death of a salesman essay questions

Death of a Salesman

By arthur miller, death of a salesman essay questions.

Does Willy Loman die a martyr? How do Linda's and his sons' interpretations of his death differ?

A strong answer will note that Willy has a noble conception of his suicide - he kills himself because he truly believes that the insurance money will allow his sons to achieve their destined greatness. But Miller does not give the audience the easy satisfaction of seeing Willy's plan come to fruition. It is highly doubtful that the Lomans would actually receive any insurance money at all. He has a record of suicide attempts, and it would be near impossible to convince the insurance company that his death was an accident.

The crux of an essay should be that Willy thinks he is martyring himself, but his martyrdom is in vain.

Death of a Salesman is one of the foundational texts describing the American dream. How does Miller's play differ from the more traditional Horatio Alger model? Is Miller overwhelmingly cynical on the topic?

Strong answers will contrast Miller's pessimistic and cynical take on the concept of the American dream with its glorified Horatio Alger representations. Traditionally, the American dream means that any person can work his way up from the bottom of the ladder to the top. Miller's work isn't so much a direct subversion of that dream as it is an exploration of the way in which the existence of the American dream can ruin a person's expectations.

Discuss the motif of women's stockings in Death of a Salesman? What are Willy and Biff's attitudes toward them? How do Linda and the woman with whom Willy is having an affair regard them?

To the women, stockings serve as a symbol of what Willy can provide and as a measure of his success. To Willy, they are a symbol of his guilt over the affair. To Biff, they are a symbol of Willy's fakeness and his betrayal of Linda. Each time the stockings appear, they serve each of these three purposes for every character present.

Describe the significance of names in this play. How do Happy and Biff's names contrast with or support their characters? Interpret the name "Loman."

Happy - a boy's name. As his name implies, Happy is someone who should be content - he has a job, an apartment, and a never-ending stream of women - but he remains deeply unhappy.

Ben - Willy's brother is named after the biblical figure Benjamin, which means "one who is blessed." The biblical Benjamin far outstripped his brothers in all areas, rousing their jealousy.

Loman - Willy is a low-man. No great hero, he is already so low on the ladder that he has hardly anywhere to fall.

What is the role of modernity in Death of a Salesman? Have cars and gas heaters fundamentally changed the American dream? How does Miller view these innovations?

The answer should note that Willy is a man left behind by progress. His is a profession that only functions in a small niche of time - he is reliant on the automobile and the highway system, but can't survive the advent of more sophisticated sales methods than the door-to-door. He is startled and confused by Howard's gadgets, and longs for an outdoors life that involves creating things with his hands.

Discuss the gender relationships in this play. Are there any positive models for a harmonious relationship? Does Miller find this concept plausible?

There are only two women of significance in the play, Linda and The Woman, who does not even merit a name. Happy nicely exposits the dichotomy between the two types of women in the world, as represented by his idealized mother and by The Woman and Miss Forsythe. The attitude towards women that Willy modeled for his sons was that women exist to be conquered - and once they've been had, they are no longer worthy of respect.

Analyze the role of seeds in Act II's final segment. What do they stand for?

Willy begins to obsess over seeds as he realizes that he has nothing to pass on to his sons. He hasn't created anything real, nothing physical that you can touch with your hand. But seeds are an investment in the future, something that is both tangible and grows with time, and that is what he wants to pass on to his sons.

Discuss examples of ways in which Willy Loman's suicide is foreshadowed in the first act of the play.

Be sure to note that the question isn't really whether Willy is going to die, but how. The discussion of Willy as suicidal is quite on the nose in the first act, but what is left ambiguous at that point is the how and the why. We are given both the rubber hose and the car as possible modes of suicide, and general despair and desperation as motivations, but the ultimate motivation of insurance money does not become an issue until the end of the play.

Compare Death of a Salesman to A Streetcar Named Desire. How do Willy Loman and Blanche Dubois each represent a fundamental element of the American drive towards progress and success?

Willy and Blanche are both victims of modernity. Willy cannot compete against the young men in the modern business world. And Blanche cannot adapt to the coarseness of life in the new South. Rather than adjusting, both characters descend deeper into their idea of the idealized past, until they lose hold on reality altogether.

Compare Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby. How do Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby suffer a similar fate?

Answer: Although they lived very different lives - Willy, objectively a failure, and Gatsby, objectively a success - Willy and Gatsby had similar downfalls. Both were caught up in the illusion of the American dream, fervently believing that they could and should reach for the stars. But after a lifetime of having relied on personality to get by, the men found themselves terribly alone, even in death.

Death of a Salesman Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Death of a Salesman is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Significant of the tittle in 600 words.

