Role Playing Vs. Reality in Term Paper

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All along, Miller's salesman was creating a tableau vivant, in his work and in his family. If you put the right characters on stage, you create the right image.

In Willy Loman's mind, Dave Singleman, that "single" salesman, no doubt created the proper image. Even Singleman's death was that of a salesman, "When he died -- and by the way he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston -- when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral." A traveling salesman should die on the road, as Dave Singleman obviously did. What greater tribute to a way of life than to die in the course of one's duty? Appropriately, as well, Loman's hero received the adulation of his peers - the ultimate complement in the eyes of a man who believed everything should be done for show. Singleman's public death on a train bound from New York to Boston, put him leaving America's great metropolis, heading off toward some still greater heavenly sales field. The attention that such a death would attract would be wider still, unusual enough that it would probably be reported in the press, enough to "individualize" a man even in a society as oddly and blandly homogenized as Loman's idealized America. For it is a great curiosity that the aspiring hero of sales who so lauds the cardboard sameness of "living the American Dream," can praise the heroic life and death of one man, a story of triumph that lift him far above the ordinary.

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But then this, too, is the inescapable mystery of the American Dream, and Willy Loman knows it but does not fully comprehend its subtler meanings.

Rugged Individualism" -- the belief that one should stand on one's own to feet and well apart from the crowd, is a belief that informs every fiber Loman's being, but he sees it only as a trope, as in the hypothetical, "we are all rugged individualists in America." Claiming to be an individual is just a part of the whole American dream, a trend, a fad, a style, like everything else - in Willy Loman's terms, a prop. It is one of those essentials without which one cannot have the ideal career, family, friends, etc. Willy Loman's life - and death - is a sad commentary on the power of social "advertising." We are all prisoners, to some extent, of the ideas that our culture throws at us. Too many of us accept these notions unconditionally and without any real thought. Willy Loman paid the ultimate price for building his life around a fantasy of what it meant to be an American and a man. He, his wife, and his sons, all paid the price.

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