Death of a Salesman Reaction Paper
Travis Givens
ENG 125
09 March 2014
Edward Wilson

Death of a Salesman Reaction Paper Death of a Salesman is the literary composition play I chose to analyze. Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning play of 1949 is widely regarded as one of the cornerstone pieces of American literature. Death of a Salesman is centered on the life of Willy Lowman. It challenges the literary fact of achieving the American Dream.
Willy is a 63 year old man and has been a traveling salesman all his life. Despite his hard work Willy, his wife Linda, and their two sons Biff and Happy have always lived on the brink of poverty. Willy has always been low end of the totem pole at his company, but Willy constantly tells himself and his family that he will soon get the "big break” he deserves. He has raised his two sons, Biff and Happy, to also believe that somehow life has cheated them and insists that one day they will get their due. Linda, Willy's loyal wife, lives under the thin veneer of denial that her husband has so long tried to keep from collapsing. In the end despite his protests otherwise, Willy knows he is a failure. He begins to slowly kill himself by inhaling gas fumes from a hose in the garage, an act that relieves his mental anguish and gives him a brief high. The gas also muddles Willy's mind, conflating past, present, and future. This shifting through time and space helps the reader/audience see how much pressure there has been on this simple man to be accepted in the only way he thinks is valuable: to make money. He wants desperately to be "well liked," and without the status of being a manager who makes more money, the dream is impossible. He dies as he has lived, a failure in the eyes of society.
Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” uses the literary devices such as irony, symbolism, foreshadowing, and flashback to relate As far as irony goes it is conveyed by the fact that that he took his own life because he thought that he would be more financially beneficial to his family if he was dead. But sadly kills himself just before he is free of debt. Some examples of symbolism in Miller’s play are the apartment buildings, the rubber hose, Willy’s brother Ben, the tape recorder, and the seeds for the garden. These symbols represent Willy’s attempts to be successful and his impending failure. Willy foreshadows his suicide during his final conversation with Charley when he says, "After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive. The literary device of flashback is used as it relates to Willy’s past memories. This device is used throughout the story as a way to show his longing for the past. An example of this is when at one point in the story, Willy is having a conversation with his dead brother while at the same time carrying on a card game with Charlie, reliving a past conversation in the present. One way that Miller uses imagination to influence the reader; if you really take a look at Willy’s character you can ascertain that he has a very overactive imagination. He sees the American Dream one way, and though his family isn't living the American Dream by his definition he feels like they are. He's seeing things that aren't there.
In conclusion I believe that this was a very good play. I believe that the author Andrew Miller hit the nail on the head when he wrote death of a salesman. Even the play was comprised in 1949 it hinges on the exact state of today’s society. You can say it was foreshadowing the present day. I believe the play was well written and it’s literary content very entertaining. By reading this play I gained a better understanding of the different literary conventions and devices that go into contemporary literature. Although I have never been one to read plays other than the ones assigned in high school, just as those were I found this one to be very interesting as well as entertaining.