The West
The West functions in Death of a Salesman as a counter-geography to the cramped, competitive urban landscape of New York and Brooklyn. It is the place Biff Loman repeatedly flees to and returns from, a region associated with manual work, cattle ranching, and the possibility of a life lived outdoors, away from the pressures of salesmanship and corporate ambition. For Biff, the West is not merely a location but a repository of his truest instincts—a world where a man can work with his hands, breathe freely, and measure himself by something other than a commission check. Yet the West also becomes the site of his deepest frustration, for every spring, when the land itself renews, Biff feels the pull of the very success ethic he fled, and he comes running home, caught between two irreconcilable visions of what a life should be.
Biff's Western Itinerary and Its Meaning
Biff's relationship with the West is defined by movement and restlessness. After leaving home before the war, he worked twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs across Nebraska, the Dakotas, Arizona, and finally Texas. On the Texas ranch where he works at the time of the play, he herds cattle for twenty-eight dollars a week. The work itself—being outdoors, watching mares with new colts in the spring—strikes him as "inspiring" and "beautiful." Yet the same seasonal cycle that makes Texas beautiful also triggers his sense of failure: "whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, I'm not gettin' anywhere!" The West, then, is both the place where Biff feels most alive and the place where he feels most acutely that he is wasting his life. It is a landscape of unresolved contradiction.
The West as an Alternative to the City
Biff explicitly contrasts the Western life with the urban existence he despises. He tells Happy that he cannot bear the thought of "[getting] on that subway on the hot mornings in summer" or devoting "your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying" for the sake of a two-week vacation. His deepest desire is "to be outdoors, with your shirt off." The West represents a world where a man can use his muscles, where "men built like we are should be working out in the open." This vision is so powerful that Biff tries to recruit Happy to join him in buying a ranch, imagining the two of them as "the Loman Brothers," known all over the counties. But Happy, though momentarily enthused, cannot commit: he is too attached to the status and competition of the city, to the dream of walking into a store "the way [the merchandise manager] walks in." The West thus becomes a dream that Biff can only pursue alone.
The West and the Failure of the American Dream
The West also functions as a measure of the failure of the American Dream as Willy Loman has defined it. When Willy learns that Biff wants to return to Texas, he is incredulous and angry: "How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand?" For Willy, a man who has not "made good" by age thirty-four is a disgrace. The West, in Willy's eyes, is not a place of opportunity but of retreat—a confession that his son cannot compete in the real world of sales and personality. Yet Biff's final understanding, articulated at the graveside, is that his father "had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong." The West, for Biff, is not a failure but a liberation: it is where he can finally say, "I know who I am." The geographical opposition between East and West thus becomes a moral and existential one, between a life lived for the approval of others and a life lived on one's own terms.
