1929

The year 1929, defined by the stock market crash, is the historical pivot on which the world of Death of a Salesman turns. The Depression of the 1930s that followed seemed to break the promises America had made to its citizens. The crash, it was assumed, ended a particular version of history: optimistic, confident. The American dream faded. And yet, as the play demonstrates, myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. Arthur Miller knew this; when Charley, Willy Loman's next-door neighbor, says that "a salesman is got to dream," he sums up not only Willy's life but a central tenet of his culture.

The Historical Rupture and Willy Loman's Personal Fate

Death of a Salesman is not set during the Depression but it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman who stands baffled by his failure. Certainly in memory he returns to that period, as if personal and national fate were somehow intertwined. In spirit, according to Miller, he also reaches back to the more expansive and confident, if empty, 1920s, when, according to a president of the United States, the business of America was business. And since he inhabits "the greatest country in the world," a world of Manifest Destiny, where can the fault lie but in himself? If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself. No wonder Willy shouts out his name; he is listening for an echo. No wonder he searches desperately back through his life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path; no wonder he looks to the next generation to give him back that life by achieving what had slipped so unaccountably through his own fingers.

The Persistence of the Dream After the Crash

The play's central irony is that the American dream, supposedly killed by the crash of 1929, persists as a potent myth. Willy Loman is a true believer; his vulnerability comes from the fact that he has so completely internalized the values of his society that he judges himself by standards rooted in social myths rather than human necessities. He believes that advertisements tell the truth and is baffled when reality fails to match their claims. He believes the promises that America made to itself—that in this greatest country on earth success is an inevitability. The crash of 1929 did not destroy this faith; it merely made its fulfillment more desperate and more elusive. Willy's error is to confuse the role he plays with the person he wishes to be; the irony is that he, a salesman, has bought the pitch made to him by his society.

The Structural and Thematic Significance of 1929

The year 1929 functions as a kind of absent center in the play's temporal structure. The events onstage take place over twenty-four hours, a period which begins with a timid, dispirited, and bewildered man entering a house once an expression of his hopes for the future. But this twenty-four-hour period is only one form of time; there is also what Miller has called "social time" and "psychic time." By social time he seems to mean the unfolding truth of the public world which provides the context for Willy's life, and 1929 is the key marker of that social time. The psychic time is evident in memories which crash into his present, creating ironies, sounding echoes, taunting him with a past which can offer him nothing but reproach. The crash of 1929 is the historical event that makes the gap between past promise and present reality unbridgeable, and it is this gap that breeds the irony, regret, guilt, and disillusionment that permeate the play. The play is not an attack on American values, but an exploration of the betrayal of those values and the cost of this in human terms, a betrayal that began, in the national consciousness, with the crash of 1929.