I think the title refers to both the death of Willy the salesmen and the death of his dreams. Willy's dreams of success turn to disillusionment when he cannot compete in the capitalist world. An extended metaphor might also involve Capitalism and...

death of a salesman

Charley visits because he is worried about Willy.He knows Willy is a proud man and he wants to help him, though Willy isn't really willing to take his help.

Please submit your questions one at a time.

How have biff and happy responded to their father’s condition

Biff denies responsibility for his father's condition, but he is forced to acknowledge that he is linked to his father's guilt and irrational actions. I think happy is just stressed about it.

Study Guide for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman study guide contains a biography of Arthur Miller, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Death of a Salesman
• Death of a Salesman Summary
• Character List

Essays for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

• Shattered Dream - The Delusion of Willy Loman
• Perceptions of Self Worth and Prominence: Spaces and Settings in Death of a Salesman
• Sales and Dreams
• Musical Motifs
• Death of A Salesman: Shifting of the American Dream

Lesson Plan for Death of a Salesman

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Introduction to Death of a Salesman
• Relationship to Other Books
• Notes to the Teacher

Wikipedia Entries for Death of a Salesman

• Introduction
• Characters and cast

Death of a Salesman

Arthur miller, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Death of a Salesman: Introduction

Death of a salesman: plot summary, death of a salesman: detailed summary & analysis, death of a salesman: themes, death of a salesman: quotes, death of a salesman: characters, death of a salesman: symbols, death of a salesman: theme wheel, brief biography of arthur miller.

Historical Context of Death of a Salesman

Other books related to death of a salesman.

• Full Title: Death of a Salesman
• When Written: 1948
• Where Written: Roxbury, Connecticut
• When Published: The Broadway premiere was February 10, 1949. The play was published in 1949 by Viking Press.
• Literary Period: Social Realism
• Genre: Dramatic stage play
• Setting: New York and Boston in 1948.
• Climax: Biff's speech to Willy at the end of Act Two.
• Antagonist: Howard Wagner; the American Dream that allows Willy and his sons to delude themselves.

Extra Credit for Death of a Salesman

Death of a Simpson: Beleaguered, overweight family man Willy Loman has been the genesis not only of live-action domestic sitcoms like All in the Family and Married with Children , but animated satires like The Family Guy and The Simpsons , both of which have made knowing reference to Death of a Salesman in various episodes.

Salesman in Beijing: In 1983, the People's Art Theatre in Beijing wanted to put on a Chinese-language production of Death of a Salesman . Arthur Miller flew to Beijing and spent six weeks directing the cast, though he only spoke two words of Chinese. He documented his experiences in the book Salesman in Beijing , published in 1984 with photographs by his wife, Inge Morath.

105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Examples

Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis.

A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Death of a Salesman is that rare thing: a modern play that is both a classic, and a tragedy. Many of the great plays of the twentieth century are comedies, social problem plays, or a combination of the two. Few are tragedies centred on one character who, in a sense, recalls the theatrical tradition that gave us Oedipus, King Lear, and Hamlet.

But how did Miller come to write a modern tragedy? What is Death of a Salesman about, and how should we analyse it? Before we come to these questions, it might be worth briefly recapping the plot of what is, in fact, a fairly simple story.

Death of a Salesman : summary

The salesman of the title is Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is in his early sixties. He works on commission, so if he doesn’t make a sale, he doesn’t get paid. His job involves driving thousands of miles around the United States every year, trying to sell enough to put food on his family’s table. He wants to get a desk job so he doesn’t have to travel around any more: at 62 years of age, he is tired and worn out.

He is married to Linda. Their son, Biff, is in his thirties and usually unemployed, drifting from one temporary job to another, much to Willy’s displeasure. Willy’s younger son, Happy, has a steady job along and his own home, and is therefore a success by Willy’s standards.

However, Happy, despite his name, isn’t happy with the life he has, and would quite like to give up his job and go and work on a ranch out West. Willy, meanwhile, is similarly dreaming, but in his case of the past, rather than the future: he thinks back to when Biff and Happy were small children and Willy was a success as a salesman.

The Lomans’ neighbour, Charley, offers Willy a job to help make ends meet, but Willy starts to reminisce about his recently deceased brother, Uncle Ben, who was an adventurer (and young Willy’s hero). Linda tells her sons to pay their father some respect, even though he isn’t himself a ‘great man’.

It emerges that Willy has been claiming to work as a salesman but has lately been borrowing money as he can’t actually find work. His plan is to take his own life so his family will receive life insurance money and he will be able, with his death, to do what he cannot do for them while alive: provide for them. Biff agrees reluctantly to go back to his former boss and ask for a job so he can contribute to the family housekeeping.

Meanwhile, Willy asks his boss, Howard, for his desk job and an advance on his next pay packet, but Howard sacks Willy. Willy then goes to Charley and asks for a loan. That night, at dinner, Willy and Biff argue (Biff failed to get his own former job back when his old boss didn’t even recognise him), and it turns out that Biff once walked in on his father with another woman.

