What is the American Dream? For most, it’s the rags to riches story — going beyond one’s means and somehow beating life — money has got a lot to do with it, but perhaps it is more the glory that comes with the wealth: the children, the car and the wife who can cook. My lit teacher in high school taught us a different definition, which is that the next generation does better than the previous. Posterity rolls on in compound interest. If we follow this definition today, then the American has died a long time ago, perhaps the throngs of it starting as early during the time when Miller wrote Death of a Salesman.
Nowadays, America is broke, indebted, with a ballooning current account deficit north of $200billion the last time I checked. Her children can no longer rent houses in good neighbourhoods, let alone to purchase them. Some live in cars that they cannot afford to repay. It is a dystopia out there and America is still living under its petty illusions. And despite all this, America is still proud. It is like that opening scene of the Newsroom where Will McAvoy’s character articulately destroyed a sorority girl for asking “Why is America the greatest country in the world?” But it used to be.
An America poisoned by her own Dreams
Willy Loman is an allegory for the old and tired America obsessed to recapture and relive its glory days and looking pathetic doing it. We can say that Willy Loman represents that generation, bedazzled still by the dreams of the past while his world is on fire. He thrived in the old days — promising athletic sons destined for college, bragging about opening up new markets (“giving them hell”) and an impugnable belief in his pedigree. His brother after all, was a successful speculator who made it big in the diamond mines, but died young.
Coming back home and tired one night, his vagrant son Biff visiting back home he fell into a reverie and fell into a resolution that the next day he will ask his boss for a position in the city, instead of moving everywhere all around the country while sales are constantly dwindling down. Willy had spent a good part of three decades in the same company and he couldn’t keep up with the times. Biff also tried his hand at being employed by a distant acquaintance from a fleeting promise made too long ago. We know where this is all going to go.
The Old America trying to keep up, and dropping dead en route
It is sadistic perhaps, to take pleasure in reading inevitable train wrecks that in many ways, are too relatable. Willy Loman is that eroding middle class in the great post-war era. We have to take in mind that this is also the decade which was career-defining for America: after having won the war, the generation of boomers are yet to come, yet things are changing too quickly for the old sales industry, as it always is. The glory of winning the war is still fresh in the American memory and it’s justifiable to take pride in that. But a changing America will always have its victims, and the old is often fed to the young.
Willy Loman is no better than any of us. His greatest guilt is perhaps his hubris — that it cast him with an illusion that he is no longer as haughty as he really were. His old clients, who were also his drinking buddies are retired or dead, his sales are dwindling and the fact that he has to rely fully on commission means that he no longer has a stable income. It’s not like he had no job offers, like his friend Charley who he loathed with every ounce of his soul. Regardless, he still has life insurance and his house is all but paid for minus the last mortgage. I believe that the worse things get, the more he is withdrawn into his wild reveries.
And wow, what a revelation the reveries are. Willy is back in his first decade on the job, a big man who were feared and respected by customers and competitors alike, he talks to his deceased brother Ben who made it big and he is reliving his children as kids who have the life ahead of them — up to no good sometimes, but in general children a parent can be proud of. This reverie also drove him perhaps to make the next move to ask for an office job.
But that didn’t go so well. For a long while Willy had been underperforming, and his accidents driving into the ditch and his awkwardness with customers and colleagues alike means that really it was time to go. Although he felt a sense of entitlement for building the company from the ground up with his boss’s father, he really had no place in the office and he was forced into a long and potentially permanent holiday.
The new generation isn’t doing much better either. Biff, after feeling betrayed by his father, decided to live the life of a vagabond — moving from state to state in a string of temporary jobs. It’s Kerouac-ish but it doesn’t pay the bills and he’s got nothing saved up. He’s already in his mid-30s and is still living his life as a broke 20-something. Happy isn’t doing any better either. At one point, he disowned his father as a complete stranger in front of women he fancied. He is stuck in town with nowhere to go. Both generations it seemed have failed each other miserably.
The death of a tragic hero or a pathetic old man?
It’s no spoiler that Willy died in the end. It’s already in the title. But his death is an ambiguous one — he died as a self-proclaimed hero to save his son Biff from stagnating by offering his own life for the sake of insurance payoff — so that Biff has a head start. He was moved when Biff approached him with desperation and compassion, as though he was a child again. Is this what the heroic end of the old America supposed to be? In a cheap payoff of self-sacrifice?
I can’t say. But I would argue that this book is more relevant now than the time it was written. The American Dream is dead and has been for years, but unlike the book, there is no payoff. Just mountains of debt.
