Alex Thorn

English 544

09.21.03

Wake Up, Willy

He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine … A salesman is got to dream, boy.

(Requiem, page 138)

Willy Loman longs for the success of his brother Ben, but refuses to accept the drudgery in the work of his friend, Charley. Essentially, Willy wants the freedom that Ben has – leaving for Alaska on a whim, ending up in the wrong place, and still succeeding on his own – without the responsibility and hard work that Charley puts in to be modestly and stolidly successful. The incongruity in Willy’s wishes – that Willy wants all the glory without any of the guts – leaves him in a place where, truly, he is still a child. And, like a child, Willy could never live like Ben because he needs the security of a job and life like the one Charley has. As the play winds on, Willy cannot wake up from his fantasized version of true American success and, ultimately, allows Miller to illustrate the shallowness of the American Dream.

Ben represents success based on the benchmarks Willy has created: that if a man has a good appearance and is well-liked, he will thrive in the business world. Yet, the amount of truth in Ben’s character is questionable. More likely, Ben has been idealized in Willy’s mind to become a mix between truth and fantasy – one who exemplifies the principles that Willy lives his life by and bestows on the Loman boys.

William, when I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich! (Act 1, Page 52)

In fact, either Ben leaves out the part of the story where he worked tirelessly for four years in the jungle to make his fortune or this is another example of Willy nurturing his fantasies in his own idealized hallucination of Ben. Either way, Willy cannot wake up from the dream world his head is in involving the seemingly effortless success that comes about his brother Ben, nor can he realize that, at least in his world, success is based on more than projecting a good, confident appearance and being well-liked: it involves hard work and effort. And, while he idealizes Ben and raises him to the point of symbolic greatness, he idolizes Dave Singlman (single-man), who, at the age of eight-four, can “go into any city, pick up the phone, and… [make] his living,” because he represents the only solid example of success under Willy’s principle – and even then, Singleman is alone.

In the same way that Ben serves as a symbol of perfect success for Willy, Charley serves as an emblem of drudgery and responsibility. Charley’s plain spoken offer is simple but reliable:

I offered you a job. You can make fifty dollars a week. And I won’t send you on the road. (Act 2, Page 96)

At face value, Willy rejects Charley’s job offer as a matter of childish pride. Beneath this pride, however, the mundane, restrictive, slogging labor that a job with Charley would entail is not only against Willy’s formula for success (good appearance + popularity = success), but it is totally foreign to him. As an audience, we have already become aware that Charley’s offer is really exactly what Willy wants, for he, in just the previous scene, requested from Howard precisely what Charley is offering.

Willy’s life is full of disillusion; he is torn, frequently against his will, between the idealized fantasy that Ben represents and the solid, responsible reality that Charley symbolizes. Essentially, Willy longs for the freedom and success of his brother Ben, without being ready to commit himself to the drudgery of Charley. And, it is during the few moments in the play when Willy realizes the disparity between the two – fantasy and reality – that his character becomes truly tragic. His brother, Ben, traveled abroad and was immediately successful. Yet, Willy often drives seven hundred miles and returns with nothing, unable to live up to his own expectations as derived from and represented by Ben. Even Ben points out that “a diamond is rough and hard to the touch,” (Act 2, Page 134) explaining that even the greatest wealth is hard to come by, but Willy doesn’t pick up on it. Willy’s inability to commit himself to any line of work that involves manual labor – essentially, where one must use something other than his appearance and amiability to succeed, such as a job with Charley – leaves him without any foundation upon which to build success. He is a skilled carpenter, as Charley points out when he says, “That’s a nice piece of work… to put up a ceiling is a mystery to me… how do you do it?” (Act 1, Page 44) Unfortunately, Willy could never be a carpenter because he is too deranged and caught up in his fantasy about instantaneous wealth and greatness to bother himself with a more menial, but still successful job as a carpenter.

The battle in Willy between the freedom and success that Ben represents and the drudgery and reality that Charley symbolizes, coupled with his inability to have either, leaves Willy childish. Throughout the play, Willy’s behavior and the way he is handled by others suggests that he, in fact, has never really grown up. Charley asks him the very question, “Willy, when are you going to grow up?” (Act 2, page 89). Sadly, Willy knows that he is unstable, telling Ben that he still feels “kind of temporary about himself,” (Act 1, Page 51) and even both Howard and Bernard refer to Willy as a “kid.” (Act 2, pages 84, 93). Similarly, Linda, for much of the play, serves not as a wife, but as a mother-figure, mending Willy’s clothes, protecting Willy from his sons and keeping him grounded and organized in reality. Because of his childlike behavior and the conflict within Willy that is based on his inability to have neither the life of Ben nor of Charley, he is plagued by contradictions when reality encroaches on his fantasies and vice versa; he hates stealing, but encourages the kids to steal sand from the construction site; he calls Biff a bum, but then says that fifty men in New York City would love to hear from him; he says that the “old Chevy” was a spectacular car, but then calls it the worst car ever made. Alas, Willy’s distorted and disillusioned perception of reality is fueled by his childish inability to work, through drudgery and slog, towards true American success. This view of American success reflects Miller’s condemnation with the shallowness of the language of the cliché American Dream: Willy believes that just going out “west” or “into the jungle” will automatically mean striking gold or finding diamonds. Through Willy, though, Miller points out that what the language of the American Dream leaves out is that, to achieve the American Dream, you have to put in incredible amounts of drudgery and, sometimes, painful work.

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