guilt, hope and goodwill, Willy commits the final act, in the hope that the insurance money will be the key to his sons' success. (hide spoiler)]

Requiem

(view spoiler)[At Willy's funeral, contrary to his life-long belief, only a few people turn up. Biff is bent upon returning to his simple life, making plain his disillusionment, while Happy, in his father's footsteps, is planning to make it big.

Linda, however, is both devastated, and relieved - her final words as she breaks down, are a symbol that she now is free - free from their last debt, and from the man who loved them so fiercely, he won't let go. (hide spoiler)]