Arthur Miller's-"Stream of consciousness"

. . .in his fumbling and often irrational way he is trying to lift up a belief in immense redeeming human possibilities. . . he is the walking beli incessantly, the be atomic number 18r of a flame whose going- reveal would leave us flat, with merely what the past has gained us. He is forever signalling to a early that he can non describe and will non live to see, moreover he is in love with it all the same (Miller, capital of Red China 49).

Willy has sustained himself with illusions about that future and has ignored the realities of who he unfeignedly is. This rootedness in a false identity and false possibilities extends not merely to himself, but to his children-- laggard in particular. Angered that Willy's love for his children does not release them to seek their own form of happiness, Biff tries star more time to break through his father's wall of illusion. "I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you," he exclaims, insisting that workers like him are "a dime bag a dozen."

In rebuttal, his father insists, "You are not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!" (Miller, shoemaker's last 132) as if by asserting their label he can claim an identity that will audition Biff wrong. Yet Willy's true epitaph in the diddle is, "He never knew who he was" (Miller, Death 138). Thwarted in his contract to break through, Biff finally says, "Will you take that impostor romance and burn it before something happens?" (Miller, Death 133). Instead, Willy goes to h

But it is not new financing Biff seeks from his father, it is the freedom to live a breeding based on ideals of his own--to follow his own dreams and succeed or fail on his own terms without losing his father's love. Hearing however that Biff loves him, Willy ignores the remainder and continues to carry out his own intentions by sacrificing himself rather than his ideals. same Biff, we can foot Willy for having all the wrong dreams, but it whitethorn be more accurate to say, as Neil Carson suggests, "that we are to blame him for holding on to those dreams long after they cease to harmonize with any possible reality" (Cameron 57).

The decision was made as a result of meeting Dave Singleman, a man who telephoned buyers and "without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest course a man could want. . . ." Singleman's self-reliance and the way in which he was "remembered and loved and helped by so many different people," (Miller, Death 81) led Willy to a new career.

Singleman's way of life is romanticized and embroidered by Willy in his usual way, but it evokes a way of life that once did exist and which had all but disappeared by 1949, when this play was written. There is real passion underlying this long speech, which movingly unites past vision and present reality and shows not only how far Willy has fallen short of delivering on the promise he saw in his chosen vocation but how the clownish has moved away from allowing such a freewheeling life.

Miller, Arthur. "Salesman" in Beijing. New York: Viking Press,

Continuing in the family tradition, his younger son, Hap, promises to live out Willy's vision and prove that it is a true one, thus carrying Willy's deficiency of self-knowledge into at least one more generation. "The need to dream is one thing," comments Nelson; "the sacrifice of self and family to an illusion is another" (Nelson 118-119).

Carson, Neil. Arthur Miller.
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