In Act One of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the main character Willy Loman tells his wife Linda, “I’m well-liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is Linda, people don’t seem to take to me” (Miller TBD). The self-contradiction implicit in this line demonstrates Miller’s masterful use of indirect characterization to divulge Willy Loman’s delusion, and ensuing nervous breakdown and suicide, over the course of the play. It is the incremental revelation of delusion through self-contradiction that creates the magnetism of this character, Willy Loman, a tragic protagonist that continues to enthrall, despite the passage of over half a century.
Miller does not make the reader immediately aware of Willy Loman’s mental and emotional frailty. In the initial scenes, Willy comes across as absent-minded and slightly bumbling, but relatively stable. Small clues peppered throughout Act One however tell us Willy no longer listens to himself, nor to anyone else, and has completely severed his connection with reality. These clues begin innocently, as in Willy’s self-contradiction on page TBD:
WILLY: Biff is a lazy bum!…
LINDA: I don’t know. I think he’s still lost, Willy. I think he’s very lost.
WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such–personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff–he’s not lazy. (Miller TBD)
Again, on page TBD, Willy’s self-contradiction appears in the line “Chevrolet, Linda is the greatest car ever built,” followed by “That goddam Chevrolet, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car!” a few pages later (Miller TBD).
Innocuous self-contradictions such as these escalate to full-fledged disassociation as the play progresses. Willy’s delusion becomes harder to suppress. Cocooned at home with his devoted wife Linda, who supports his delusion, Willy feels very little interference from the outside world. But having both grown sons Biff and Happy at home places pressure on his fictionalized account of their youth, as Biff’s line – “we never told the truth for ten minutes in this house” – epitomizes (Miller TBD).
Nevertheless, Willy dismisses his wife’s adoration and seeks instead the respect of his sons – an impossible goal. When Biff and Happy abandon Willy in the restaurant, his self-contradiction can no longer shield him from reality – his sons think he is a joke, and he’s dead broke. We receive a chilling glimpse into the totality of Willy’s disassociation from reality on page TBD with the lines spoken to his dead brother Ben:
Ben, that funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he’ll see it with his eyes once and for all (Miller TBD).
Death of a Salesman maintains its relevance and appeal, as the popularity of recent productions attests [1]. This is due, in part, to Miller’s conscious use of indirect characterization for full tragic effect. To see a man lie to himself for a lifetime, only to come finally to the truth – poor, old, and rejected by his own offspring – speaks to primal human fear.
References
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.