Willy goes home, plants some seeds, and then – hearing his brother Ben calling for him to join him – he drives off and kills himself. At his funeral, only the family are present, despite Willy’s prediction that his funeral would be a big affair.

Death of a Salesman : analysis

Miller’s family had been relatively prosperous during the playwright’s childhood, but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, as with many other families, their economic situation became very precarious. This experience had a profound impact on Miller’s political standpoint, and this can be seen in much of his work for the theatre.

Death of a Salesman represented a decisive change of direction for the young playwright. His previous success as a playwright, All My Sons , was a social drama heavily influenced by Henrik Ibsen, but with his next play, Miller wished to attempt something new. The mixture of hard-hitting social realism and dreamlike sequences make Death of a Salesman an innovative and bold break with previous theatre, both by Miller and more widely.

In his essay ‘ Tragedy and the Common Man ’ (1949), which Miller wrote to justify his artistic decision to make an ordinary American man the subject of a theatrical tragedy, Miller argued that the modern world has grown increasingly sceptical, and is less inclined to believe in the idea of heroes.

As a result, they don’t see how tragedy, with its tragic hero, can be relevant to the modern world. Miller argues, on the contrary, that the world is full of heroes. A hero is anybody who is willing to lay down his life in order to secure his ‘sense of personal dignity’. It doesn’t matter what your social status or background is.

Death of a Salesman is an example of this ethos: Loman, who cheated on his wife and lied to his family about his lack of work and his reliance on friends who lent him money, makes his last gesture a tragic but selfless act, which will ensure his family have money to survive when he is gone.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Miller is somehow endorsing the hero’s final and decisive act. The emphasis should always be on the word ‘tragedy’: Loman’s death is a tragedy brought about partly by his own actions, but also by the desperate straits that he is plunged into through the harsh and unforgiving world of sales, where once he is unable to earn money, he needs some other means of acquiring it so he can put food on the table for his family.

But contrary to what we might expect, there is something positive and even affirmative about tragedy, as Arthur Miller views the art form.

For Miller, in ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’, theatrical tragedy is driven by ‘Man’s total compunction to evaluate himself justly’. In the process of doing this, and attaining his dignity, the tragic hero often loses his life, but there is something affirmative about the events leading up to this final act, because the audience will be driven to evaluate what is wrong with society that it could destroy a man – a man willing to take a moral stand and evaluate himself justly – in the way that it has.

Does Willy Loman deserve to be pushed to take his own life just so his family can pay the bills? No, so there must be something within society that is at fault. Capitalism’s dog-eat-dog attitude is at least partly responsible, since it leads weary and worn-out men like Willy to dream of paying off their mortgage and having enough money, while simultaneously making the achievement of that task as difficult as possible. When a younger and better salesman comes along, men like Willy are almost always doomed.

But by placing this in front of the audience and dramatising it for them, Miller invites his audience to question the wrongs within modern American society. Thus people will gain a greater understanding of what is wrong with society, and will be able to improve it. The hero’s death is individually tragic but collectively offers society hope.

So it may be counter-intuitive to describe a tragedy like Death of a Salesman as ‘optimistic’, but in a sense, this is exactly what it is. Miller takes the classical idea of the tragic flaw, what Aristotle had called the hamartia , and updates this for a modern audience, too: the hero’s tragic flaw is redefined as the hero’s inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity and rightful status in society.

There is something noble in his flaw, even though it will lead to his own destruction. So really, the flaw is not within the individual or hero as much as in society itself.

A key context for Death of a Salesman , like many great works of American literature from the early to mid-twentieth century, is the American Dream: that notion that the United States is a land of opportunity where anyone can make a success of their life and wind up stinking rich. Miller’s weaving of dream sequences in amongst the sordid and unsatisfactory reality of the Lomans’ lives deftly contrasts the American dream with the American reality.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman”

This is a very insightful and convincing appreciation. What it misses is any idea that Miller’s being Jewish may have had a hand in helping him to see why the American dream and its popularity-cult needed to be criticized. The word “cult” in “populairty-cult” says it all, because “The Death of a Saleman” is at its core a play about idolatry, the Ol,d Testament theme against which its prophets railed the most.

Willy is portrayed as an idol-worshipper, whereas his friend, Charely, and Charley’s son, Bernard, are both seen as devotees of the “true” God, in whose religion the human being is always endowed with dignity and always seen as an end in himself, never as a means to some other end. The play, in fact, asks a very Jewish question. If the true God and the false god both require sacrifice, how can you ever know which is which? And its tragedy supplies us with Miller’s answer: those who worship idols discover in the end that THEY are the sacrifice!

