Willy Loman: Complete Failure?

In “Death of a Salesman” discussion this week in class we predominantly talked about the success, or lack thereof, of Willy. While we did come to the conclusion that Willy was indeed unsuccessful in life I think that there may be more to his success than we give him credit for. We all came to the agreement that Willy is in no way successful in his own mind. He constantly compares himself to his rich older brother Ben and is always stretching the truth about his salary and his sales. Willy believes that his clients and fellow salesmen laugh at him behind his back and he attributes that to his failure in life. He always thinks about the opportunities that he has lost and how he could just be rich if he had been like other people. Willy as a self measured success is indeed a failure in almost every aspect of his life. In his eyes he has failed as a businessman, father, and husband. His delusions and attempts at suicide also portray him as a mentally unstable man who is a danger to himself and his family. Over all Willy is a very unsound character that we as readers do not trust or for the most part sympathize for over the course of the play. Even with his shortcomings in life Willy is not a complete failure and in fact could be called a success by several measures.

Indeed Willy is more than adequately successful in both his role as a parent and a salesman. He makes at least seventy dollars a week which at the time was not a paltry sum. On his salary he could support his wife nicely and live a comfortable life. We are informed after his death that Willy’s house has been completely paid for, a feat which even today is rarely achieved. His two sons worship him, even if Biff doesn’t admit it until the end, and they only want to make him proud and live up to his expectations. If Willy was not suicidal and possibly insane his life would be an example of the American dream. He is a proud father, he has little to no debt, and he gets a very respectable salary. He is even a capable carpenter which is a rare skill. Willy is a very successful man if he is viewed from a different perspective and although he does think that he is a failure, with some degree of merit, he is not completely correct. Willy could have had a happy life if he hadn’t had such high expectations to live up to, if he had thought about his life as something other than a measure of how many diamond mines he found in a jungle he would have been pleasantly surprised at how successful he really was. (472)