Death Of A Salesman By Arthur Miller - 1788 Words

The nineteen-thirties and forties were a very masculine dominated period. The father was the head of the home and most times his businesses were sent down to his children when he stops working. A strong relationship between a father and his children is very central to keeping a healthy home. Once the relationship begins to weaken, the entire family becomes unstable. Willy not having a strong father figure himself made him struggle with his personality and that led to him instilling the wrong values and causing a breach in his relationship with his sons. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman expresses how the bond between Willy Loman and his two sons produces the downfall of the Loman family. Willy Loman a sixty year old salesman living†¦show more content†¦Willy never really had a father when he was growing and he lost his father at a young age and he references this when he tells his brother Ben, as â€Å"well dad left when I was such a baby and I never had a chance t o talk to him and I still feel-kind of temporary about myself† (Miller 36). With that type of declaration an intervention can be said that Willy Loman longed for a relationship with his father. His statement that he feels kind of temporary about himself reveals that something is missing in his life and he seems to recognize this himself. Ben, Willy’s older brother served as a substitute father. Ben left home at the age of seventeen to search for their father in Alaska, but ended up in Africa, where he discovered diamond mines and came out of the jungle at twenty-one becoming a very rich man. Though Ben died, but in Willy’s mind, Ben represents the fantastic success for which Willy has always wanted but can never seem to accomplish. And he only appears in Willy’s illusions, carrying a suitcase and umbrella. After Ben died, Willy also looked up to Dave Singleman as a father figure, an eighty-four year old salesman who he met in Alaska and false idolized him thinking he was the embodiment of the American Dream because he called his buyers and completed his sales without ever leaving his hotel room. After he died, Willy discloses that his associate with this Dave Singleman persuaded him to turn out to be a salesman