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By Root 1001 0

“wanted plenty of space in the play for people to confront each other with their feelings, rather than for people to advance the plot.”4 This led to the open form of a play in which the stage operates in part as a field of distorted memories. In the 1996 National Theatre production, all characters remained onstage throughout, being animated when they moved into the forefront of Willy’s troubled mind, or swung into view on a turntable. The space, in other words, was literal and charged with a kinetic energy. Elia Kazan, the play’s first director, observed that “The play takes place in an Arena of people watching the events, sometimes internal and invisible, other times external and visible and sometimes both.”5 The National Theatre production sought an expression for this conviction, finding, thereby, a correlative for that sense of a “dream” which Miller had also specified in his stage directions. It is the essence of a dream that space and time are plastic and so they are here. Past and present interact, generating meaning rather as a metaphor strikes sparks by bringing together discrete ideas. The jump from reconstructed past to anxious present serves to underscore the extent to which hopes have been frustrated and ambitions blunted. The resulting gap breeds irony, regret, guilt, disillusionment.

In part Willy taunts himself by invoking an idyllic past, in which he had the respect of his sons, who were themselves carried forward by the promise of success, or by recalling betrayals which he believes destroyed that respect and blighted that promise. The irony is that Willy believed that he failed Biff by disillusioning him with the dream of success, when in fact he failed him by successfully inculcating that dream so that even now, years later, each spring he feels a sense of inadequacy for failing to make a material success of his life.

Miller has said of Willy Loman that “he cannot bear reality, and since he can’t do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it.”6 He is “a bleeding mass of contradictions.” (184) And that fact does, indeed, provide something of the rhythm of his speeches, as though he were conducting an argument with himself about the nature of the world he inhabits. At one moment Biff is a lazy bum, at the next his redemption is that he is never lazy. A car and a refrigerator are by turns reliable and junk. He is, in his own eyes, a successful salesman and a failure. It depends what story he is telling himself at the time, what psychic need such remarks are designed to serve. Hope and disappointment coexist, and the wild oscillation between the two brings him close to breakdown. In a similar way he adjusts his memories, or “daydreams,” as Miller has called them, to serve present needs. These are not flashbacks, accurate accounts of past time, but constructions. Thus, when he recalls his sons’ school days he does so in order to insist on his and their success. His brother, Ben, by the same token, is less a substantial fact than an embodiment of that ruthless drive and achievement which Willy lacks in his own life and half believes he should want. In one sense the strain under which he finds himself erodes the boundary between the real and the imagined so that he can no longer be sure which is which. His thoughts are as much present facts as are those people he encounters but whose lives remain a mystery to him. Like many other Miller characters, he has built his life on denial. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge the failure of his hopes, or responsibility for his actions, he embraces fantasies, elaborates excuses, develops strategies to neutralize his disappointment.

Willy Loman is not, however, a pure victim. As Miller has said, “Something in him knows that if he stands still he will be overwhelmed. These lies and evasions of his are his little swords with which he wards off the devils around him. . . . There is a nobility, in fact, in Willy’s struggle. Maybe it comes from his refusal ever to relent, to give up. . . .” (Beijing, 27) And yet, of course, that energy is devoted to sustaining an