Ans:
In "All My Sons", Arther Miller had dealt with the conflict between a father and a son in
the context of war. In Death of Salesman, he again takes up the battle between
a father and a son but shifts the argument from the context of war to the
everyday case of a man (Willy Loman) destroying himself for business and for
family. Once again Miller leaves the conflict between a man and society hanging
fire between suicide and an intolerably unchanging world.
Miller
presents a fairly full context for the suicide, but he cannot show his hero
attaining any profound understanding of his end. Willy’s father made flutes and
sold them himself throughout the country in the self-made businessman’s manner.
Willy’s brother Ben is the next stage: the man is self-made outside America. In stage three, the location is New York, the American city, where the man stays,
burdened by a house over-topped by skyscrapers, payments on household
equipment, mortgage and insurance worries, and a built-in belief that the
competitive society is life at its best. As in All My Sons, the son penetrates
some of the father’s illusions, Biff tried life on a Texas ranch but remained inhibited by his
father’s standards. In a flash-back, Miller presents the father-son
relationship as a manic cult of youthful athletic powers, operated at the
expense of maturity. Miller’s criticism emerges from the conflict between youth
and age, private and public life, optimism and suicidal despair. Willy
perceives that he has accomplished nothing, but America is still the greatest country in the
world even if personal attractiveness gets you nowhere. He perceives that the
accomplished nothing, but America is still the greatest country in the
world even if personal attractiveness gets you nowhere. He perceives that the
competition is maddening, but he refers here to the uncontrolled birth-rate
only. His second son, Happy, is also a salesman, already lost to liquor and
sex, obsessed with the empty word “future” always on his lips.
Once
Willy’s energy is exhausted by the work which society has assigned to him, he
is thrown aside: Willy is casually dismissed by the son of the man who had been
his boss for thirty-four years. He protests: “You can’t eat the orange and
throw the peel away –a man is not a piece of fruit!” He is wrong, but Miller
cannot find anyone to help him. Willy’s exhaustion is the tiredness of empty
buoyancy, of feeling “kind of temporary” about himself. His wife provides
loving despair. Biff knows that his father is a fake.
Willy
lives in a world where his sons are Adonises, with Biff on the football field
in a golden helmet, “like a young god”. But the boys’ old school-mate Bernard,
who worked at his books, is now arguing a case in the Supreme Court, and it is
Charley, Willy’s old friend, who says outright that personal relations and
codes of honor are meaningless now: “Why must everybody like you? Who liked
J.P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish-bath he’d look like a butcher. But
with his pockets on, he was very well liked.”
But
Willy is beyond advice and change. In fact, he is already dead, believing that,
through his insurance, he is worth more dead than alive, and this at least would
atone for his cruelty to his wife and his betrayal of his sons. It now comes
out that Biff lost the will to pass his examination and even the will to live
when he saw his father with a cal –girl. “We never told the truth for ten
minutes in this house”, he says. They are all victims of a “phooey dream” and
it is the American dream.
At
least Miller does not degrade human life in the manner of Broadway psycho-drama
which claims that self-analysis cures everything, or of the social melodrama
which claims that economic change means total human change. He wants the
theatre to present a balanced concept of life in which the hero’s need is to
wholly realize himself without the questioning author preaching revolution.
Consequently, when Willy is betrayed by the myths and ethic of his society, all
we get is his wife’s pathetic cry: “Attention, attention must finally be paid
to such a person”