Good Evening Friends,

Willie Loman had been given a second chance to save himself. Charlie (known as Uncle Charlie to Biff and Hap), is the family friend who owns his own business of an undefined nature. Through out the play Charlie repeatedly offers Willie a job with his company. Willie should have taken Charlie up on this. It would have been the pragmatic and wise thing to do.

Charlie makes a powerful argument to Willie about why he should take the job. "You can make two hundred dollars a week (relatively decent money in 1950) and I won't send you on the road." Willie really needs to reliable income and he needs to be off the road.

We first meet Willie Loman at the beginning of the play, when he has come back from his sales trip in Boston - early. It seems he never arrived at his destination. He returned because "I couldn't make it."

He might have even "smashed up" the car again. But as he explains, his eyesight is not failing and there is no problem with his glasses - "I see everything." He simply states that "I can't keep my mind on it (driving)." Poor Willie is plagued with daydreams when they were all young and Biff was in his glory and the star high school football player, through whom Willie was going to finally become a success - vicariously, of course.

We'll speed things up to save time. Linda, his wife, urges Willie to go talk to Howard Wagner (the son of Old Man Wagner, the original chief of the company and possibly its founder), now the head of the organization for which Willie toils, and persuade him to give Willie the job in New York, to base Willie in New York so that he does not have to travel anymore.

In the interest of brevity, let me just say that his appeals fail. Not only does he not get the job in New York but he is also fired. Not only that, but before this moment, we have learned that Willie has been working for the Wagner Company on a strictly commission basis for quite some time.

Willie's right to a regular wage was taken away from him. He has also been borrowing two hundred dollars a week from Charlie, and pretending to Linda that it was his pay. Still, Willie cannot work for Charlie.

Just quickly, remember that Willie and Charlie are very different kinds of men. Willie, as we have been developing the profile, is... well - Willie. Charlie, in contrast, is plainspoken, pragmatic, practical, realistic, one not given to boasting or self congratulation. He achieves his intentions by action, not talk. He does not invest nearly so much in being "well liked" as Willie does. And so on and so forth.

Willie cannot work for Charlie because, to do so, would be an intolerable self repudiation of everything the salesman has ever stood for his whole life, everything he is. If Willie had gone to work for Charlie, then who would he be? Not: where would he be? Who would he be?!

Hap refuses to go out west with Biff for exactly the same reason. Next time we'll talk about the transformations of Biff and Hap, as we wrap up the discussion of Death of a Salesman.

wingedcentaur