One of the main elements of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is the depiction of the American family. Salesman provides vivid and detailed characterizations of the roles of American family members. The characters Willy, Linda, Biff, and Happy represent the father, mother, and sons of the average working class American family, respectively. Miller’s astute observations and reality-based portrayals offer a powerful look into the fabric of American values, culture, and heritage.
Every family traditionally begins with a father, and the Loman family is no different. The Loman family father, Willy, is the main character in the story and the center of the conflict. He is an old-fashioned working man who places a great deal of emphasis on the American value system, though it is invariably corrupt. He believes in nothing but total sacrifice to hard work and steady income to finance a family and build a career and home. Sadly, Willy, striving to be the leader and provider for his family, turns out to be a rather insufficient father in that he neglects the human elements of his family life so that he can bow to the wishes of the working class society and values. He is the personification of the American dream gone wrong because, in most cases, it has no other outlet but to go wrong. Ronald Hayman writes of Willy as “the modern Everyman,” a man in which all other average fellows can identify. This is the main reason that Willy is such a vivid portrayal of the American father figure. The struggling working class can always relate to his problems and his struggles.
In the home, Willy never really behaves as the ideal father, but rather the real life father who has just as many problems as anybody else. Willy just seems to not be able to handle these problems in any sort of effective way. This is not to say that all American fathers are failures. Miller’s main point is not the critique of the American father, but rather the American values’ effects on the American father and the American family. What is important to society is many times destructive to the individual, whether the individual realizes it or not. The sad thing about Willy is that he never did fully realize what society and the values of American business and industry took away from him. As Willy’s son Biff says at the close of the play, “he never knew who he was.”
At the right hand of the husband is the wife, and Linda Loman assumes the role in Death of a Salesman. She is, in many ways, the glue that holds the family together. Unfortunately, she is not always successful at doing so. Linda mediates and tries to maintain peace in the household between the family members. In this case, her biggest challenge is keeping the peace between her husband and her son Biff. Ultimately, she is never really able to pull it off.
