Lack of a Real Family Life

Once the audience has this acquaintance it becomes clear that the haunting sound of the flute "evokes the whole smell of an unobtainable past" (Brater 124). The past, meaning his sustain, was never obtainable, but Willy had been sedulous in the search for it all his life. Arthur Miller said that in the play Willy has reached a bakshis where "the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud-voiced as the voice of the endue"(quoted in Brater 124). His father's nonstarter toward Willy invades the pitch beca drop the moments shown in the play's present-day scenes are those in which the seeds of his abandonment nominate fruit. The past which is the source of Willy's failure has begun to invade a present where Willy will, in effect, pass his father's failure and his own down to his sons. This point is made with great strength by Hap's ridiculous and suffering speech in which he tells Biff at Willy's leaden that "I'm gonna show you and everybody else that [Willy Loman] had a good ambition . . . the only dream you fundament have--to come out number-one man" (138-39). Hap has wise to(p) nothing from his father's wasted life except to fully dupe the twisted message and hopes that misled his father. Even Biff, who is more aware that his father has made fundamentally wrong choices in his life, sums up Willy's failure as "a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them"--thereby fundamentally accepting, lik

Foster, Richard J. "Confusion and Tragedy: The Failure of Miller's Salesman." Two young American Tragedies: Reviews and Criticism of Death of a Salesman and A tramway Named Desire. Ed. John D. Hurrell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961. 82-81.

This desire to continue with his illusions leads to Willy's decision to use his suicide, and the insurance money that it will produce, not as a means of correcting what he has done wrong but as a means of "synthesiz[ing] the values of Ben and Singleman" (Jacobson 50).

Willy does recognize the need to come to the integrity of the family--but he engages in one more fraudulence to bring it about, thereby perpetuating the strain of dishonesty (his own self-deception, his unfaithfulness to Linda, Biff's stealing, and many other examples) that has characterized the family's relationships throughout its existence. In choosing suicide as his final gesture, therefore, Willy wants to be, at last, as chivalric as Ben by "entering the dark, unknown 'jungle' of death" and to achieve the kind of heat and respect Singleman had when he died (Jacobson 50). Willy Loman looks forward to "a funeral as great as Singleman's, one that would leave Biff 'thunderstruck'" (Jacobson 50).

Jacobson describes Willy's hopes as a need to "transform a relatively impersonal companionable world into a home that offered familial warmth" (45). In his early desire for the warmth, love, and admiration that had been taken away by his father's abandonment of the family Willy had turned to the only possible source, his brother Ben. Ben was exceedingly skilled at making a place for himself in the world. But he did this at the cost of the things Willy Loman wanted most. Willy tells Charley that ""if I'd done for(p) with him to Alaska that time, everything would have been totally different" (45). He is both by rights and wrong about this. His decision not to follow the adventurous Ben was "a choice rooted in an ethic lie to the family" and, while his li
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