Willy Loman is a 60 year traveling salesman who was employed by the Wagner firm for 34 years. ... Ben was the epitome of success and of lost opportunity for Willy Loman. ... Unfortunately, Willy attributed Ben's success to being rugged and well liked consequently raising Biff and Happy the same way. ... Willy Loman tragically drives to his death in pursuit of the reward, a twenty thousand dollar life insurance policy, he hoped would allow Biff to become the success he never was in life. ... Willy Loman's legacy was one of empty dreams and intangible greatness and success, the ...

• Word Count: 939
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Willie Loman is an ordinary man who embodies traditional American values of success. ... Willie Loman had already achieved the historical dream, he had a house, car, family and a job, but he gets obsessed with the business success dream and tries or at least he think he does try to accomplish it but he dismantles his family in the process. Willy Loman had accomplished the historical American Dream but because of his ambition he did not realize it. ... At the age of sixty Willy had built a family and had two sons. ... Happy saws how Biff always got their dad whole attention, and Biff reali...

• Word Count: 2201
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The protagonist of the story is the 60ish Willy Loman being at the rough end of an undistinguished career as a salesman, and the pressures of his life are causing him to lose contact with reality. Living partly in the present (1949) and partly in the past (1928), Willy clings to fantasies of success for both himself and his sons, womanizing underachiever Happy and prodigal runaway Biff and simultaneously veils the family's hopeless financial situation. Since 36 years the small, almost fragile seeming and exhausted traveling salesman Willy Loman has been selling the products of the firm th...

• Word Count: 590
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Miller criticizes the American Dream and its value system by presenting the false image of reality that Willy Loman creates in his household. ... Willy Loman, like Berenger, learns to be content with the world around him by creating an illusion for himself with which he can cope. ... Biff, Willy's son who was once an attractive football star who failed math his senior year and gave up on his aspirations, was well liked but did not succeed in society. ... Biff could not live up to his father's dreams and deemed himself a failure. ... Miller writes in a realist fashion about a very dis...

• Word Count: 621
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The whole play is structured to gradually reveal the deteriorating condition of Willy's mind as well as the worsening relations of the entire Loman family, through a series of complex flashbacks. ... Willy Loman's personal breakdown is the central issue in the play, as the title suggests. ... Miller's whole critique on the business world is also a device for revealing the breakdown of Willy Loman's psyche. ... Also, through this slow unfurling of events, the audience is led more deeply into the plot and seems to be experiencing the breakdown of Happy, Biff, Willy and the Lo...

• Word Count: 1911
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate