Willy returns home exhausted

Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman, returns home to his Brooklyn house late at night, carrying heavy sample cases. He is exhausted and confused, having been unable to complete his sales trip to New England. He tells his wife Linda that he couldn't drive any more, that the car kept going off the road, and that he had strange thoughts. This opening scene establishes Willy's physical and mental fatigue, his failure as a salesman, and the tension that pervades the Loman household. The flute music that accompanies his entrance evokes a lost pastoral past, contrasting with the cramped apartment buildings that now surround the house.