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By Root 1013 0

actors, was hailed as an Irish play. The fact is that Miller was not concerned with writing an ethnically specific play, while the speech patterns noted by McCarthy and Koenig were an expression of his desire to avoid naturalistic dialogue. Indeed he wrote part of the play first in verse, as he was to do with The Crucible, in an effort to create a lyrical language which would draw attention to itself. He wished, he explained, not to write in a Jewish idiom, or even a naturalistic prose, but “to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the ‘natural.’ ” (182)

Over the years Miller has offered a number of intriguing interpretations of his own play. It is about “the paradoxes of being alive in a technological civilization.” (Theater Essays, 419) It is “a story about violence within the family,” about “the suppression of the individual by placing him below the imperious needs of . . . society.” (Theater Essays, 420) It is “a play about a man who kills himself because he isn’t liked.” (Conversations, 17) It expresses “all those feelings of a society falling to pieces which I had” (Theater Essays, 423), feelings which, to him, are one of the reasons for the play’s continuing popularity. But the observation which goes most directly to the heart of the play is contained in a comment made in relation to the production that he directed in China in 1983: “Death of a Salesman, really, is a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America.” (Beijing, 49) Turn to the notebooks that he kept when writing the play, and you find the extent to which the relationship between Willy and his son is central.

They wrestle each other for their existence. Biff is Willy’s ace in the hole, his last desperate throw, the proof that he was right, after all, that tomorrow things will change for the better and thus offer a retrospective grace to the past. Willy, meanwhile, is Biff’s flawed model, the man who seemed to sanction his hunger for success and popularity, a hunger suddenly stilled by a moment of revelation. Over the years, neither has been able to let go of the other because to do so would be to let go of a dream which, however tainted, still has the glitter of possibility, except that now Biff has begun to understand that there is something wrong, something profoundly inadequate about a vision so at odds with his instincts.

He returns to resolve his conflict with his father, to announce that he has finally broken with the false values offered to him as his inheritance. Two people are fighting for survival, in the sense of sustaining a sense of themselves. Willy desperately needs Biff to embrace him and his dream; Biff desperately needs to cut the link between himself and Willy. There can be only one winner and whoever wins will also have lost. As Miller explained to the actor playing the role of Biff in the Beijing production, “your love for him binds you; but you want it to free you to be your own man.” Willy, however, is unable to offer such grace because “he would have to turn away from his own values.” (Beijing, 79)

Once returned, though, Biff is enrolled in the conspiracy to save Willy’s life. The question which confronts him now is whether that life will be saved by making Willy confront the reality of his life or by substantiating his illusions. To do the latter, however, would be to work against his own needs. The price of saving Willy may thus, potentially, be the loss of his own freedom and autonomy. Meanwhile the tension underlying this central conflict derives from the fact that, as Miller has said, “the story of Salesman is absurdly simple! It is about a salesman and it’s his last day on the earth.” (Theater Essays, 423)

Miller may, in his own words, be “a confirmed and deliberate radical” (Conversations, 17), but Death of a Salesman is not an attack on American values. It is, however, an exploration of the betrayal of those values and the cost of this in human terms. Willy Loman’s