Good Morning Friends,

So old man Loman (Willie and Ben's father) moved the family around a lot because he was very likely dodging creditors. And according to Willie, the father "left when I was just a baby," and "I never had a chance to talk to him." Willie's use of the word "chance" is interesting.

This word, "chance" reduces parental responsibility to happenstance. Old man Loman couldn't pencil little Willie into his schedule. The father abandoned the family when Willie was very young. Willie, it seems, never allowed himself to consciously feel that anger.

But Willie is angry at his father. There is no doubt about that. We know he is angry at his father, as he should be, because he takes that anger out on his brother Ben. There is a scene in the play when Ben invites Willie to move himself and his family out to Alaska. Ben wants Willie to "manage" some properties he has there.

Willie is sorely tempted to take him up on his offer, remember? He fantasizes about it, "me and my boys out there..." Willie should have taken his brother up on his offer. He would have been being true to himself for perhaps the first time in his whole life, and had been engaged in this rare act of self honesty, he would have changed his whole life and that of his family for the better and avoided tragedy.

After Willie had killed himself and the family and Uncle Charley attended the funeral and returned to the Loman home, Willie's son, Biff, said something interesting. "He had the wrong dreams."

Charley, completely missing Biff's meaning, blathers on irrelevantly about how "a salesman's got to dream, boy.." and so on and so forth. Willie Loman should never have been a salesman. But not only that, Biff's statement is literally true. Willie Loman, in trying to make himself into something he was not, for the wrong reasons, had indeed possessed the wrong dreams.

This is a counterintuitive sentiment though. How can someone have the wrong dreams? How can dreams be right or wrong? One's dreams are simply intrinsic to himself, aren't they? One can have wrong dreams if they are the product of a false self, a fragile structure that Willie Loman painstakingly built up over his entire life.

Willie should have been a carpenter. That was his great talent. He was in his glory working with his hands. It was with his hands that he could hope to impress his brother Ben. Willie loved to send Biff and Hap, his other son (and there is a reason it has taken me this long to mention his name) to steal building supplies from the apartment building project across the street so that they could "rebuild the entire front stoop right now." Willie cannot impress his brother about his career, such as it is, in "selling."

During these episodes Willie can show Ben that he is a man's man, as it were, and that he was raising his two sons properly. In this way Willie likes to think he is gaining Ben's approval. And we, who came of age in the eighties, certainly, and blessed as we are with the perspective of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, know that Willie is seeking something he can never have - the approval of his own father.

There is something else that our modern perspective informs us of. Willie Loman, like all children who have been the victims of parental abandonment, blamed himself as a child and never stopped blaming himself. This is the key to his whole life. This is why he builds a false self. This is why he shoe-horns himself into a profession he is not suited for, is not good at, and doesn't even like. This is how he has become so economically desperate that, for some time, he has been borrowing two hundred dollars a week from Charley and pretending to his wife, Linda, that it is his pay. But I'll come to that later on.

When Willie and Ben's father abandoned the family, Willlie blamed himself, as all such children do. If only I had been a better, more cheerful kid, dad wouldn't have left me. Willie's mother was obviously not enough of a firmly supportive presence to counteract Willie's mistaken idea.

Let us return to the scene where Ben offers Willie the job in Alaska. But we'll have to do that next time.

Until then,

wingedcentaur