Miller, like Philip Roth later on, was a Jewish-American inheritor of the Old Testament’s prophetic tradition, a tradition in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremia en Ezekiel continually used their verbal art to expose Israel’s stinking moral corruption, foreseeing nothing but doom if it continued in irs idolatrous ways. Change ancient Israel to America, change the average Israelite of that time to Willy Loman now: both wind up destroying themsevles for the very same reason: with all the good will in they world, they have no self-knowledge and spend their whole lives worshipping a false god, deluded in the belief that they are worshipping the true one.

Their mistake in both cases only becomes apparent when it is time to offer the sacrifice, but by then, of course, it is always too late!

Perfect analysis, particularly when viewed in regards to recent events, involving American involvement with Israel dogma

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Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Samples

As a Pulitzer Prize winner, Death of a Salesman deserves some attention, which is most likely the reason why you were asked to write an essay about it. Even though Arthur Miller wrote it in the middle of the twentieth century, the play is still relevant.

This Custom-Writing.org article aims to help you if you have questions or are looking for a decent Death of a Salesman essay topic or have to choose between many variants.

• The first section of it contains a list of ideas that might help you write a great essay.
• The second one contains Death of a Salesman essay samples that you are welcome to use for inspiration.
• 💡 Essay Topics
• ✒️ Essay Samples

💡 Death of a Salesman: Essay Topics

Miller addresses various themes, such as the American dream and betrayal, incorporated into family life. To write a killer essay on Death of a Salesman , you should first study all aspects of the play. So you don’t forget to read through our analysis of the main characters and themes !

Now you are all set up to pick a topic from the list below.

• Analyze the main symbols of the play. There are multiple hidden symbols that Miller uses to represent one idea or another. The interpretation depends on you. There are no wrong answers. However, to set a direction, we recommend looking at such a symbol as the stockings. It is quite an obvious hint on the theme of betrayal.
• How is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman as a father? Willy Loman, the main character in Death of a Salesman , is far from being the employee of the month. But as a father, he is also supposed to be a role model to his two sons. However, we can see that Biff and Happy have developed their personalities according to their dad’s behavior.
• Can Willy Loman be considered a hero? Loman tries to solve the problems which are too big for him. He cannot possibly overcome capitalism and becomes its victim. Analyze Willy’s last act and see whether it can be genuinely regarded as a good deed or it is a desperate attempt to get rid of a problem.
• Discuss the theme of the American Dream in Death of a Salesman . Is it Willy’s fault that he failed his family? Think about how our ambitions shape the course of our lives and write an essay reflecting on it in relation to the play. Discuss the fate of the salesman as the embodiment of the American dream.
• How reasonable was Willy’s despair in the final scenes? Look through all the details you can find about the Loman family and analyze their social and financial state. Try to write an objective opinion on whether Willy’s suicide was the only option for them. What might have caused him to exaggerate the problems they were having?
• Discuss the statement “Be liked, and you will never want” from Death of a Salesman . This prompt is related to Willy’s life philosophy, which he passes on to his sons. Are there any reasons to claim that it doesn’t work? Why? Maybe reflect on the same idea circulating in modern society.
• What is the meaning of Arthur Miller’s play? We suggest you answer the question, “What is the main message of Death of a Salesman ?” Rereading our analysis of the main themes and characters should give you some ideas! However, remember to focus on ONE idea and present persuasive arguments.
• Analyze Willy Loman’s career choice. What do you think about Willy’s decision to go into the sales business? Was it the right choice? Find the evidence in the play? Think about how different his life and life of his family could be if he had chosen a different occupation, which fits his natural abilities.
• Illusions and realistic dreams as Willy Loman’s coping mechanism. Look at Death of a Salesman as a tragedy and the story about the main character’s inner fight. Write about how he retreats into the memories to escape real-life problems. Does it have anything to do with his failure to understand his ambitions?
• Discuss the reason for Willy’s rejection of Charley’s job offer . Loman keeps turning down his friend’s job offer, and it seems to be annoying him more and more every time. But what is the reason? He might have been more well-off if he accepted it. Is it about his pride or social values?

✒️ Death of a Salesman: Essay Samples

Below you’ll find a collection of Death of a Salesman essay examples. You are welcome to use them for inspiration!

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Is the American dream attainable? What makes someone a successful person? How does your image of yourself shape your life? Arthur Miller’s play is a tragic but true-to-life illustration of these philosophical questions without definitive answers. This Death of a Salesman Study Guide will help you understand the author’s intention...

Looking for a summary of Death of a Salesman? This article by Custom-Writing.org experts contains everything you might need for your studies or essay: Death of a Salesman’s synopsis, a plot infographic, Death of a Salesman’s short summary, and detailed descriptions of the events in the play act by act....

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Death of a Salesman

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