ASSIGNMENT

PAPER: 5

TRAGEDY:

TOPIC   :   “WILLY LOMAN AS A VICTIM OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY.”

NAME     :   BHALIYA UMA H.

ROLL NO:  02

SEM -1: M.A. PART-1

BATCH:  2010-2011

SUBMITTED TO:  Mr. Jay Mehta.

Department of English, Bhavnagar University.

v     WILLY LOMAN AS A VICTIM OF

     CAPITALIST SOCIETY

   ANS:        DEATH OF SALESMAN

                                          -ARTHU  MILLER

Willy loman is the protagonist of the play. “Death of a salesman” by Arthur miller. Trough character of willy, miller has depicted the life of a common man. Willy loman, as his name suggest is average lower middle class American. He is everyman. His life is dull and insecure. He has two ambitions- he wants to be rich and he wants to be loved especially by his elder son biff. The end of the play is partly ironical and partly positive. Willy becomes rich but only when he is dead. He dies with a satisfaction that biff really loves him.

WILLY – A TRAVELING SALESMAN :-

Willy loman is a traveling salesman in Wagner’s company. He is past sixty years. He is Exhansed and he can’t travel any more. His wife linda suggests that he should ask for a job in New York. But the firm does not need him in New York as in New England. He feels that he is vital there and all the important people know him there. He thinks himself to be a very successful, but it is his self deception. Dave single man is his ideal. In reality willy is an utter failure. He does not earn properly. He is unable to meet his financial needs. He feels loneliness too and wants someone to understand him.

A MAN OF MANY ILLUSIONS  :-

Willy always mixes up illusions with reality. He thinks that if a man wants to be successful in life. He should not only be “liked but well liked”. Willy loves material success. According to him success can be achieved by personal magnetism and the spirit of enterprise. He speaks highly of himself and his son biff. He has innocent faith in the goodness and uprightness of other people. He thinks that if you make yourself  likable, you can end up with diamonds, realization comes to him when he is neglected by his boss and rejected by his own sons in the “dinner scene” for him  “personal attractiveness” is important than hard work.

MISFIT IN THE ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH HE LIVES  :-

Willy is very much depressed by the harshness of life. And his surrounding. He always wants to escape in his imaginative world of pastoral bliss. He loves nature. It is the symbol of his unattamable happiness. He is frustrated by the buildings around him he says….

“The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise carrot in the background”.

His memories of elm tree. The beautiful melody of flute etc. Are suggestive of his love of nature. The symbolic planting of a “garden” before his death is also symbolic. He loves even roadside scenery. He is sorry for the jungle around him. He misses the fresh air of the past.

HIS IDEALS   :-

Willy believes more in the attractiveness rather than effort. It is the reason of his failure. We can understand it by willy’s association with three characters. They provide three different alternative paths to success. The first one is Dave single man. He is willy ideal in his business. Willy was inspired by him and accepted his profession. Dave had set up a huge commercial empire with his personal charm and sharp business sense. But willy himself accepts that it is not possible to be like Dave single man. He accepts that the life has become too much competitive.

His second ideal is his brother, Ben. He represents the typical adventurer in America who gambles his life on nothing and comes up with millions. Willy says,

“What’s the mystery? The man knew what he wanted and went out and got it. Walked into a jungle, and comes out, the age of twenty one and he is rich! The world is an ouster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress”.

Willy discovers that the risk and chanciness in Ben’s life are not applicable to his own. One great failure of willy’s life is his refusal to go along with Ben to Alaska.

The third character is willy’s neighbor charley. He is successful in comparison with willy. Charley understands the social and economic system. He knows that one can achieve success in work gradually and painfully. He is dull and not a dreamer as willy. That is why willy has no respect for him. Willy is too dreamy to live with the hard realities of life. He fails to adopt any of the characteristics of these three models.

HIGH OPINION ABOUT HIS SON BIFF  :-

Willy thinks that biff has distinguished himself as a football player. So he will be successful everywhere, he says,

“Like a young god, Hercules – something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him…. God almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that magnificent can never really fade away”.

He likes biffs popularity among the girls and his school friends. Biff is thirty four years old and has achieved nothing. Willy is unable to give up his illusion about his son. He thinks that bill Oliver will give him any amount of money. When biff returns without money. He can not accept his failure. His high opinion about biff and the contrary realities make father-son relationship very bad willy’s failure as a father is his personal failure. He had responsibility to his bring up two sons. He had not to make them millionaires. He had to make them two decent human beings, but he couldn’t do it. His moral and human failures are reflected in his sons.

OFTEN ABSENT MINDED   :-

Willy is often confused. He contradicts himself and becomes absent minded. In the beginning, he returns from his journey without completing his work as he was unable to drive car. He tells linda about biff that he is lazy and just after sometime he describes him as a hard worker. Though all the windows are open, he asks linda to open them. He talks about opening the windshield of his car but his new car has no windshield.

A PATHETIC PERSON  :-

We feel sorry for willy many a times. He talks to linda with a heart full of a pain. Linda understands him and says….

“But he is human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid to him”.

Willy accepts his short coming to linda but he is unable to overcome them. We feel sorry for him when he asks Howard to give him job in New York. He is ready to reduce his salary from sixty thousand dollars to forty thousand dollars a week. But Howard denies it. Willy’s frustrations often lead him towards the effort of suicide. He has tried to smash his car many times. The other example is the rubber pipe in the cellar. Willy is unable to meet his financial needs. He borrows money from charley and pretends to linda that it is his salary. When charley offers him a job. He refuses by telling that he had already a job.

HIS LOVE FOR LINDA      :-

Willy loves linda a lot. She understands him fully. Once he had been unfaithful to her. We see him with a woman, but this feeling always hurts him a lot. He had given stockings to that woman. When he sees linda mending stocking, he becomes angry as it reminds him of his past. He tells her that she is his foundation and support. When he is very upset he remembers her a lot. He says,

“You’re the best there’s linda, you’re a pal, you know that? On the road – on the road i want to grab you sometimes and just kiss the life out’s you”.

He confesses to her that people, they neglect him. He accepts that he is foolish and fat to look at. Though he tries to run away from the realities of biff’s life, he confesses to linda that it is a disgrace that biff is unsettled at the age of thirty four. He says from the age of seventeen nothing good has happened to biff. Thus he opens his heart to linda many times.

TRAGIC  END   :-

Willy tries to achieve success but fails constantly. He is unable to bear his frustration.  He feels that he has done nothing in his life and he should do something for his family and his sons, he says,

“I’ve got to get some seeds, right away. Nothing is planted. I don’t have a thing in the ground”.

His sentences are quite symbolic it is his realization that he couldn’t do anything. The other realization comes to him afterwards. Biff   shows him realities and asks to abandon his false dreams. At that time willy feels,

Willy:  isn’t that isn’t that remarkable?  Biff, he likes   

              Me!

Linda   :  he loves you, willy!

Happy:  always did pop.

This is the happiest moments of willy’s life. He wanted the love of his son and he got it. Then he commits suicide to get insurance of twenty thousands dollars for his son’s better future. Thus when he dies, he has no debt but he is not there to enjoy it.

SUFFERINGS AT THE HANDS OF UNJUST SOCIETY         :-

The society gives importance to success, appearance, ambitions and self interest. Willy is surrounded by such a society and is affected by it. Willy has become the embodiment of all the worst and destructive forces which ruin him. Willy is influenced by false society. His life is lost in seeking his place in that society. He struggles a lot but is unable to achieve success.