Death of a Salesman

The flute plays a small, fine melody, a sound of grass and trees lost in the city air. Before a fragile house, hemmed in on all sides by the angry orange glow of towering apartment buildings, Willy Loman appears. He is past sixty, his shoulders slumped under the weight of two large sample cases and a life of travel. “I'm tired to the death,” he tells his wife, Linda, having returned unexpectedly from a sales trip he couldn't complete. His mind had wandered on the road, the car swerving, the scenery of his past more real than the road ahead. His mind, as Linda says, is overactive, and it is what counts.

Upstairs, his two sons, Biff and Happy, lie in their old beds, listening to their father's murmurs below. Biff, the elder at thirty-four, is home again, his worn air a testament to a life spent drifting from one farm job to another, unable to take hold. Happy, younger and more self-assured, has a car and an apartment but is hollowed out by a meaningless job and an endless parade of women. “I don't know what I'm supposed to want,” Biff confesses, the open sky of the West calling to him, even as he feels the crushing weight of his own failure. They talk of buying a ranch, the Loman Brothers, a dream of freedom that flickers and dies in the face of the city's demands.

As Willy putters in the kitchen below, the walls of the house become transparent, and the past floods the present. Suddenly, Biff and Happy are teenagers again, washing their father's red Chevrolet. Willy is a king returning from the road, full of grand stories of his popularity in New England. He is a man who believes that to be liked - no, to be *well liked* - is the key to everything. “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead,” he preaches. His boys are Adonises, destined for greatness. The memory is interrupted by the ghost of his brother Ben, a man who walked into the jungle at seventeen and emerged at twenty-one, rich. “The world is an oyster,” Willy tells his sons, “but you don't crack it open on a mattress!”

But the golden memories are laced with poison. Linda's darning of her silk stockings enrages Willy, a painful reminder of the stockings he once gave to another woman in a Boston hotel room. The present reasserts itself with crushing force. Linda confronts her sons, her love for Willy a fierce, protective shield. “He's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him,” she insists. “So attention must be paid.” She reveals the truth they have ignored: Willy has been reduced to working on straight commission, borrowing fifty dollars a week from his friend Charley and pretending it's his pay. More than that, he has been trying to kill himself. Biff, horrified, finds the length of rubber hose his mother has been hiding, a grim testament to his father's desperation.

A new day dawns with a fragile hope. Biff is going to see his old boss, Bill Oliver, to ask for a loan to start a business. Willy, buoyed by this prospect, goes to his own young boss, Howard Wagner, to ask for a non-traveling job in New York. The meeting is a catastrophe. Howard, obsessed with a new wire recorder, is deaf to Willy's pleas. Willy's desperate monologue about Dave Singleman - the salesman who made a living at eighty-four from his hotel room, dying the noble death of a salesman - falls on deaf ears. “You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away,” Willy cries out. “A man is not a piece of fruit!” He is fired.

The planned celebratory dinner at Frank's Chop House becomes a crucible of failure. Biff arrives, shattered. Oliver didn't even remember him, and in a moment of panic, Biff stole his fountain pen. He tries to tell his father the gentle truth - that their whole life has been a lie, that he was never a salesman for Oliver, only a shipping clerk. But Willy, reeling from his own humiliation, cannot hear it. His mind fractures, and the restaurant dissolves into a hotel room in Boston years ago. The sound of a woman's laughter echoes as a teenaged Biff stands at the door, having come to his father for help after flunking math, only to find him with another woman. The foundation of his life cracks, and his hero is revealed as a “phony little fake.”

Back at home, the final confrontation erupts. Biff, determined to shatter the dreams that are killing them all, throws the rubber hose on the table. “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” he shouts. He confesses to being a thief, a failure, a man who can't hold a job because he was blown so full of hot air. “Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!” In the heat of his rage, Biff breaks down, sobbing, clinging to his father. “Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”

Willy stands astonished. Through the haze of his confusion, he sees not his son's plea for truth, but a sign of devotion. “Isn't that remarkable?” he whispers, elevated. “Biff - he likes me!” This, to Willy, changes everything. The ghost of Ben appears once more, speaking of the jungle, dark but full of diamonds. Willy sees his final, perfect sale: a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar proposition. The insurance money will give Biff his magnificent start. He is known, he is loved, and his funeral will be massive. He rushes out into the night, ignoring Linda's calls, and the sound of a car starting and speeding away fills the house, followed by a violent crash.

At the graveside, only his family and his friend Charley stand in the fading light. The massive funeral Willy envisioned is a sparse, quiet gathering. “Why didn't anybody come?” Linda asks, bewildered. Charley tries to explain. “Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” Happy, defiant, vows to stay and beat the racket, to prove his father did not die in vain. But Biff, finally free, knows who he is. As the others leave, Linda kneels, whispering to the empty space before her. “I made the last payment on the house today,” she says, a sob finally rising in her throat. “Today, dear. And there'll be nobody home. We're free and clear. We're free.” The mournful sound of the flute returns as the hard towers of the apartment buildings rise into sharp focus, boxing in the small, empty house.